As a result of the 5-to-4 decision, Pennsylvania must now either give the defendant, Ronald Rompilla, a new capital sentencing hearing or sentence him to life in prison for the 1988 murder of the owner of a bar in Allentown, Pa.
The decision was the second in eight days in which the Supreme Court overturned a death sentence. Last Monday, in a case from Texas, the court overturned a 20-year-old murder conviction as well as the death sentence on the ground that the jury selection had been infected by racism.
The court also ruled in March that the Constitution barred capital punishment for those who committed crimes before the age of 18. In the new case, Rompilla v. Beard, No. 04-5462, as in the case last Monday, Miller-El v. Dretke, the justices accepted a death row inmate's appeal from a federal appeals court's denial of a writ of habeas corpus. The Supreme Court then proceeded itself to grant the writ, which is a judgment that a conviction or sentence was unconstitutional. Justice David H. Souter was the author of both opinions.
In both cases, the majority engaged in an unusually detailed examination of the record and concluded that the court's own precedents required a ruling for the defendant. In the Pennsylvania case, Justice Souter cited the court's precedents as well as the standards for performance of defense counsel published by the American Bar Association.
That publication, identifying a "duty to investigate" and instructing lawyers to "explore all avenues," "describes the obligation in terms no one could misunderstand in the circumstances of a case like this," Justice Souter said. The American Bar Association filed a brief on Mr. Rompilla's behalf.
But Justice Souter's assertion that the court was applying existing standards and not making new law provoked a sharply worded dissent from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who called the ruling a "remarkable leap" and a "radical departure" from the court's previous treatment of the question of inadequate legal counsel.
Justice Kennedy accused the majority of "distortion" of the most directly relevant precedent. "This elevation of needle-in-a haystack claims to the status of constitutional violations will benefit undeserving defendants and saddle states with the considerable costs of retrial and/or resentencing," he added.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist joined the dissent, as did Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Souter's majority opinion was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sandra Day O'Connor, who also filed a concurring opinion.
There were indications that Justice O'Connor had changed sides in the five months the case was under consideration, enabling Justice Souter to convert a dissenting opinion into an opinion for the court.
This case was the last to be decided of the 10 cases the court heard during its January argument sitting. From this group, it was the second majority opinion for Justice Souter, with the other eight justices each having only one. Justice Souter almost never receives an extra assignment during an argument sitting. It happened only once in the last term, in a police interrogation case from Missouri, a 5-to-4 decision that was probably also the product of a late vote switch.
The point of contention among the justices in the case on Monday was the failure by Mr. Rompilla's defense lawyers, members of the Lehigh County public defender's office, to examine the file of a rape case in which he had been convicted 14 years earlier. The case was germane because the prosecution had announced its intention to use the case to show that Mr. Rompilla was a previously convicted violent felon, one of the "aggravating circumstances" on which the Pennsylvania death penalty law permits juries to rely in imposing a sentence of death.
The file was maintained in the same courthouse where Mr. Rompilla's murder trial was taking place and was easily obtainable by the defense, Justice Souter noted. "It flouts prudence to deny that a defense lawyer should try to look at a file he knows the prosecution will cull for aggravating evidence, let alone when the file is sitting in the trial courthouse, open for the asking," Justice Souter said, adding that "no reasonable lawyer would forgo examination of the file."
Had the lawyers looked in the old file, Justice Souter continued, they would have been led to evidence of the defendant's limited mental capacity and background as an abused child, as well as his likely diagnoses of fetal alcohol syndrome and schizophrenia. According to evidence later unearthed by the new lawyers who handled Mr. Rompilla's habeas corpus case in federal court, he and his brother had been locked by their father in a small wire-mesh dog pen that was "filthy and excrement filled." Mr. Rompilla was sent to school in rags. He dropped out in the ninth grade.
Mr. Rompilla's initial lawyers had not extracted this information in interviews with their client, who was often uncooperative, or with family members, who presented a more benign image of his upbringing. Justice Souter said that an adequate defense would have presented the information as evidence mitigating against the death penalty, and that there was a "likelihood of a different result" had the lawyers done so.
In his dissent, Justice Kennedy said "there is no reasonable probability" that, short of giving "intense scrutiny to every single page of every single document," the defense lawyers would have been led to the information about Mr. Rompilla's childhood.
A "rigid requirement" that defense lawyers give that kind of scrutiny to trial records, he said, would harm defendants by steering their lawyers away from other strategies. "The Constitution does not mandate that defense attorneys perform busy work," Justice Kennedy said.
Both Justice Souter and Justice O'Connor, in her concurring opinion, denied that the court was imposing any such "rigid requirement." Justice O'Connor, in fact, said she was joining the majority "because the court's opinion is consistent with the case-by-case examination of the evidence called for under our cases."
The effective assistance of counsel is guaranteed by the Constitution's Sixth Amendment. The Supreme Court's major precedent, Strickland v. Washington, established a two-part test for defendants to meet in order to show that their defense was constitutionally inadequate: first, that the representation "fell below an objective standard of reasonableness," and second, a "reasonable probability" that the outcome would have been different but for the defense lawyer's failings.
For 16 years after announcing that test in 1984, the Supreme Court did not find any case in which a defendant's legal representation was inadequate. Beginning in 2000, however, it has decided three consecutive cases, including Monday's, in which it found the representation to have been constitutionally deficient.
Eric M. Freedman, a professor at Hofstra University School of Law who is a specialist in the death penalty and habeas corpus, said the trend indicated that the court was increasingly troubled by problems of adequate representation for capital defendants. "They are starting to put some teeth in their scrutiny" of these cases, Professor Freedman said in an interview. "The basis themes of fundamental fairness in the administration of the death penalty have penetrated the Supreme Court as well as the general public."