Whether trial counsel's ineffective assistance in failing to investigate and present mitigating evidence of the defendant's difficult childhood and frontal lobe brain damage prejudiced the defendant at sentencing

QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW THIS IS A CAPITAL CASE 1. The Eleventh Circuit did not focus on the state habeas court’s actual reasons for rejecting Petitioner’s claim that trial counsel’s inadequate investigation and presentation of mitigating evidence of Petitioner’s difficult childhood and frontal lobe brain damage amounted to constitutionally ineffective representation, instead deferring to speculative reasons for denying relief on that issue. In doing so, did the Eleventh Circuit ignore this Court’s earlier directive in this case that a federal habeas court should “train its attention on the particular reasons — both legal and factual — why state courts rejected a state prisoner’s federal claims,” Wilson v. Sellers, 138 S. Ct. 1188, 1191-92 (2018), in determining whether the Petitioner may be entitled to relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), and, if properly reviewed in accordance with this Court’s prior decision, should the writ of habeas corpus issue? 2. At sentencing, the State presented substantial evidence regarding alleged gang activity in the county where Petitioner’s crime took place, much of which was based on uncorroborated hearsay and speculation, and can reasonably be characterized as hyperbolic fearmongering lacking any relevant connection to the case or Petitioner. Though trial counsel failed to object to the presentation of this evidence, took no steps to limit its admission, and introduced virtually no evidence to mitigate its aggravating impact, the state habeas court held that trial counsel were not ineffective in failing to challenge this evidence. In federal habeas proceedings, the district court endorsed the state court’s ruling. Nonetheless, it relied on the gang-related aggravation as proof that Petitioner was not prejudiced by counsel’s failure to develop and present mitigating evidence of Petitioner’s childhood privations and brain damage. The Eleventh Circuit denied a certificate of appealability to address this aspect of the sentencing phase ineffective claim, though it, too, relied on the aggravated nature of the gang evidence to support its conclusion that counsel’s failure to develop and present background mitigation was not prejudicial. These facts give rise to the following questions: 1. In light of the questionable provenance of the gang evidence and its damning role both at sentencing and in state and federal habeas proceedings, did the Eleventh Circuit violate 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c) in denying a certificate of appealability to address the gang-related subclaim? 2. Given that Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 695 (1984), requires courts to determine whether counsel’s “errors” (in the plural) created “‘a reasonable probability that . . . the result of the proceeding would have been different,” and, when raising a Strickland challenge to counsel’s failure to investigate and present mitigating evidence in a capital sentencing hearing, courts must “consider the totality of the available mitigation evidence — both that adduced at trial and the evidence adduced in the habeas proceeding — and reweig[h] it against the evidence in aggravation,” Porter v. McCollum, 558 U.S. 30, 41 (2009) (per curiam) (internal quotation marks omitted), does a federal court err in first parsing a defendant’s sentencing phase claim into multiple subclaims and then granting a certificate of appealability on only a subset of those claims? ii