Whether the Sixth Amendment requires a court to consider the cumulative effect of mitigating evidence when assessing an ineffective assistance of counsel claim in a capital sentencing proceeding

No question identified. : Carolina sought the death penalty based on a single statutory aggravating factor— that Mr. Lindsey’s “act of murder knowingly created a great risk of death to more than one person in a public place by means of a weapon or device which normally would be hazardous to the lives of more than one person.” §.C. Code Ann. § 16-320(C)(a)(3) (2015). Against this, Mr. Lindsey has a substantial mass of mitigating evidence, including of his compromised mental state at the time of the shooting and of his extreme childhood poverty, abuse, and trauma. Defense counsel, however, started work on the penalty phase far later than any reasonable capital lawyer would, and, as a result, presented only a half-baked mitigation case. The jury recommended a sentence of death, which the trial court imposed. Mr. Lindsey sought state post-conviction relief, in part on the ground that defense counsel’s failure to present certain mitigating evidence constituted ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. The post-conviction relief court held an evidentiary hearing, which included testimony from ten mitigating witnesses who did not testify at trial and additional testimony from five witnesses who did. Significantly, Mr. Lindsey’s brother testified for the first time that he spoke to Mr. Lindsey shortly before the shooting and Mr. Lindsey was “messed up” like he was “all out of his mind.” Ex. A at 13. Mr. Lindsey’s former attorney Rodman Tullis similarly testified for the first time that Mr. Lindsey had left him a voicemail about an hour before the murder, in which he sounded “emotional, distressed, and distraught.” Id. at 13. The paramedic who responded to the murder scene testified, also for the first time, that Mr. Lindsey shot himself in the head and wanted the paramedics to let him die. Dr. Brawley, who performed an “extended clinical interview and battery of neuropsychological tests” on Mr. Lindsey, and Jan Vogelsang, who “conducted a bio-psychosocial assessment on Lindsey and his family,” likewise testified only in the post-conviction relief hearing. Jd. at 15-16. Further, Mr. Lindsey’s mother testified to additional details about his childhood, including that he was physically abused by her live-in boyfriend and sustained head injuries. And Dr. Melikian testified that she now had “six to seven times more records and information” than she did during her trial testimony, and this additional information “would have changed” her diagnosis of Mr. Lindsey. Id. at 17. The state court denied post-conviction relief by signing a proposed order submitted by the State without even reading it. The Supreme Court of South Carolina remanded for the court to comply with due process. On remand, the post-conviction court again wholesale adopted the State’s proposed order. This time, it corrected typographical errors Mr. Lindsey had identified, made minor formatting adjustments, and initialed each page. It changed no substance—only editing a single turn of phrase. The Supreme Court of South Carolina granted Mr. Lindsey’s petition for certiorari but ultimately affirmed. The court approved the trial court’s wholesale adoption of the State’s error-ridden proposed order. And a three-justice majority rejected Mr. Lindsey’s claim of ineffective assistance during the sentencing phase on the ground that he was not prejudiced by any deficient performance. Ex. A at 25. The majority assessed, item-by-item, whether there was a reasonable probability of a different result and concluded there was not (id. at 26-29) but did not analyze the cumulative effect of all the omitted testimony, nor did it balance the mitigating evidence with the single aggravating factor. As Justice Hill explained in dissent, in which Justice Beatty concurred, “[a] closer look at the new mitigation evidence shows that it was much different in nature and degree than what the sentencing jury heard.” Ex. A at 34. The dissent included a table, spanning