Failure to present evidence of combat experience ineffective assistance of counsel.
Combat experience may warrant leniency, the Supreme Court ruled today.
In Porter v. McCollum, issued November 30, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court found that defense counsel’s failure to introduce evidence of the Porter’s frontline engagement in two battles in the Korean War as mitigation during the penalty phase of the trial was ineffective assistance of counsel. Defense counsel failed to investigate potential mitigating evidence, and was therefore ineffective. The court stated,
Had Porter’s counsel been effective, the judge and jury would have learned of the “kind of troubled history we have declared relevant to assessing a defendant’s moral culpability.” . . . They would have heard about (1) Porter’s heroic military service in two of the most critical—and horrific—battles of the Korean War, (2) his struggles to regain normality upon his return from war, (3) his childhood history of physical abuse, and (4) his brain abnormality, difficulty reading and writing, and limited schooling.
In finding that the state court had unreasonable applied Strickland in finding that the evidence of Porter’s war efforts would not have influenced the outcome, the Supreme Court stated
Our Nation has a long tradition of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service, especially for those who fought on the front lines as Porter did. Moreover, the relevance of Porter’s extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably under extreme hardship and gruesome conditions, but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter.
The decision was per curiam.
