Washington v. Commissioner

After Charlie Washington was sentenced to death, it came to light that his trial attorneys had failed to investigate and present an avalanche of mitigating evidence that made a powerful case for life. Nonetheless, Alabama courts rejected Mr. Washington’s claim that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel, relying on egregious misunderstandings of how capital jurors process evidence. The MacArthur Justice Center, representing eight leading scholars, is urging a federal appellate court to heed the research on jury decisionmaking and vacate Mr. Washington’s death sentence. 

Charlie Washington was sentenced to death for a 2003 double-murder in Alabama by a 10-2 jury vote—the narrowest possible margin under state law at the time. At the sentencing phase of the trial, in which jurors were tasked with choosing whether Mr. Washington should live or die, they heard almost nothing that would humanize him or give them an accurate sense of his moral culpability. Instead, they heard ill-prepared testimony (comprising less than four transcript pages) from just two family members whom Mr. Washington’s attorney had met mere minutes earlier. Even so, two jurors voted for life.

After Mr. Washington’s conviction, it was revealed that his counsel had failed to investigate and present compelling mitigating evidence at the sentencing phase—including evidence about Mr. Washington’s tight-knit family connections, his impoverished childhood, traumatic deaths in his family, his abusive stepfather, and his intellectual and mental health challenges. Mr. Washington filed a petition for post-conviction relief in state court, arguing that his lawyers had been ineffective and that there was a reasonable probability their failings had affected his sentence.

The state courts denied Mr. Washington’s petition—for reasons that contradicted Supreme Court precedent and empirical research on how capital juries actually reach sentencing decisions. The courts unreasonably concluded that because of the cursory, scattershot testimony from two family members the jury heard, any additional testimony from Mr. Washington’s family and friends would have been cumulative. They wrongly held that modest additional aggravating evidence would have cancelled out the compelling new mitigation evidence. And they improperly reasoned that the crime was simply too brutal to mitigate and that the unpresented mitigation evidence didn’t “justif[y]” the murders. A federal district court declined to disturb these conclusions.

The MacArthur Justice Center filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on behalf of eight leading scholars and experts in law, social science, and criminal justice whose research recognizes the impact and import of mitigation evidence in the modern death penalty system. The brief, citing decades of empirical research, explains that the details of Mr. Washington’s life experiences and relationships would have allowed jurors to construct a full narrative of his life and understand him better as a human being. That would not have justified his crimes or absolved him of responsibility, but it likely would have caused at least one more juror to choose life—as similar evidence has done in countless other cases.