Galloway v. Mississippi

The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the effective assistance of counsel, which imposes on counsel a duty to investigate before making strategic decisions. This duty is most exacting in capital cases, where the prevailing professional norms call for a thorough investigation of mitigation evidence, including in particular the defendant’s life history and mental health, which are often the core of a mitigation case. The Supreme Court has clearly established that counsel’s failure to discharge that duty to investigate cannot be justified by post hoc rationalizations, because sufficient investigation must be conducted in order to inform a strategic decision.

In this case the Mississippi Supreme Court concluded that the failure of Mr. Galloway’s appointed counsel to investigate their client’s excruciatingly abusive childhood and post-traumatic stress disorder, despite obvious red flags in readily available records, was not ineffective assistance because it hypothesized, without record basis, that trial counsel employed an “alternate strategy” of “humanizing” Mr. Galloway. Counsel themselves never offered that strategy as a reason for the failure to investigate.\, and there is nothing inconsistent about seeking to humanize a client and demonstrating that he had an abusive childhood or suffers from mental disabilities.