Samayoa v. Ayers

This is a capital case in which the trial defense counsel, for reasons that are impossible to fathom, deliberately and knowingly refused to investigate the capital defendant’s abusive family background, the type of mitigating evidence that the Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized is highly relevant to a jury’s decision whether to impose the death penalty. See, e.g., Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 510, 535, 123 S.Ct. 2527, 156 L.Ed.2d 471 (2003). In fact, in this case it was the only mitigating evidence by which counsel would have had any realistic chance of persuading the jury to spare his…