Abuse Defense - Legal Precedent

Legal Precedent

The Supreme Court of the United States has held on numerous occasions that capital defendants have the right to present information about an abusive childhood as mitigating evidence. Prior to 1978, the capital statute of Ohio had placed limitations on what mitigating factors the defense could present during sentencing. However, this statute was invalidated by Lockett v. Ohio, in which Chief Justice Warren E. Burger proclaimed that the sentencer should not be "precluded from considering, as a mitigating factor, any aspect of a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death." A similar conclusion was reached in the 1982 case Eddings v. Oklahoma, in which the Supreme Court held that United States law does not prevent a jury from considering a defendant's childhood abuse when determining the appropriate sentence.

In the June 2003 case Wiggins v. Smith, the petitioner Kevin Wiggins, who had been sentenced to death for murder, was granted habeas corpus because his attorney had failed to fully investigate or present mitigating evidence regarding Wiggins's childhood. Wiggins had been abused and neglected by his mother and was repeatedly raped while in foster care; the Supreme Court determined that there was a "reasonable probability" that such information would have altered the jury's sentencing, and that the attorney's failure to present this information violated Wiggins's Sixth Amendment right to counsel.