SCOTUS: ABA's DP standards are only "guides," not commands
11/09/09
SCOTUS: ABA's DP standards are only "guides," not commands
SCOTUS decides today per curiam, without full briefing or argument, that the ABA Standards Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases are not determinative to a trial held nearly 20 years before they were adopted--also, they are only "guides," not commands. The IAC standard at the time (pre-Strickland?) had to be considered. Bobby v. Van Hook, 09-144 (Nov. 9, 2009) (per curiam):
Quite different are the ABA’s 131-page “Guidelines” for capital defense counsel, published in 2003, on which the Sixth Circuit relied. Those directives expanded what had been (in the 1980 Standards) a broad outline of defense counsel’s duties in all criminal cases into detailed prescriptions for legal representation of capital defendants. They discuss the duty to investigate mitigating evidence in exhaustive detail, specifying what attorneys should look for, where to look, and when to begin. See ABA Guidelines 10.7, comment., at 80–85. They include, for example, the requirement that counsel’s investigation cover every period of the defendant’s life from “the moment of conception,” id., at 81, and that counsel contact “virtually every-one ... who knew [the defendant] and his family” and obtain records “concerning not only the client, but also his parents, grandparents, siblings, and children,” id., at 83. Judging counsel’s conduct in the 1980’s on the basis of these 2003 Guidelines—without even pausing to consider whether they reflected the prevailing professional practice at the time of the trial—was error.
To make matters worse, the Court of Appeals (following Circuit precedent) treated the ABA’s 2003 Guidelines not merely as evidence of what reasonably diligent attorneys would do, but as inexorable commands with which all capital defense counsel “‘must fully comply.’” 560 F. 3d, at 526 (quoting Dickerson v. Bagley, 453 F. 3d 690, 693 (CA6 2006)). Strickland stressed, however, that “American Bar Association standards and the like” are “only guides” to what reasonableness means, not its definition. 466 U. S., at 688. We have since regarded them as such. See Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U. S. 510, 524 (2003). What we have said of state requirements is a fortiori true of standards set by private organizations: “[W]hile States are free to impose whatever specific rules they see fit to ensure that criminal defendants are well represented, we have held that the Federal Constitution imposes one general requirement: that counsel make objectively reasonable choices.” Roe v. Flores-Ortega, 528 U. S. 470, 479 (2000).
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