George Porter, JR. v. Bill Mccollum, Attorney General of Florida, et al. (558 U.S. 30)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided November 30, 2009 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 558 U.S. 30 · 130 S. Ct. 447
- Decided
- November 30, 2009
- Term
- October Term 2009
- Vote
- 9–0
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Per Curiam. Petitioner George Porter is a veteran who was both wounded and decorated for his active participation in two major engagements during the Korean War; his combat service unfortunately left him a traumatized, changed man. His commanding officer’s moving description of those two battles was only a fraction of the mitigating evidence that his counsel failed to discover or present during the penalty phase of his trial in 1988. In this federal postconviction proceeding, the District Court held that Porter’s lawyer’s failure to adduce that evidence violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel and granted his application for a writ of habeas corpus. The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed, on the ground that the Florida Supreme Court’s determination that Porter was not prejudiced by any deficient performance by his counsel was a reasonable application of Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668 (1984). Like the District Court, we are persuaded that it was objectively unreasonable to conclude there was no reasonable probability the sentence would have been different if the sentencing judge and jury had heard the significant mitigation evidence that Porter’s counsel neither uncovered nor presented. We therefore grant the petition for certiorari in part and reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals. I Porter was convicted of two counts of first-degree…
Excerpt of a 28,998-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.