the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has overturned the death sentence of Warren Wesley Summerlin

the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has overturned the death sentence of Warren Wesley Summerlin for the second time, saying he is entitled to a new hearing because of ineffective legal assistance during his sentencing.
In a case that has gone back and forth on appeal for more than 2 decades, the Court sent the case back to U.S. District Court, with instructions to grant a writ of habeas corpus unless Arizona begins resentencing proceedings "within a reasonable time to be determined" by the federal court.
The court-appointed lawyer who defended Summerlin at the death penalty hearing "utterly failed in his duty to investigate and develop potential mitigating evidence for presentation at the penalty phase," the appellate court found.
Summerlin was sentenced to death on July 12, 1982 for the 1981 rape and murder of Brenna Bailey.
The trial judge, Phoenix Superior Court Judge Philip Marquardt, later lost his job because of a drug conviction after acknowledging he was addicted to marijuana.
In addition, Summerlin's first lawyer did not disclose that she was sleeping with the prosecutor, which Summerlin did not learn about until later, long after a deal that would have kept him off death row fell through.