Chelsea ©️

1 witness and 2 questions. No character witnesses, pastor, coach or teacher. No mental health professional or mitigation specialist. A teenager is about to be sentenced for murder, possibly for life, and that is the entire punishment phase the defense put on. It lasted less than hour? In my years of covering high profile cases as a journalist, I have never seen this. This is an obvious pattern. No expert witnesses in the guilt phase. Opening statements waived and now this. A competent mitigation case for a young defendant takes months to build—Investigators, childhood records, trauma history, neurodevelopment screening. You construct a human being in front of that jury so they cannot reduce him to the act alone. They sent his mother up there to say she loves him. Two questions and sat down. There are only a few explanations. The family didn’t know what they were missing. Counsel made a bad bet that guilt phase sympathy would carry over. Or this defense was never adequately funded or staffed for a case this size. Every one of those is a problem. Together they form the outline of an ineffective assistance of counsel argument on appeal. The sentence hasn’t come down yet. But the question of how this defense was built, and for whom, is already answered.