Ben Gersten v. Daniel Senkowski, Superintendent of Clinton Correctional Facility, Eliot L. Spitzer, Attorney General of the State of New York

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• concluding that counsel provided ineffective assistance for failing to consult medical expert where such consultation would demonstrate sexual penetration did not occur
• holding that even under the more demanding AEDPA standard, it was an unreasonable application of Strickland for the state court to hold otherwise
• noting that district courts, on habeas review, are “bound to apply this Court’s precedents governing when applications of Strickland are unreasonable” (quotation marks omitted)
• determining that counsel's failure to consult with a medical expert \essentially conceded\ that the abuse occurred when the nature and extent of abuse on the young victim likely would have shown long-term damage
• holding state court to have unreasonably applied Strickland in rejecting ineffective-assistance challenge to counsel who, without investigation, conceded that physical evidence demonstrated sexual assault of child when qualified medical experts would have testified otherwise
• finding that prejudice is established when “counsel’s failures go to something as important as the medical evidence in [the] case — -the only objective evidence that a crime occurred and the only evidence directly corroborating any aspect of the victim’s story”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).