Dennis Thurl Dowthitt v. Gary L. Johnson, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that an affidavit from Dr. Lundberg-Love did not fulfill the petitioner’s burden to demonstrate that trial counsel’s decision prejudiced his defense in the punishment phase because she never performed an examination
• holding that “trial counsel was not deficient by not canvassing the field to find a more favorable defense expert”
• recognizing that the Texas contemporaneous-objection rule, which requires a timely objection to preserve error for appeal, is strictly and regularly applied, and is therefore an adequate state procedural bar to federal review
• explaining that “[m]ere requests for evidentiary hearings will not suffice” to demonstrate diligence when a petitioner fails to present affidavits he could easily have obtained
• holding counsel is entitled to rely on the opinions of their experts and is not required to “canvass[] the field to find a more favorable defense expert”
• noting the crucial facts of Dowthitt's mental illness of the paranoid, schizophrenic type had already been presented to the state courts and thus finding the expert affidavits further supporting that mental illness exhausted

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).