VADP

Christopher Scott Emmett’s Background:

Excerpted from GREGORY, Circuit Judge (4^th Circuit Court of Appeals), concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I concur in Part IV of the majority opinion, which concludes that Christopher Scott Emmett’s counsel was not ineffective in failing to develop evidence of Emmett’s intoxication for use during the penalty phase. I respectfully dissent from the majority’s analysis and conclusion in Part III of the opinion. Counsel failed to investigate adequately Emmett’s childhood, and counsel’s inadequate investigation prejudiced the sentencing phase of Emmett’s trial. The Supreme Court of Virginia unreasonably applied Strickland v. Washington in ruling otherwise.

The majority opinion provides a lengthy description of the facts related to Emmett’s crime and a thorough exposition of counsel’s effort to investigate Emmett’s background. The opinion does not detail at length the facts related to Emmett’s childhood of abuse and neglect. Because these facts are essential to analyzing Emmett’s claim, I fully recount them here.

Emmett, born August 18, 1971, was the last of five children born to Barbara “Karen” McAdams (“Karen”) and Bobby Emmett Bazemore (“Bobby”). His birth home was unsanitary. Emmett’s aunt, Joanne Bazemore, remembered that the home was filthy and smelled of urine, a stench bad enough to make her eyes burn. She remembered dirty diapers that fell out of closet doors and urine-soaked mattresses that had to be taken outside for airing. She recalled there were many times the children did not have enough to eat. While unsupervised, and older sister then two years old, Angela Emmett Wynn, sustained severe injury from an electrical shock after she was allowed to chew on a cord. Also while unsupervised, an infant sister died, apparently from an asthma attack.

Approximately three months after Emmett’s birth, his mother divorced his father, taking the children with her, she said, because Bobby was an alcoholic who could not keep a job. Bobby’s second wife Glenda Mills (“Glenda”) remembered that at some point thereafter, Karen left the children, dirty and underdressed, with a friend but did not return for them for over two days. When the children stayed with Bobby and Glenda for approximately one year, the couple never heard from Karen.

Visitors to the home described it as dilapidated. The stairs had fallen off the front porch, so the children climbed up a tree to enter the home from the front; the back of the house was also difficult to access. Emmett’s brother Bobby Emmett Jr. remembered that bugs infested the house in the summer because none of the windows had screens, bats flew inside the house, and the one oil heater in the parents’ bedroom could not keep the family warm in the winter.

A sister, Mary Emmett Floyd, remembered that their step-father Tommy was often working, but their mother was either idle at home or “running the streets”. The lack of supervision led to injuries. Mary fell off the front porch and suffered rib injuries that persist today. When still a baby, Emmett fell down a flight of stairs and required emergency room care. Even though Tommy was home that night, he blamed and beat [another sister] Amy for Emmett’s fall.

The McAdams home was as unsanitary as Karen’s previous home with Bobby. Glenda remembered piles of dirty clothes and dishes, the smell of urine, and dirty diapers that were left wherever a baby was changed. Emmett’s siblings remembered the same, including trash cans that were full and sometimes overturned. Amy could not recall Karen doing laundry. Before eating, the children had to find a dish and wash it.

The children were also mal-nourished; therefore Emmett was very thin as a child. Karen only served dinner and sometimes a tomato soup lunch. Emmett’s siblings remembered that there was never enough food to eat, so the children regularly left the house to look for food. They occasionally had to steal food. More often, neighbors, or the man working at a local ice cream shop fed them; other times, a local doughnut shop owner fed them on the way to school. Angela remembered that, strangely, her mother always had enough to eat and would not share with the children the cakes she lay in bed eating.

The children suffered physical abuse. Karen and Tommy beat Mary and Emmett with “anything that was handy”. Emmett received more beatings because he was rebellious; Mary went to school with marks from the beatings. Angela remembered not feeling safe in the home. She recalled that the children were so afraid of Tommy, especially when he was drinking, that they would climb down a tree from the second floor window to reach the bathroom behind the house without seeing him, or simply urinate on their bedroom floors. Tommy beat Emmett badly after one of his sisters threw him though a wall in the trailer. Bobby Jr. remembered that a caretaker beat Amy badly and locked Emmett and Bobby Jr. in their rooms.

Around 1974, the children’s biological father, Bobby, picked up his three eldest children at school, without permission, and took them to live with him in Chesapeake, Virginia. Mary and Emmett, however, were too young to be in school and were therefore left behind. Amy, Bobby Jr., and Angela considered it a huge relief to go live with their father. They recalled that back in North Carolina, Tommy sometimes beat Emmett badly, dumped their plates of food in the trash just for “looking at him wrong,” and locked them in a closet.

Sometimes Karen left the home for weeks or months at a time. Emmett was first arrested for stealing at age seven. A psychiatric social worker noted that Emmett’s “hygiene was most inappropriate. There was a distinctive odor of urine about him.”

Juvenile court reports confirm these accounts of Emmett’s childhood. In 1980, a juvenile intake counselor preparing for Emmett’s court appearance on charges of breaking and entering and larceny described the home as dilapidated and unkempt. When he visited, he wrote, the children were extremely dirty and the only furniture in good condition was a fully stocked gun cabinet.

The Chief Court Counselor filed a Child Abuse and Neglect Report against Karen on March 3, 1981. He recommended that Emmett be placed outside the home if the present conditions could not be fixed. The next month, a social worker reported that Karen resisted DSS involvement. When the social worker did succeed in visiting the home, she found that rotted food and dirty dishes filled the sink in a roach-infested kitchen; the furniture was dilapidated; all the children were unkempt and dirty; there was a lack of bonding between mother and children and among siblings; and the mother did not nurture or show any affection toward the children. The social worker concluded that the home was dysfunctional. Emmett was finally removed from the home on March 7, 1984.

In sum, Emmett’s is “a case where counsel’s failure to thoroughly investigate kept the jury completely in the dark as to” Emmett’s childhood. McWee V. Weldon. Because counsel made a “strategic” decision not to develop additional mitigating evidence after an investigation that was unreasonable by the standards set forth in Supreme Court precedent, and because at least one juror might have voted against death had the jury heard the extent of the abuse and neglect Emmett suffered as a child, I would grant Emmett relief.