Marcus Bernard Williams v. State of Alabama

── Marcus Bernard Williams v. State of Alabama ── Case No.: 21-13734 Court: Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Date: April 03, 2026 Category: REM USCA11 Case: 21-13734 Document: 83-1 Date Filed: 04/03/2026 Page: 1 of 35 FOR PUBLICATION In the United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit ____________________ No. 21-13734 ____________________ MARCUS BERNARD WILLIAMS, Petitioner-Appellee, versus STATE OF ALABAMA, Respondent-Appellant. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama D.C. Docket No. 1:07-cv-01276-KOB ____________________ ON REMAND FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Before GRANT, LAGOA, and WILSON, Circuit Judges. GRANT, Circuit Judge: USCA11 Case: 21-13734 Document: 83-1 Date Filed: 04/03/2026 Page: 2 of 35 2 Opinion of the Court 21-13734 In Thornell v. Jones, the petitioner asserted that his lawyer provided ineffective assistance at sentencing in his capital murder trial by not introducing mitigating evidence of his mental illness and childhood trauma. 602 U.S. 154, 161–62, 166 (2024). He argued that the attorney’s mistakes warranted resentencing because a reasonable sentencer might have considered the omitted evidence relevant to his moral culpability. Id. at 165. The Ninth Circuit agreed. Id. at 162–63. But the Supreme Court explained that an Arizona sentencing judge almost certainly would have weighed the serious aggravating circumstances of the petitioner’s crime more heavily than all his mitigating evidence, including new and corroborating evidence of psychological disorders, cognitive impairment, childhood physical and sexual abuse, and substance abuse. Id. at 164–71. So it rejected his ineffective-assistance-of- counsel-at-sentencing claim, concluding that he had not shown that he was prejudiced by his counsel’s alleged incompetence. Id. at 165. The claim here is similar, and after issuing Thornell, the Supreme Court vacated our first opinion in this case and remanded for reconsideration. We now conclude that Williams likewise has not shown that he was prejudiced by his trial attorneys’ substandard mitigation investigation. There is no reasonable probability that the sentencer, an Alabama trial court, would not have sentenced Williams to death even had it considered his new mitigation evidence. Alabama sentencing courts generally weigh the aggravating circumstances of his crimes—burglary, rape, and murder—more heavily than the kinds of mitigating evidence he USCA11 Case: 21-13734 Document: 83-1 Date Filed: 04/03/2026 Page: 3 of 35 21-13734 Opinion of the Court 3 offered, including episodic, unreported childhood sexual abuse. We therefore reverse the district court’s judgment and remand for reinstatement of Williams’s death sentence. I. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, almost 30 years ago, Williams raped and murdered his neighbor, Melanie Rowell. After crawling through her window at about 1:00 a.m., he took a knife from the kitchen counter and walked up the stairs toward her bedroom, taking his pants off along the way. He stepped over a baby gate and “peeked in” at Rowell’s two toddl