An Ohio jury recommended the death sentence for Frank G. Spisak and the judge imposed the sentence for the murder of three people and the attempted murder of two people at Cleveland State University in 1982. After s a series of appeals and petitions for a writ of habeas corpus the matter came before the Supreme Court on a petition for habeas corpus.

Spisak made two claims in his petition. First he claimed that the jury instructions unconstitutionally required the juror to consider only those mitigating factors that they unanimously agreed were mitigating and second that his attorney performed below the expected standard in his closing address.

The Supreme Court ruled that since the parties agreed that the Ohio courts considered the claim and “rejected it ‘on the merits,’ the law permits a federal court to reach a contrary decision only if the state-court decision ‘was contrary to, or involved an un-reasonable application of, clearly established Federal law,as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.’”

The law requires that in order to recommend the death sentence the jury must unanimously find that each aggravating circumstance outweighs all of the mitigating circumstance in the penalty phase of the the murder trial. But the Supreme Court found, contrary to the claim of the defendant that the jury was not asked to find the existence of each mitigating circumstance unanimously. Rather it is possible for each juror to find a different mitigating circumstance. But if each juror believed that mitigating circumstances outweighed the aggravating circumstances it was to vote against the death penalty.

The defendant’s second claim was that his counsel’s comments denigrating him during closing argument amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel. But the court pointed out that in order to reverse a conviction for ineffective assistance of counsel the court must find that counsel’s was below that expected of counsel and that the defendant was prejudiced as a result. The Supreme Court ruled that there was so much evidence against the defendant that regardless of counsel’s actions the jury would have convicted him anyway and therefore he was not prejudiced. There was considerable aggravating evidence including statements made by the defendant such as that he shot the people because he was a follower of Adolf Hitler “[a]nd he had hoped to “create terror” at Cleveland State University, because it was “one of the prime targets ‘where the “Jews and the system . . . are brainwashing the youth.’” Statements such as these plus admissions that he killed the people lead to be the finding that he would have been convicted despite counsel’s possible incompetence.