The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a decision throwing out a Texas prisoner's life sentence, which a judge below based on the fact that his lawyer failed to ask a jury to consider a manslaughter conviction carrying a maximum 20-year sentence.

Mejia v. Davis involves David Mejia, who was found guilty of murder for stabbing Marcos Torres outside a Victoria bar in 1998. Mejia's trial attorney, Alex Luna, presented a self-defense theory based on Mejia's claim that Torres was threatening him with a gun.

While a state court later rejected Mejia's ineffective assistance claims, U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas of Houston reached a different conclusion last year, determining that Luna was ineffective for failing to request the lesser-included offense of manslaughter during the guilt phase of the trial and a sudden-passion instruction during the penalty phase.

Atlas concluded that Luna had no strategic reason for failing to request the instructions, either of which could have resulted in the jury giving Mejia a much shorter sentence than life in prison. She ordered Mejia to be released from custody unless the State of Texas initiated retrial proceedings within 180 days—decisions the state appealed to the Fifth Circuit.

In their Oct. 11 decision, the Fifth Circuit ruled that Atlas failed to defer to the state court's reasonable application of the U.S. Supreme Court's seminal ruling in Strickland v. Washington in rejecting the ineffective assistance of counsel claim. Strickland established a two-part test for ineffective assistance of counsel, requiring a criminal defendant to prove: that his lawyer's performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness; and that, if the attorney had performed adequately, the result would have been different.

The Fifth Circuit concluded that, given Luna's all-or-nothing strategy of self-defense, he reasonably declined a “double-edged” manslaughter instruction that could have lowered Mejia's chances of acquittal.

“And by agreeing to a manslaughter instruction, Luna would have invited the jury to consider whether Mejia had 'recklessly' caused Torres's death [under] Texas Penal Code § 19.04(a) which would have entailed a finding that Mejia's actions 'consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk' of killing him,” wrote Judge Kyle Duncan. “Inviting a jury to consider recklessness could have easily undermined Mejia's insistence he was 'not guilty of anything,' making conviction more likely and acquittal less likely.”

The Fifth Circuit also determined that even if Luna had requested a sudden-passion instruction—which would have reduced the maximum punishment to 20 years if the jury believed Mejia's crime was the result of being provoked by the person he killed—it was unlikely the instruction would have changed the sentence.

“This overlooks the glaring fact that the same jury had already rejected Mejia's self-defense theory premised on the same claim that Torres had threatened Mejia with a gun,” Duncan wrote. “A jury previously unmoved by Mejia's guilt-phase argument that 'Torres had a gun, and I had to defend myself!' was unlikely to accept Mejia's penalty-phase argument that 'Torres had a gun, and I was provoked into stabbing him!'”

David Adler, a Houston attorney who serves as Mejia's court-appointed counsel, is disappointed in the ruling.

“I hate to sound cliché but we're evaluating our options moving forward. We still believe that Mr. Mejia did not receive a fair trial or a fair defense at trial,'' Adler said. “We're going to continue to fight for this guy. You shouldn't have representation like this.'

A spokeswoman for the Texas Attorney General's Office, which represented the state in the case, did not return a call for comment.

Adler was named Texas Lawyer's “Appellate Lawyer of the Week” in 2017 after he convinced Atlas to overturn his client's life sentence.