Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca8-05-04329/USCOURTS-ca8-05-04329-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 530
Nature of Suit: Prisoner Petitions - Habeas Corpus
Cause of Action: 

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1

The Honorable David S. Doty, United States District Judge for the District of

Minnesota.

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT

___________

No. 05-4329

___________

James R. Niederstadt, *

*

Appellee, *

* Appeal from the United States

v. * District Court for the

* Eastern District of Missouri.

Jeremiah W. Nixon, Attorney General *

for the State of Missouri; Jim Purkett, *

*

Appellants. *

___________

Submitted: June 13, 2006.

Filed: October 17, 2006 (Corrected: 10/31/06)

___________

Before LOKEN, Chief Judge, ARNOLD, Circuit Judge, and DOTY,1

 District Judge.

___________

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

James Niederstadt was convicted of one count of sodomy, see Mo. Rev. Stat.

§ 566.060 (Supp. 1991), and sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment. The

Missouri Court of Appeals reversed, concluding that the evidence was insufficient to

support his conviction. State v. Niederstadt, No. 23612, 2001 WL 995937 (Mo. Ct.

App. July 23, 2001) (Niederstadt I). The state then successfully sought review in the

Missouri Supreme Court, which reinstated Mr. Niederstadt's conviction. State v.

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The Honorable E. Richard Webber, United States District Judge for the Eastern

District of Missouri.

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Niederstadt, 66 S.W.3d 12 (Mo. 2002) (Niederstadt II). When Mr. Niederstadt filed

a motion for rehearing, the Missouri Supreme Court summarily denied it.

Afterward, Mr. Niederstadt filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus,

see 28 U.S.C. § 2254, which the district court2

 granted on the ground that

Mr. Niederstadt's due process rights under the fourteenth amendment had been

violated by the Missouri Supreme Court's construction of the sodomy statute. The

state appeals, and we affirm the district court's order granting habeas corpus.

I.

S.C. was a sixteen-year-old female at the time of the alleged sodomy in 1992.

Her parents, missionaries working in Africa, sent her to live with the Niederstadt

family while she attended high school in the United States. When S.C. began to get

into trouble at school, Mr. Niederstadt punished her by whipping her back, buttocks,

and legs. The whippings occurred about once a month, caused bruises, and made it

difficult for S.C. to walk. After one such beating, Mr. Niederstadt choked S.C. and

threatened to kill her. Some mornings, while S.C. was in bed, Mr. Niederstadt put his

hands under her clothes and fondled her. In March of 1992, S.C. awoke feeling a

sharp pain and saw that Mr. Niederstadt had put his finger in her vagina. S.C. asked

Mr. Niederstadt what he was doing, and he replied that he was taking her temperature.

S.C. testified that Mr. Niederstadt penetrated her vagina with his finger on other

occasions, but she did not provide details. She also testified that she was afraid to

report the sexual abuse to authorities.

Given these facts, the Missouri Supreme Court held that Mr. Niederstadt had

committed sodomy by penetrating S.C.'s vagina with his finger in March of 1992. The

applicable statute defined sodomy as "deviate sexual intercourse with another person

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without that person's consent by the use of forcible compulsion." Mo. Rev. Stat.

§ 566.060.1 (Supp. 1991). The court analyzed the events in light of Mo. Rev. Stat.

§ 556.061(12)(a) (Supp. 1991), which defines forcible compulsion as "physical force

that overcomes reasonable resistance."

Mr. Niederstadt asserts that the Missouri Supreme Court's construction of the

sodomy statute unexpectedly changed and retroactively applied the applicable statute,

thus violating his due process rights.

II.

We turn first to the state's argument that Mr. Niederstadt's due process claim

was procedurally defaulted because he failed to raise it in the state supreme court

before his rehearing motion. In order to preserve a constitutional issue, Missouri law

requires that it be raised at the earliest opportunity "consistent with good pleading and

orderly procedure." State v. Wickizer, 583 S.W.2d 519, 523 (Mo. 1979). Although

the state argued in its appeal brief in the Missouri Supreme Court that § 566.060

encompassed Mr. Niederstadt's conduct, the asserted constitutional violation on which

Mr. Niederstadt's claim rests was not apparent until the Missouri Supreme Court

construed the sodomy statute to include that conduct. Until that point, Mr. Niederstadt

had simply maintained that the evidence was insufficient to convict him of forcible

sodomy. Because Mr. Niederstadt raised his due process claim as soon as the statute

had been construed to include his conduct, it was not procedurally barred.

III.

What is the appropriate standard of review for Mr. Niederstadt's due process

claim? If his claim "was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings" relief

is available only if those proceedings "resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or

involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as

determined by the [United States] Supreme Court." 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). If, on the

other hand, Mr. Niederstadt's constitutional claim was not adjudicated on the merits

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by the state court, the deferential standards of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death

Penalty Act (AEDPA) do not apply. In that case, we would conduct a de novo review

of the claim. Pfau v. Ault, 409 F.3d 933, 938-39 (8th Cir. 2005).

The motion for rehearing that Mr. Niederstadt filed in the Missouri Supreme

Court contains claims involving both federal and state law, and the court's response

was a one-line order stating simply that Mr. Niederstadt's "motion for rehearing is

overruled." The Missouri Supreme Court's decision did not discuss or even

acknowledge Mr. Niederstadt's constitutional claim or any other state or federal claim

that he raised. Although in James v. Bowersox, 187 F.3d 866, 869 (8th Cir. 1999),

cert. denied, 528 U.S. 1143 (2000), we stated that "the summary nature of a state

court's ruling does not affect the § 2254(d)(1) standard of review," the state court in

James had reviewed the federal claim and "label[ed]" it " 'without merit.' " Likewise,

Weeks v. Angelone, 528 U.S. 225, 231, 237 (2000), is distinguishable: the state court

in Weeks had specifically referred to the claim at issue (issue "44"), along with several

others, "considered" them, and found that they had "no merit." Weeks v. Virginia, 248

Va. 460, 465, 450 S.W.2d 379, 383 (1994).

Since our decision in James, we have remarked that determining when a state

court has decided an issue on the merits is "not so easy" and indicated that there are

no hard-and-fast rules. Brown v. Luebbers, 371 F.3d 458, 460-61 (8th Cir. 2004) (en

banc), cert. denied, 543 U.S. 1189 (2005). And we recently conducted a detailed

examination of a state court opinion before determining that the opinion resolved a

particular claim regarding the prosecution's argument to the jury on the merits. Weaver

v. Bowersox, 438 F.3d 832, 838-39 (8th Cir. 2006).

Given our careful approach in Weaver, we have some doubt that the state court's

one-sentence ruling here warrants the application of AEDPA. In our en banc decision

in Brown, 371 F.3d at 461, we said that we must "simply look at what [the] state court

has said, case by case, and determine whether the federal constitutional claim was

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considered and rejected by that court." Here, where the state court said nothing, it

would not be obviously wrong to conclude that it did not consider Mr. Niederstadt's

claim so that we would have to review it de novo.

But even assuming that the due process claim here "was adjudicated on the

merits," 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), and AEDPA applies, we believe that Mr. Niederstadt

is entitled to habeas relief. When we decide an issue under AEDPA that the state

court denied without providing an explanation, we must "conduct an independent

review of the record and applicable law to determine whether state court decision is

contrary to federal law [or] unreasonably applies clearly established law." Harris v.

Stovall, 212 F.3d 940, 943 (6th Cir. 2000). For the reasons that follow, we believe

that the state court's denial of Mr. Niederstadt's due process claim is an unreasonable

application of clearly established Supreme Court due-process precedent.

IV.

Over forty years ago, the Supreme Court said that "[t]he basic principle that a

criminal statute must give fair warning of the conduct that it makes a crime has often

been recognized by this Court." Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 350-51

(1964). While the due process clause does not incorporate the specific prohibitions

of the ex post facto clause, Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U.S. 451, 458 (2001), the

"concepts of notice [and] foreseeability" are at its core, id. at 459. And thus the due

process clause is violated when a court gives retroactive effect to "a judicial

construction of a criminal statute [that] is 'unexpected and indefensible by reference

to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue.' " Bouie, 378 U.S.

at 354 (quoting Jerome Hall, General Principles of Criminal Law 61 (2d ed. 1960));

see also Rogers, 532 U.S. at 461.

As we have said, the Missouri sodomy statute, at the time of Mr. Niederstadt's

conduct, prohibited "deviate sexual intercourse with another person without that

person's consent by the use of forcible compulsion." Mo. Rev. Stat. § 566.060.1

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(Supp. 1991). Deviate sexual intercourse included "any sexual act involving the

genitals of one person and the mouth, tongue, hand, or anus of another person." Mo.

Rev. Stat. § 566.010(1) (Supp. 1991). Forcible compulsion was defined as "physical

force that overcomes reasonable resistance" or "a threat, express or implied, that

places a person in reasonable fear of death, serious physical injury, or kidnapping of

himself or another person." Mo. Rev. Stat. § 556.061(12) (Supp. 1991).

Mr. Niederstadt admits that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict

him of deviate sexual assault in the first degree, Mo. Rev. Stat. § 566.070(1) (1986),

which applied when the victim was an incapacitated person, or deviate sexual assault

in the second degree, Mo. Rev. Stat. § 566.080(1) (1986), which applied to an assault

of a sixteen-year-old victim by a person seventeen years or older. Neither of these

crimes included the element of forcible compulsion. Mr. Niederstadt argues that he

did not use forcible compulsion to accomplish the act, and that the Missouri Supreme

Court's construction of § 556.061(12)(a) to include his conduct diverged so widely

from the law as it existed at the time of his offense as to violate his due process rights.

The Missouri Supreme Court held that Mr. Niederstadt used physical force

against S.C., a minor dependent on him for care, in such a manner that her reasonable

resistance to his sexual assaults was greatly reduced and then sodomized her while she

slept. The act of penetrating S.C.'s vagina itself required force to be applied to her

body, the court held, and that satisfied the physical force element of the statute.

Niederstadt II, 66 S.W.3d at 14-16. Several years after Mr. Niederstadt's conduct, the

Missouri courts had defined "physical force" as " '[f]orce applied to the body,' " State

v. Kilmartin, 904 S.W.2d 370, 374 (Mo. Ct. App. 1995) (quoting Black's Law

Dictionary 1147 (6th ed. 1990)).

In determining whether the force used was sufficient to overcome S.C.'s

reasonable resistance, Mo. Rev. Stat. § 556.061(12)(a) (Supp. 1991), the Missouri

Supreme Court looked at "the totality of the circumstances" in accordance with

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Missouri precedent. Niederstadt II, 66 S.W.3d at 15. These circumstances include

"the ages of the victim and the accused; the atmosphere and setting of the incident; the

extent to which the accused was in a position of authority, domination and control

over the victim; ... whether the victim was under duress," Kilmartin, 904 S.W.2d at

374, and whether the sexual act was preceded by threats or violence. Niederstadt,

66 S.W.2d at 15. The state supreme court then stated that the beatings, the age

difference between Mr. Niederstadt (who was about forty years old at the time of the

assault) and sixteen-year-old S.C., her dependence on Mr. Niederstadt for subsistence,

and her fear of him were relevant in determining the reasonable level of resistance that

could have been expected from S.C. Additionally, the court determined that because

the act that S.C. described in detail was initiated when she was sleeping, her expected

reasonable resistance was extremely low. Niederstadt II, 66 S.W.3d at 15-16.

Under Bouie, we must determine what law "had been expressed prior to the

conduct in issue." We first examine the statutory language. Section 566.060 required

that the "deviate sexual intercourse" be accomplished "by the use of forcible

compulsion" (emphasis added); it does not give notice that the intercourse itself can

be the force used to accomplish the intercourse or that a sleeping or unconscious

victim can be "compelled." Under § 556.061(12), "forcible compulsion" is defined

as "physical force that overcomes reasonable resistance," but this definition does

nothing to bring Mr. Niederstadt's conduct within the scope of § 566.060: it provides

no notice that "physical force" can be the intercourse itself or that the victim (whose

"reasonable resistance" is overcome) may be asleep. Therefore we do not believe that

the statutory language provided "fair warning" that Mr. Niederstadt's conduct came

within the terms of the crime with which he was charged.

Case law also plainly failed to provide the notice that due process requires. No

Missouri case before Mr. Niederstadt's holds or implies that the force necessary for

forcible compulsion is equivalent to the performance of the sexual act which the

statute states the forcible compulsion is used to accomplish. Nor had any case held

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or implied that a defendant could be convicted under § 566.060 when the victim was

asleep and unaware of the acts alleged to be "forcible compulsion." For example, in

State v. R_ D_ G_, 733 S.W.2d 824, 827 (Mo. Ct. App. 1987), the court's discussion

of force focused on the defendant's grabbing and holding the victim's arms and

dragging her into a bedroom. Here S.C. testified that she was not even aware that

Mr. Niederstadt was in the room until she awoke and, according to the Missouri

Supreme Court, the deviate sexual intercourse had already been accomplished "by the

use of forcible compulsion," Mo. Rev. Stat. 566.060. And even Kilmartin, relied upon

to uphold Mr. Niederstadt's conviction, would not have provided "fair notice" if it had

been decided before Mr. Niederstadt's charged conduct. The defendant in Kilmartin,

904 S.W.2d at 374, repeatedly requested that the victim, an eleven-year-old boy, allow

the defendant to massage his penis. After the boy refused, the defendant grabbed the

child and held him; the child then ceased to resist and was sodomized by the

defendant. Kilmartin specifically held that the force "applied to the body" was that

used to grab and hold the victim (not the force used to massage his penis). See id.

And we find it telling that after noting that the defendant "reinforced his physical

force-grabbing the boy and holding him-with many psychological factors intended to

instill fear and wear down the boy's resistance," the court in Kilmartin concluded that

the tactics used by the defendant were "near the outer limits as to what constitutes

forcible compulsion."

In holding that the force used to penetrate S.C. could fulfill the element of

forcible compulsion, the Missouri Supreme Court reconfigured the sodomy statutes

in an unexpected way. Under this construction, the element of "forcible compulsion"

collapses into the element of "deviate sexual intercourse," Mo. Rev. Stat. § 566.060.1

(Supp. 1991), and sodomy, when committed against a victim from whom virtually no

reasonable resistance is expected, such as the sleeping victim here, becomes

indistinguishable from the offense of deviate sexual intercourse in the second degree,

which does not require proof of forcible compulsion. At the time of Mr. Niederstadt's

conduct, neither the plain language of the sodomy statute nor the case law supported

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such a construction. Where, as here, a court construes a criminal statute in a way that

removes an entire element, it violates the principle of fair warning that underlies the

constitutional right to due process if, in the same case, the court uses that new

statutory interpretation to uphold the defendant's conviction.

We conclude that the Missouri Supreme Court's decision was an unreasonable

interpretation of United States Supreme Court due-process jurisprudence in Bouie and

other cases because we believe that it is quite obvious that neither the plain language

of the statute nor state law at the time of Mr. Niederstadt's conduct defined "forcible

compulsion" as encompassing his acts. We agree with the Missouri Court of Appeals,

which stated in its opinion reversing Mr. Niederstadt's conviction that "there are no

facts in this case of persuasion or force. Defendant appeared while S.C. was sleeping.

He initiated the sexual act while she slept. Defendant's actions caused her to awaken.

There was no evidence of forcible compulsion, as § 556.061(12) defines that term,

before or after S.C. awoke." Niederstadt I, 2001 WL 995937, at *3. Significantly,

one member of the panel, after concurring in the state court of appeal's unanimous

opinion, wrote separately to express his "chagrin" that the reversal resulted from the

prosecutor's decision to pursue this charge: "Why the prosecutor chose to undertake

the burden of proving forcible compulsion -- an impossible task on the evidence here

– defies explanation." Id. at *4 (Shrum, J., concurring) (emphasis added).

We recognize that the method of the common law will cause legal principles

to migrate and expand somewhat as words and principles encounter new facts. But

in the present case the Missouri Supreme Court's application of the sodomy statute

represents not the gradual evolution of a principle but a quantum leap that essentially

redefines a statutory crime.

We recognize, too, that it is the sole province of the Missouri courts to construe

their own statutes and that such constructions as those courts may give them are

authoritative and binding on federal courts. We have no appellate jurisdiction over

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state courts and would not presume to venture an opinion that the interpretation that

the Missouri Supreme Court gave the statute relevant to this case was incorrect:

Indeed, it was correct by definition. The Missouri Supreme Court's interpretation of

the statute remains intact, unaffected by our ruling, and the courts of Missouri are free

to apply it to any conduct that occurs after the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling in

Mr. Niederstadt's appeal. We hold only that in applying its construction to

Mr. Niederstadt, the Missouri Supreme Court violated his right to due process. 

Affirmed.

LOKEN, Chief Judge, dissenting.

I respectfully dissent. In my view, the court misapplies the due process

principles of Bouie v. Columbia, 378 U.S. 347 (1964), and Rogers v. Tennessee,

532 U.S. 451 (2001). In Rogers, a divided Supreme Court refused to extend Bouie to

a state court decision overruling a common law rule that otherwise would have barred

petitioner’s conviction. The opinion of the dissenting Justices explaining how Bouie

should be applied is highly relevant to this case involving a criminal statute:

Many criminal cases present some factual nuance that arguably

distinguishes them from cases that have come before; a court applying

the penal statute to the new fact pattern does not purport to change the

law. That, however, is not the action before us here, but rather, a square,

head-on overruling of prior law . . . . 

532 U.S. at 471 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Here, the Supreme Court of Missouri applied

the governing statute to a new fact pattern; it did not overrule prior law. 

The due process inquiry under Bouie is whether the judicial construction of a

criminal statute was “unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had

been expressed prior to the conduct in issue.” 378 U.S. at 354. In only one prior

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All prior cases cited by Niederstadt or discussed by the district court were

decisions by the Missouri Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court of Missouri had not

previously construed the term,“physical force that overcomes reasonable resistance,”

in Mo. Rev. Stat. § 556.061(12)(a) (Supp. 1991). In Hagan v. Caspari, 50 F.3d 542,

547 (8th Cir. 1995), we questioned “whether a state supreme court’s overruling of an

intermediate appellate court decision can ever constitute a change in state law for due

process purposes. In fact, we are strongly inclined to agree with the state that until the

state’s highest court has spoken on a particular point of state law, the law of the state

necessarily must be regarded as unsettled.”

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Missouri case was a sodomy conviction reversed. State v. Daleske, 866 S.W.2d 476

(Mo. App. 1993).3

 Here, the Supreme Court of Missouri’s opinion carefully

considered the Missouri Court of Appeals decision in Daleske and found it “readily

distinguishable” on two grounds: (i) Daleske was not submitted to the jury under Mo.

Rev. Stat. § 556.061(12)(a) and thus its discussion was dicta, and (ii) in any event the

defendant in Daleske employed only de minimis force, whereas here the victim “was

awakened by a sharp pain which she discovered was caused by defendant’s finger in

her vagina.” State v. Niederstadt, 66 S.W.3d 12, 14 (Mo. banc 2002). I think Daleske

was properly distinguished. But what matters is that the Supreme Court of Missouri

engaged in the type of fact-based analysis described in Justice Scalia’s dissent in

Rogers. Therefore, its decision cannot be deemed contrary to or an unreasonable

application of Bouie as construed in Rogers. 

I disagree with the court’s conclusion that the Supreme Court of Missouri

“reconfigured the sodomy statutes in an unexpected way.” Supra, p. 8. The statute

required proof of “physical force that overcomes reasonable resistance.” The

Supreme Court of Missouri first noted there can be “no question but that defendant

used physical force to insert his finger in the girl’s vagina.” Niederstadt, 66 S.W.3d

at 15. That is literally true; thus, the court’s assertion that the statutory language

“provides no notice that ‘physical force’ can be the intercourse itself” is simply

wrong. The court goes on to complain that this construction of the statute “remove[d]

an entire element” from the sodomy offense because lesser included deviate sexual

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intercourse offenses also include this type of force. However, by noting that Daleske

involved de minimis force in committing deviate sexual intercourse, unlike the paininflicting force used by Niederstadt in this case, the Supreme Court of Missouri

preserved a distinction between the offenses. 

The Supreme Court of Missouri then discussed the “critical question” of

“whether the acts of deviate sexual intercourse were done by use of physical force that

‘overcomes reasonable resistance.’” 66 S.W.3d at 15. The Court looked to the

coercive beatings, threats, and sexual indecencies the forty-year-old Niederstadt had

previously inflicted on this sixteen-year-old girl who was living in his house. The

Court concluded that Niederstadt’s conduct and his “complete control and dominance

over every aspect of the girl’s life” provided sufficient evidence for the jury to find

that he used physical force that overcame “[t]he reasonable resistance expected of an

unconscious or sleeping person.” 66 S.W.3d at 16. That construction did not

“unexpectedly broaden[] a statute which on its face had been definite and precise.”

Bouie, 378 U.S. at 353. Nor was it an unexpected departure from prior decisions on

closely comparable facts. Supported by no prior Missouri law, the court concludes

that a sleeping victim cannot be “compelled” and therefore Niederstadt had no

warning that his crime would be severely punished as sodomy. That conclusion

requires more knowledge of the human mind and behavior than I possess. Worse yet,

it rejects out of hand the Supreme Court of Missouri’s conclusion that the entire

relationship between the perpetrator and the victim is relevant to the sodomy inquiry

under Missouri law. Bouie did not give federal courts unrestrained power to apply the

Due Process Clause in this manner.

Missouri law gave Niederstadt fair warning that his despicable conduct would

subject him to severe criminal penalties. I would reverse the judgment of the district

court and remand with instructions to deny the petition for a writ of habeas corpus. 

______________________________

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