Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca9-13-36185/USCOURTS-ca9-13-36185-0/pdf.json

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

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FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

STEPHEN D. NEWMAN,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

TIMOTHY WENGLER,

Respondent-Appellee.

No. 13-36185

D.C. No.

1:11-cv-00520-LMB

OPINION

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Idaho

Larry M. Boyle, Magistrate Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted

May 8, 2015—Seattle, Washington

Filed June 16, 2015

Before: J. Clifford Wallace, Andrew J. Kleinfeld,

and Ronald M. Gould, Circuit Judges.

Per Curiam Opinion

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2 NEWMAN V. WENGLER

SUMMARY*

Habeas Corpus

The panel affirmed the district court’s denial of Idaho

state prisoner Stephen Newman’s habeas corpus petition

challenging his conviction for attempted rape.

The panel held that the Stone v. Powell doctrine – where

the state has provided an opportunity for full and fair

litigation of a Fourth Amendment claim, a state prisoner may

not be granted federal habeas corpus relief on the ground that

evidence obtained in an unconstitutional search or seizure

was introduced at his trial – survived the passage of the

Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

The panel held that Newman had a full and fair

opportunity in state court to litigate his Fourth Amendment

claims, and that the Stone v. Powell doctrine therefore bars

consideration of his Fourth Amendment claim in a federal

habeas corpus petition.

COUNSEL

Dennis P. Riordan (argued), Donald M. Horgan, and Gary K.

Dubcoff, Riordan & Horgan, San Francisco, California, for

Petitioner-Appellant.

* This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has

been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

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NEWMAN V. WENGLER 3

L. LaMont Anderson (argued), Deputy AttorneyGeneral, and

Lawrence G. Wasden, Attorney General, Boise, Idaho, for

Respondent-Appellee.

OPINION

PER CURIAM:

In 2008, Stephen Newman was convicted by a jury of

attempted rape and sentenced to a unified term of 15 years

with the first 7 1⁄2 fixed. The Idaho Court of Appeals affirmed

his conviction on direct appeal, and denied his petition for

rehearing. The Idaho Supreme Court also denied his petition

for review. Newman filed a federal habeas petition claiming

that the Idaho trial court violated his Fourth and Fourteenth

Amendment right to be free from unlawful searches and

seizures. The State argued that Newman’s claim was barred

by the Supreme Court’s holding in Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S.

465 (1976). The magistrate judge

1

agreed and denied the

petition. The Court held in Stone that “where the State has

provided an opportunity for full and fair litigation of a Fourth

Amendment claim, a state prisoner may not be granted

federal habeas corpus relief on the ground that evidence

obtained in an unconstitutional search or seizure was

introduced at his trial.” Id. at 494 (footnote omitted). 

Newman now appeals and argues that the Stone doctrine did

not survive the passage of the Antiterrorism Effective Death

Penalty Act (“AEDPA”), or in the alternative, that he did not

receive a full and fair opportunity to litigate his Fourth

Amendment claims in the Idaho state courts.

 

1

 Both parties consented to adjudication by a magistrate judge.

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4 NEWMAN V. WENGLER

We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2253. 

Reviewing the magistrate judge’s decision de novo, Lambert

v. Blodgett, 393 F.3d 943, 964 (9th Cir. 2004), we affirm. 

The question of whether the doctrine of Stone v. Powell

survives the passage of AEDPA is a question of first

impression in our circuit. We hold that it does, and that its

application bars Newman’s claim.

Newman argues that the plain language of 28 U.S.C.

§ 2254(d) abrogates Stone. Section 2254(d) states:

An application for a writ of habeas corpus on

behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the

judgment of a State court shall not be granted

with respect to any claim that was adjudicated

on the merits in State court proceedings unless

the adjudication of the claim—

(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to,

or involved an unreasonable application of,

clearly established Federal law, as determined

by the Supreme Court of the United States; or

(2) resulted in a decision that was based on an

unreasonable determination of the facts in

light of the evidence presented in the State

court proceeding.

Newman’s sole support for this argument is Carlson v.

Ferguson, 9 F. Supp. 2d 654 (S.D.W. Va. 1998) (“Carlson

II”), a district court case from West Virginia. In Carlson II,

the district court held that Stone merged with AEDPA and

“that the phrase ‘any claim that was adjudicated on the

merits’ as drafted in section 2254(d) includes claims

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NEWMAN V. WENGLER 5

premised under the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule.” 

Id. at 657. The district court in Carlson II held that

“AEDPA’s two-tiered analytical approach replaces [Stone’s]

full and fair opportunity test.” Id. at 656. This approach

liberalizes the consideration of certain Fourth Amendment

claims in a habeas petition.

Under Stone, exclusionary rule claims were barred if the

petitioner had a full and fair opportunity to litigate them

below whether or not they were actually adjudicated on the

merits and whether or not they involved an unreasonable

application of Supreme Court law or unreasonable

determination of the facts. “Stone reversed both the eighth

and ninth circuits, not because the Justices thought that the

state courts had handled the fourth amendment issues

correctly, but because error on a fourth amendment issue does

not support a writ of habeas corpus.” Hampton v. Wyant,

296 F.3d 560, 563 (7th Cir. 2002). We are not persuaded that

the passage of AEDPA abrogated this doctrine and eliminated

other existing limitations on habeas relief sub silencio. This

interpretation is not compelled by the text, has not been

adopted by any other circuit to consider the issue, and

requires us to engage in anticipatory overruling of Supreme

Court precedent.

The language of section 2254(d) is not in tension with

Stone because it does not imply a negative pregnant.2

 There

is no implication in § 2254(d) that because the statute

commands us not to grant a petition unless certain conditions

are met, those are the only conditions under which we could

2 A negative pregnant is “[a] denial implying its affirmative opposite by

seeming to deny only a qualification of the allegation and not the

allegation itself.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1132 (9th ed. 2009).

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6 NEWMAN V. WENGLER

deny a petition. The Supreme Court has held that the text of

AEDPA established “a precondition to the grant of habeas

relief . . . not an entitlement to it,” Fry v. Pliler, 551 U.S. 112,

119 (2007), and that “[i]t is . . . well settled that the fact that

constitutional error occurred in the proceedings that led to a

state-court conviction may not alone be sufficient reason for

concluding that a prisoner is entitled to the remedy of

habeas,” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 375 (2000). In

Danforth v. Minnesota, 552 U.S. 264, 278 (2008), the

Supreme Court explained that although Title 28 gives federal

courts the power to grant writs of habeas corpus, it also

“leaves unresolved many important questions about the scope

of available relief.” Id. The Court “has interpreted that

congressional silence—along with the statute’s command to

dispose of habeas petitions ‘as law and justice require,’—as

an authorization to adjust the scope of the writ in accordance

with equitable and prudential considerations.” Id. (citation

omitted) (quoting 28 U.S.C. § 2243). The Stone doctrine is

one of a number of such prudential considerations.3

No other circuit that has considered this issue has

determined that AEDPA abrogated Stone. The Tenth and the

Seventh Circuits have both held that Stone survives the

passage of AEDPA. In Herrera v. Lemaster, 225 F.3d 1176

(10th Cir. 2000), the Tenth Circuit rejected Carlson II

because it was not persuaded “that by enacting AEDPA

Congress intended to expand in any way a habeas petitioner’s

right to overturn a state court decision.” Id. at 1178 n.2. The

Supreme Court has “frequent[ly] recogni[zed] that AEDPA

3

See, e.g., Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619 (1993) (harmless-error

standard); McCleskey v. Zant, 499 U.S. 467 (1991) (abuse-of-the-writ bar

to relief); Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72 (1977) (procedural default).

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NEWMAN V. WENGLER 7

limited rather than expanded the availability of habeas relief.” 

Fry, 551 U.S. at 119 (citing Williams, 529 U.S. at 412).

Stone and AEDPA both narrowed the availability of

habeas relief in exclusionary rule cases because, on collateral

review, “the contribution of the exclusionary rule, if any, to

the effectuation of the Fourth Amendment is minimal, and the

substantial societal costs of application ofthe rule persist with

special force.” Stone, 428 U.S. at 494–95. The Court

observed that “in the case of a typical Fourth Amendment

claim, asserted on collateral attack, a convicted defendant is

usually asking society to redetermine an issue that has no

bearing on the basic justice of his incarceration.” Id. at 491

n.31. The Court concluded that this was because the

exclusionary rule is “not a personal constitutional right,” but

is instead a way to deter police misconduct. Id. at 486. The

Seventh Circuit, in determining that Stone survived the

passage of AEDPA, agreed:

What [a petitioner] needs in order to prevail

on a collateral attack is not simply a holding

that the directive was invalid, but a conclusion

that this error requires application of the

exclusionary rule. And Stone v. Powell holds

that, although both state and federal courts

must apply the exclusionary rule at trial and

on direct appeal, it is inappropriate to use the

exclusionary rule as the basis of collateral

relief because it would not appreciably

augment the deterrence of improper police

conduct.

Hampton, 296 F.3d at 562 (citation omitted).

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8 NEWMAN V. WENGLER

In a pre-AEDPA case, Woolery v. Arave, 8 F.3d 1325 (9th

Cir. 1993), we agreed that “enforcing the exclusionary rule

through writs of habeas corpus would not further the deterrent

and the educative purposes of the rule to an extent sufficient

to counter the negative effect such a policy would have on the

interests of judicial efficiency, comity and federalism.” Id. at

1325. We hold that there is not, in AEDPA, an implied

broadening of the right to habeas relief with respect to the

exclusionary rule.

Finally, we hold that Stone survives because we do not

engage in anticipatory overruling of Supreme Court

precedent. The Supreme Court has made clear that it retains

“the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.” Rodriguez

de Quijas v. Shearson/Am. Exp., Inc., 490 U.S. 477, 484

(1989). AEDPA “does not authorize this court to overrule

Supreme Court precedent ‘even where subsequent decisions

or factual developments may appear to have significantly

undermined the rationale for [an] earlier holding.’” United

States v. Mitchell, 502 F.3d 931, 982 (9th Cir. 2007) (quoting

Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 594 (2005)) (O’Connor, J.,

dissenting) (alteration in the original).

Since we hold that Stone is still good law, we now

analyze under Stone whether we can consider Newman’s

Fourth Amendment claim. We are barred by the Stone

doctrine from considering Newman’s claim if he had a “full

and fair opportunity” to litigate his Fourth Amendment

claims in the state courts. “The relevant inquiry is whether

petitioner had the opportunity to litigate his claim, not

whether he did in fact do so or even whether the claim was

correctly decided.” Ortiz-Sandoval v. Gomez, 81 F.3d 891,

899 (9th Cir. 1996).

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NEWMAN V. WENGLER 9

Newman had three hearings at the trial court level in his

attempt to suppress evidence seized from his SUV. He does

not argue that this was not enough for a full and fair

opportunity to litigate his Fourth Amendment claims. 

Instead, he contends that he was “ambushed” by the state

court of appeals when it decided his Fourth Amendment

claim on a different ground than the trial court. However, it

is well settled under Idaho law that “[w]here the lower court

reaches the correct result by an erroneous theory, [an

appellate court] will affirm the order on the correct theory.” 

State v. Russo, 336 P.3d 232, 240 (Idaho 2014) (quoting

Nampa & Meridian Irr. Dist. v. Mussell, 72 P.3d 868, 873

(Idaho 2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). 

Furthermore, Newman was aware that the State would argue

a new theory on appeal when he received its brief. Newman

addressed the State’s arguments in his reply brief, in his brief

when he petitioned for rehearing by the state court of appeals,

and in his petition before the Idaho Supreme Court. This was

a full and fair opportunity.

Newman also argues that his full and fair opportunity was

compromised because the state trial court made insufficient

factual findings for the state court of appeals to decide on a

different ground. He argues that his case should have been

remanded for additional fact finding. This is not our

standard. “All Stone v. Powell requires is the initial

opportunity for a fair hearing. Such an opportunity for a fair

hearing forecloses this court’s inquiry, upon habeas corpus

petition, into the trial court’s subsequent course of action,

including whether or not the trial court has made express

findings of fact.” Caldwell v. Cupp, 781 F.2d 714, 714 (9th

Cir. 1986) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). 

Newman does not argue that his initial hearings were not fair,

but that they were wrongly decided. “As in Stone itself, all

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10 NEWMAN V. WENGLER

we have is a claim of error—and that is not enough to support

collateral relief based on the exclusionary rule.” Hampton,

296 F.3d at 565.

The Stone v. Powell doctrine survives the passage of

AEDPA and therefore bars Newman’s claim because he had

a full and fair opportunity in state court to litigate his Fourth

Amendment claims.

AFFIRMED.

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