Source: https://habeascorpusblog.typepad.com/habeas_corpus_blog/around-the-us/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 10:15:42+00:00

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Habeas Corpus Blog: Around the U.S.
Starting with my home court, the Second Circuit, we have Ramos v. Racette. The petitioner in that case attempted to express his disapproval of the proceedings by taking the unusual step of both representing himself and absenting himself from trial. The trial judge appointed standby counsel, but then mistakenly introduced counsel to the jury as Ramos' "attorney" rather than as his "legal advisor" or some other term that did not convey the false impression that Ramos was represented by counsel.
Later in the trial, the prosecutor urged the court to correct its statement, and the court did so by instructung the jury that the man at counsel table was a "legal advisor." To be safe, counsel also spent the remainder of the trial in the gallery.
Ramos claimed that introduction of standby counsel as his attorney violated his clearly established Sixth Amendment rights to self-representation. He relied on Mckaskle v. Wiggins, a Supreme Court decision which had some helpful dicta, but which ultimately held that a defendant's right to represent himself is not violated where standby counsel's unsolicited involvement is "held within reasonable limits".
"The fleeting imposition of counsel upon a pro se defendant who has elected to abstain from participating at trial is a matter of first impression in this Court. . . .
Analysis of [Mckaskle] confirms that Ramos’s self-representation was not substantially disturbed by the court’s brief introduction of counsel."
At first glance this does not seem like a particularly compelling claim - you might wonder why the Court of Appeals granted a COA. I suspect the Second Circuit doesn't want defendants to think they can manufacture a postconviction claim simply by choosing a defense strategy of complete nonparticipation, and then attacking any attempt by the court to give them a fair trial as a violation of that constitutionally-protected strategy. It stands to reason that a court of law would want to shut that party down before sunset.
So the right to self-representation is, in a way, a right to an unfair trial. It certainly is where, as here, the defendant himself chooses not to show up. The Second Circuit seems to have recognized this, implicitly acknowledging Ramos' right to a "concerted refusal to participate" in his trial and noting that "[a]ny presentation of a defense at all, no matter how limited, inherently disrupts" that right.
But the Circuit wouldn't (could not) endorse that strategy by granting the writ here. And it seems pretty clear that the Supreme Court hasn''t clearly established Ramos' right to it under these facts. An iron-clad right to an unfair trial presents certain risks to justice as we define it. Not to mention some thorny issues: how could harmless error analysis apply to violations of such a right? What does it mean for an error to create a probability of unfair proceedings when that's exactly what the defendant wanted?
Moving across the Hudson, the Third Circuit upheld a 2254 habeas grant on August 9. This was a Bruton issue that it appears the trial court simply ignored. The trial court allowed the prosecutor to introduce a codefendant's redacted confession replacing Washington’s name with “the driver,” when it was clear to everyone that Washington was the alleged driver.
The Third Circuit agreed that this was a pretty straightforward Confrontation violation (and indeed, that the "trial judge knew at the time of introduction [that the redaction] would be transparent to the jurors"). Nevertheless, the decision still spends an awful lot of time sorting through nationwide precedent (making this this is a good decision to read if you have a Bruton issue).
Finally, we head down the east coast to Florida, where the Eleventh Circuit held in Spencer that § 2255 was an appropriate vehicle for raising a career offender issue* and that two intervening Supreme Court cases (Begay v. United States and Sykes v. United States) applied retroactively to overrule the sentencing court's conclusion that Spencer was a career offender.
* the Court makes sure we all understand the caveats: "We conclude that allowing a first, timely-filed motion under section 2255 where a new Supreme Court decision has been given retroactive effect, and where the prisoner has preserved the issue of career offender categorization at both original sentencing and appeal, will not create an unmanageable problem"
"And on the other side of the ledger, there is the annual cost to the taxpayers of keeping people in prison who should no longer be there. According to the Bureau of Prisons, that annual cost is $28,893.40 per prisoner. In Spencer’s case, according to the sentencing judge he was facing roughly half the sentence in the absence of career offender status. Thus, erroneously labeling him a career offender results in an annual taxpayer outlay of $28,893.40 for an extra 6 ¼ years. We do not know how many instances there are of defendants like him."
I fundamentally disagree that the biggest concern in unjustifiably keeping a man in jail for 6.5 years is the cost to taxpayers. But what do you want, we're talking about the Stand Your Ground capital of America. The law and order crowd and equal justice folks are on the same side on mandatory minimums - that's enough for me.
The Ninth Circuit Blog has created a great handbook for navigating the new habeas landscape as a result of the restrictive decisions from the Supreme Court's last term, namely Ricther, Pinholster and Moore. It's called "Recent Supreme Court And Ninth Circuit Habeas Decisions: Why We Need Full Factual Development And Preservation Of Issues In State Court Litigation" writted by Stephen Sady, Chief Deputy Federal Defender for the District of Oregon.
By limiting federal review to the state record for claims already adjudicated in state court, Pinholster places an enormous premium on the adequate development of that record. In the wake of the decision, petitioners denied the ability to develop their claims in state court will seek alternative solutions. Indeed, several state defendants already have begun to pursue some of the potential paths around Pinholster, suggesting what is to come. The resulting challenges will raise fundamental, unanswered questions about AEDPA, the Suspension Clause, and the role of due process in postconviction review. This Article explores likely paths toward filling the gaps that Pinholster, together with the Court’s recent decisions in Boumediene v. Bush, District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, and Skinner v. Switzer, has created in both the literature and the jurisprudence.
Here's a fascinating article about a habeas case up in Connecticut before DJ Charles Haight, who used to sit in SDNY. Petitioner, who was convicted of committing a double murder, has maintained his innocence throughout the case. But he's not the only one to say that he's innocent. Both a police detective and the FBI, after an 18-month investigation, concluded that he was innocent and had been framed. He has now been incarcerated for 21 years.
Not something new, but I did come across this comment from 2010 in the Yale Law Review about whether habeas corpus relief is available based on a reverse-Batson challenge (i.e. when the court improperly grants a prosecutor's Batson motion and overrules a defense peremptory challenge on the ground that it was racially-motivated). It addresses the question of whether habeas relief is now unavailable after the Supreme Court's decision in Rivera v. Illinois. It argues that it remains available (even though I think the common understanding is that it is not).
Appeal and Habeas has a post about a recent Ninth Circuit decision in which the court found equitable tolling of the statute of limitations where petitioner's attorney took $20,000 and never bothered to file the petition.
Habeas Corpus - Around the U.S.
Here's a law professor who seems to love habeas corpus as much as I do. She gives a nice list of reasons of why habeas corpus remains an interesting subject for law students.
More analysis of the Troy Davis case and/or the AEDPA can be found here, here, here, here, and here. I really enjoyed reading the first of those here's. It's more about the death penalty than either the AEDPA or habeas, but still relevant.
On a similar note, I liked this line from an Esquire piece about Obama and civil liberties. The line is in a discussion of which presidents did the most to infringe upon civil liberties: "Still clinging to third place is Bill Clinton, whose response to the Oklahoma City bombing was the Effective Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act, a big bag of constitutional grief passed in 1996 that, among is other charms, took the biggest whack at habeas corpus since Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ entirely during the Civil War."
A discussion of the habeas and Fourth Amendment cases in the Supreme Court's upcoming term can be found here. The New York Times has commented that the upcoming term is very criminal/habeas heavy.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania has granted a habeas petitioner's request for bail after the judge granted habeas relief last month. Petitioner had been convicted of a 1977 double murder. However, the judge concluded that prosecutorial misconduct had "'cast[ ] a pall of doubt over every single piece of evidence presented by the prosecution in support of its case.'"
There was a lot of coverage of the Seventh Circuit decision in MC Winston v. Boatwright. The issue was whether counsel was ineffective for using peremptory challenges to strike every male juror in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The court concluded that this was deficient performance, but that there was no prejudice since the per se reversal rule for Batson violations was not clearly established until after the state courts had reviewed the claim. It's an aggressive use of the Musladin rule (for explanation of that rule you can read this post), but the court makes a good case that it was appropriate.
The Union Leader in New Hampshire had this article about a habeas petition filed by Katherine Mendola, who was convicted of attempting to hire a hitman to murder the wife of a lawyer with whom she sought a romantic relationship.
The Houston Chronicle had an article about the habeas petition filed by Nebraska inmate Germai Molina, who had been convicted of beating his toddler daughter.
To the outside observer, it looks like Rabe got a raw deal. Maybe he's guilty, but he at least deserved a defense that included an alibi witness and a nod to the fact that the robber in the surveillance tape did not appear to have tattoos on his forearms as Rabe does.
No, these issues were not raised in Rabe's state appeal, but that seems to indicate that Rabe's counsel for the state appeal may have also been ineffective, elevating Rabe's ineffective counsel conundrum to meta status.
Sentencing Law and Policy had a post about a "[b]otched Ohio capital prosecution." The issue in the case was whether the State could be barred from re-prosecuting a successful habeas petitioner after the State failed to abide by the federal court's order granting habeas relief. It was a split decision with the majority concluding that the district court had the authority to bar re-prosecution.
Here is a post from a blog called "Legal As She Is Spoke" about a habeas denial from the Sixth Circuit in which petitioner had argued that his counsel was ineffective for falling asleep during the prosecution's cross-examination of petitioner. It's an interesting post that discusses other cases in which relief was denied based on a sleeping attorney.
An article from Metropolitan News Service (despite its appearance, the website seems legit) about the Ninth Circuit decision in Payton v. Cullen, in which the court denied habeas relief to a petitioner sentenced to death. The Ninth Circuit had previously granted habeas relief, but that decision was (surprise, surprise) reversed by the Supreme Court back in 2005.
From that same news source, another article about a habeas denial from the Ninth Circuit in Rossum v. Patrick. Here's the lead sentence in the article: "A woman whose husband was found dead in their bedroom, in a scene reminiscent of the film 'American Beauty,' yesterday lost her bid to overturn her murder conviction." In my mind, time has not been kind to that movie.
A post about an Eleventh Circuit decision denying habeas relief to a petitioner who argued that his sentence to life without parole as a juvenile offender was unconstitutional. I found this interesting: "As a Florida criminal appeals attorney, I was saddened to read, on page 45, that Florida stands out as the State that has the highest number of people sentenced to life without parole for non-homicide crimes committed while the people were juveniles. Out of the 123 inmates imprisoned nationwide, 77 are imprisoned in Florida."
Sticking with Florida, I had previously mentioned in this prior post about a huge habeas grant in which a federal judge in Florida concluded that a Florida drug law violated due process. Only problem, the Florida state courts are undeterred and will continue to apply the statute. The link is to a state court decision denying motions to dismiss in numerous cases on the basis of the federal court's ruling.
Don't really know what to make of this video, in which Captain Constitution takes on Habeas Corpsus.
Here's a blog post (by someone with a very similar last name to mine) discussing the potential impact of the upcoming Supreme Court case of Martinez v. Ryan.
Sticking with that case for a second, the ABA has filed an amicus brief in support of the habeas petitioner.
A blog post about the upcoming Supreme Court case of Gonzalez v. Thaler.
Justice delayed, justice denied: The subject matter of that linked article will make any fair person's blood boil. A DJ in California (who was appointed by GWB) has been sitting for over five years on at least three different R&R's that have recommended habeas grants. It can't be written off as the DJ being slow on habeas cases generally, as he appears to act much more swiftly on R&R's that recommend that habeas be denied (of course, those can be pretty easy to review, so it may not be fair to compare). Sadly, one of the petitioners died while the DJ sat on the R&R recommending habeas relief.
And to make your blood boil further, there is a quote at the end of the article from Nancy King, who, as we all know, is on the offensive to try and end habeas. In the article, she criticizes petitioners for abusing habeas. So, let me get this straight: a federal judge has been delaying decisions for years in cases where there are real concerns that there have been constitutional violations, and it is the petitioners who are abusing the system. Good to know.
Interesting article about a movie called "Crime After Crime." It focuses on the reinvestigation of multiple cases of battered women serving lengthy sentences. The reinvestigations occurred after California passed a law in 2002 that allowed abused individuals to introduce evidence of the abuse into evidence in a criminal trial. An organization called the Habeas Project took the lead in the reinvestigations and the legal advocacy.
U.S. District Judge Mary Scriven of Orlando issued a ruling Wednesday that struck down the state's Drug Abuse Prevention and Control law, saying it violates due process because it doesn't require that prosecutors prove that a person knew he or she possessed illegal drugs.
The article claims that the decision could have an impact on thousands of cases. The name of the case is Shelton v. Secretary, Department of Corrections.
One house of the California's State legislature has passed a law that would prohibit convictions based solely on a jailhouse informant's testimony. The article talks about one person who was convicted based exclusively on jailhouse informants. He later obtained habeas relief from the Ninth Circuit.
An article about a habeas petition filed down in Mississippi. Petitioner was a doctor who was convicted of killing his wife. He maintains that his wife committed suicide.
SCOTUSblog has recently featured a couple of habeas petitions (here and here) as their petitions of the day.
An article about the habeas petition filed by Tom Noe, the rare-coin dealer who stole millions from the state of Ohio. I believe that scandal nearly took down the entire Republican Party in Ohio (or something like that).
It is beyond regrettable that a possibly innocent man will not receive a new trial in the face of the preposterously unreliable testimony of the victim and sole eyewitness to the crime for which he was convicted. But our hands are tied by the AEDPA, preventing our review of Kinsel's attack on his Louisiana postconviction proceedings, so we dutifully dismiss his claim.
On the other hand, the Fifth Circuit granted habeas relief to a petitioner with the amazing name of Princess LaCaze. It's an interesting case.
The Third Circuit recently ruled that Padilla v. Kentucky applies retroactively in habeas cases (for some reason, I almost wrote "radioactively" there; not sure why, but it also seems to fit).
A post over at CrimProf Blog about an article from Matthew Seligman about summary adjudications after Richter.

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