Source: https://harvardcrcl.org/smoking-guns-the-supreme-courts-willingness-to-lower-procedural-barriers-to-merits-review-in-cases-involving-egregious-racial-bias-in-the-crimnal-justice-system/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 03:55:42+00:00

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Guest post by Professor Carrie Leonetti.* Professor Leonetti is a professor of criminal and constitutional law at the University of Oregon School of Law and the Director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Advocacy Project. She was the Executive Technical Editor of CR-CL in 1999-2000. This post is an abbreviated version of Professor Leonetti’s full-length article of the same name, forthcoming in 101 Marquette L. Rev. (Fall 2017).
The last several decades have seen a lockstep march by Congress and the Supreme Court to foreclose federal-court review of even meritorious federal constitutional challenges to state criminal-justice procedures. The current iteration of the federal habeas-corpus statute, the vehicle by which most federal constitutional challenges to state criminal adjudication arrive in (or are kept from) federal court precludes federal-court review of the constitutionality of the conduct of state trials for a host of reasons, including: a strict statute of limitations, bars to review arising from the failure to exhaust state remedies and the default of independent state procedural rules, strict limits on when federal habeas courts may hold evidentiary hearings, and a highly deferential standard of review for state court rulings. The result is that a review on the merits of an inmate’s claim that a state court violated the federal constitution in adjudicating a criminal case is the unicorn of federal jurisdiction: lots of people dream of seeing one, but almost no one ever does.
Last term, the Supreme Court appeared to open the door a crack to addressing claims of racial bias in the criminal-justice system in the context of a claim of racially motivated jury selection that was arguably barred by procedural default. This term, the Supreme Court reversed on the merits two more cases involving challenges to apparent racial bias in the criminal-justice system that lower courts had found, repeatedly, to be procedurally barred. Are these isolated anomalies? Or is the Court signaling a willingness to tackle head on issues of racial bias in the criminal-justice system, even when doing so requires it to elide serious concerns about the procedural posture of the state criminal cases that it is being asked to review? And, if so, will that willingness extend to the more subtle, hidden, and systemic implicit biases that plague the system?
The State of Georgia charged Timothy Foster with capital murder, charges for which he was ultimately convicted and given a death sentence. When the time came for the parties to exercise their “peremptory challenges” – the discretionary strikes of eligible jurors at the discretion of the parties – there remained a pool of forty-one qualified jurors. Four of the forty-one remaining jurors were black. The State had ten juror strikes available to it. It used four to strike the four black jurors in the pool, until an all-white jury remained.
When Foster objected, the State offered a host of facially race-neutral explanations for striking each of the jurors. Collectively, however, the State’s explanations suffered from a host of credibility defects. Many of the explanations were subjective or vague: the failure to make eye contact, being “curt,” seeming nervous, responding to voir dire questions too slowly, equivocating in answering questions about views on the death penalty. Other explanations, while facially neutral, seemed only to apply to black prospective jurors. Other explanations were flatly inconsistent with one another.
After he was convicted by the all-white jury, Foster discovered documents relating to the prosecutors’ conduct of jury selection, including the juror list, juror questionnaires, and prosecutors’ personal notes from jury selection. All of the documents were explicitly coded for race: the juror list had handwritten “B”s next to each black prospective juror’s name; the race of prospective black jurors was circled on each of their questionnaires; and the handwritten notes included comments like “No black churches!” next to Black jurors’ names.
It was possible that Foster was simply an anomaly or was motivated by federal-jurisdiction principles rather than a desire to talk about race and the criminal-justice system, but the Court unearthed two more analogous cases involving racial animus this term out from underneath what seemed to be high procedural hurdles and, in doing so, echoed themes from Foster. The State of Texas convicted Duane Buck of the capital murder of his ex-girlfriend and her male friend. During the penalty phase of the case, the State sought to execute Buck primarily on the ground that he posed to high a risk of future dangerousness to be spared the death penalty. During Buck’s court-appointed attorney’s direct examination of his psychiatric expert, Dr. Walter Quijano, the attorney elicited answers from Quijano about the individual components of the actuarial model that he used to predict future risk, including race. In response, Quijano opined: “It’s a sad commentary that minorities, Hispanics and black people, are over represented in the Criminal Justice System.” The prosecutor followed up on the defense attorney’s line of inquiry on cross-examination, asking Quijano to make explicit the implicit import of his direct examination testimony – namely, that Buck was more likely to pose a danger, because he was Black, than a similarly situated white man.
The case history in Buck is multilayered and complicated, but what follows is as brief a summary as possible of its relevant components. In 1997, Buck asked the Texas state courts to overturn his death sentence, but his new attorney failed to challenge the admission of the race-based dangerousness testimony at his sentencing proceeding at that time.
In 2000, in an unrelated case, the Texas Attorney General admitted to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that permitting experts to testify in death-penalty cases that race increased certain defendants’ likelihood of future dangerousness was unconstitutional. In doing so, the State identified several other cases in which it had elicited similar testimony, including Buck, and notified the respective defense attorneys in those cases.
In 2002, Buck returned to the Texas state courts, asking them again to overturn his death sentence, this time on the ground that his attorney had given him constitutionally inadequate representation by eliciting the race-based testimony. At the request of the State (and despite its earlier pledge not to do so), the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed Buck’s claim because he had missed his chance to raise the attorney-competency claim in 1997.
In 2004, sought relief in federal court on the ground that his sentencing counsel’s ineffective assistance violated the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The federal courts denied Buck relief on the ground that he could not raise the attorney-competency claim in federal court because he had failed to raise it in a timely fashion in the Texas state courts.
In 2013, Buck returned to state court. While his litigation there was ongoing, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Trevino v. Thaler, which found Texas’s provision of postconviction attorneys to Texas inmates was so inadequate that its courts could not refuse to hear claims that were filed outside of the usual procedural routes because earlier attorneys had missed them. Despite Trevino, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in a narrowly decided 4-3 decision, still refused to hear Buck’s jury-discrimination claim.
In 2014, Buck returned to federal court again, and was again turned away, this time rejecting his claim that his case was so extraordinary that the federal courts should intervene. Buck asked the Supreme Court to review the lower federal courts’ refusal to entertain his jury-discrimination claim.
[A]ccording to Dr. Quijano, that immutable characteristic carried with it an “[i]ncreased probability” of future violence. Here was hard statistical evidence—from an expert—to guide an otherwise speculative inquiry.
And it was potent evidence. Dr. Quijano’s testimony appealed to a powerful racial stereotype—that of black men as “violence prone.” In combination with the substance of the jury’s inquiry, this created something of a perfect storm. Dr. Quijano’s opinion coincided precisely with a particularly noxious strain of racial prejudice, which itself coincided precisely with the central question at sentencing. The effect of this unusual confluence of factors was to provide support for making a decision on life or death on the basis of race.
[W]hen a jury hears expert testimony that expressly makes a defendant’s race directly pertinent on the question of life or death, the impact of that evidence cannot be measured simply by how much air time it received at trial or how many pages it occupies in the record. Some toxins can be deadly in small doses.
Unfortunately for Pena, however, Colorado, like most jurisdictions, has a jury verdict non-impeachment rule, which prohibits its courts from hearing a challenge to a jury’s verdict based on evidence about anything that happened during jury deliberations. The Colorado courts refused to consider the juror’s racism and rejected Pena’s claim that their refusal was unconstitutional under the circumstances because it denied him the right to a fair and impartial jury.
The second case was Warger v. Shauers, which upheld the constitutionality of the federal jury non-impeachment rule to bar evidence that a juror had lied during voir dire, a scenario that a majority of federal courts of appeal had previously held to constitute strong evidence of jury bias (theorizing that the only reason that a juror would like about a disqualifying bias during voir dire was to get on a jury knowing that s/he could not decide the case impartially).
We do know that the prosecutor asked the expert witness is it correct that the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons. And he says, yes. . . . [T]he issue here is, is there some good reason why this person shouldn’t have been able to reopen his case? I mean, that’s the question. What’s the reason?
[[W]ouldn’t it seem pretty straightforward to say, okay, maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong, but at least he’s made a substantial showing. Let’s give him a Certificate of Appealability, and then we’ll go through the normal procedures on the merits?
Having settled on a desired outcome, the Court bulldoze[d] procedural obstacles and misapplie[d] settled law to justify it. . . . [A]fter chastising the Court of Appeals for making an end run around the COA standard in order to reach the merits of petitioner’s Rule 60 (b) claim, the Court d[id] precisely that. Astonishingly, the Court also decide[d] the merits of petitioner’s Sixth Amendment claim — an issue that was not even addressed by the Fifth Circuit. . . . This unapologetic course reversal — made without so much as a hint of the irony — is striking. . . . Permitting a defendant to file a Rule 60(b) motion years after the fact functionally eviscerates the statute of limitations [for federal habeas review of state convictions].
The deeper question that remains, therefore, is whether this willingness to bend the procedural rules and open the Court to claims of racial bias, if that is what the Court is exhibiting, will extend to the more nefarious, systemic, and common implicit biases that pervade the system. What about credibility determinations that are infused with stereotype-congruent responses to witnesses or parties of color – e.g., a jury’s determination of whether a defendant acted in self-defense, a judge’s determination of the legally permissible amount of force in apprehending a putatively “dangerous” suspect of color, or a lawyer’s use of subconscious stereotypes during the exercise of peremptory challenges? How should courts deal with well-documented implicit biases in the criminal-justice system like racially biased “misremembering” and the “shooter bias”?
Attempting to limit the damage worked by its decision, the Court says that only “clear” expressions of bias must be admitted, but judging whether a statement is sufficiently “clear” will often not be easy. Suppose that the allegedly biased juror in this case never made reference to Peña-Rodriguez’s race or national origin but said that he had a lot of experience with “this macho type” and knew that men of this kind felt that they could get their way with women. Suppose that other jurors testified that they were certain that “this macho type” was meant to refer to Mexican or Hispanic men.
Of course, this Author hopes that the Court will go down that slippery slope, but the extent of the Court’s willingness to address these bigger – and more prevalent – issues of implicit, dog-whistle biases remains to be seen.
* Associate Professor & Dean’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow, University of Oregon School of Law. The author wishes to thank Erik Girvan, Margie Paris, Leslie Harris, Ofer Raban, Stuart Chinn, Mike Quillin, Rebekah Hanley, Megan Flynn, Mindy Witkoff, and Jen Reynolds for their assistance. Their help was brilliant. Any mistakes are mine.
 See, e.g., 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (d) (1996); Cullen v. Pinholster, 563 U.S. 170 (2011); Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86 (2011); Schriro v. Landrigan, 550 U.S. 465 (2007); Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003); Woodford v. Visciotti, 537 U.S. 19 (2002); Woodford v. Garceau, 538 U.S. 202 (2003).
 See 28 U.S.C. § 2244 (d) (1996).
 See § 2254 (b) (1).
 See § 2254 (e) (2).
 See See Foster v. Chatman, 136 S. Ct. 1737, 1742 (2016).
 See id. at 1742, 1750.
 See id. at 1743, 1750; see also Ga. Code Ann. § 15–12–165 (1985).
 See Foster, 136 S. Ct. at 1743-44.
 See id.; see, e.g., Walker v. Martin, 562 U.S. 307 (2011) (holding that California’s time limitation on applications for habeas corpus relief was an independent and adequate state-law ground sufficient to bar federal habeas review); Beard v. Kindler 558 U.S. 53 (2009) (holding that Pennsylvania’s fugitive forfeiture rule could provide an adequate basis in state law to bar federal habeas review of Kindler’s conviction); Sochor v. Florida, 504 U.S. 527, 534 (1992) (holding that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to address Sochor’s claim that his sentencing court instruction to his capital sentencing jury about “heinousness” as an aggravating factor violated the federal constitution because the Florida Supreme Court’s decision affirming his death sentence rested on the adequate and independent state-law ground that he had not preserved the claim for appellate review); Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722 (1991) (holding that the dismissal of Coleman’s state-court appeal because the notice of appeal was untimely was based on an independent state-law ground that precluded federal-court review of his conviction on habeas corpus).
 See Foster, 136 S. Ct. 1746-47.
 See Buck v. Stephens, 623 Fed. Appx. 668, 669 (5th Cir. 2015).
 133 S. Ct. 1911 (2013).
 See Buck, 623 Fed. Appx. at 671.
 Buck, 623 Fed. Appx. at 671, 673-74.
 Transcript of Oral Argument, Buck v. Davis, U.S.S.C. No. 15-8049, Oct. 5, 2016, at 30, available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2016/15-8049_4f15.pdf (last visited October 21, 2016).
 See Buck v. Davis, U.S.S.C. No. 15-8049, Feb. 22, 2017, slip op. at 2.
 See id. at 17 (citation omitted).
 Id. at 19-20 (internal citations omitted).
 Id. at 21-23 (internal citations omitted).
 See Pena-Rodriguez v. People, 350 P.3d 287, 288 (Colo. 2015).
 See id. at 288 n.3.
 See Colo. R. Evid. 606 (b).
 Pena, 350 P.3d at 289-93.
 135 S. Ct. 521 (2014).
 See Transcript of Oral Argument, Pena-Rodriguez, U.S.S.C. No. 15-606, Oct. 11, 2016 (available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcript.aspx) (last visited October 21, 2016).
 Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, U.S.S.C. No. 15–606 (March 6, 2017), slip op. at 17.
 Id. at 15 (quotation omitted).
 Transcript of Oral Argument, Buck, at 31, 35-36.
 Buck, No. 15-8049 (Thomas, J., dissenting), slip op. at 1-9 (quotations & citations omitted).
 Id. at 22 (Alito, J., dissenting).
 Transcript of Oral Argument, Buck, at 10.
 Transcript of Oral Argument, Pena, at 26.
 Buck, No. 15-8049 (Thomas, J., dissenting), slip op. at 10.
 Transcript of Oral Argument, Pena, at 44.
 Peña, slip op. at 17-18.
 Peña, slip op. at 19 (Alito, J., dissenting).

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