Source: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/245/7/515058/
Timestamp: 2019-08-25 13:18:19
Document Index: 26932523

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254', '§ 2254']

Bernardo Hurtado, Petitioner, Appellee, v. John Tucker, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Respondent, Appellant, 245 F.3d 7 (1st Cir. 2001) :: Justia
Justia › US Law › Case Law › Federal Courts › Courts of Appeals › First Circuit › 2001 › Bernardo Hurtado, Petitioner, Appellee, v. John Tucker, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Mass...
Bernardo Hurtado, Petitioner, Appellee, v. John Tucker, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Respondent, Appellant, 245 F.3d 7 (1st Cir. 2001)
U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit - 245 F.3d 7 (1st Cir. 2001)
A writ of habeas corpus was granted by the district court to Bernardo Hurtado, who had been convicted of various state drug crimes. The district court determined that the state appellate courts erred in concluding that the evidence at trial was sufficient to support Hurtado's conviction, and that, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act ("AEDPA"),1 the error was such as to qualify as either "contrary to, or [ ] an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States." 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) (1) (West Supp. 2000). See Hurtado v. Tucker, 90 F. Supp. 2d 118 (D. Mass. 2000) ("Hurtado"). We reverse and clarify the limits on federal habeas review.
Hurtado sought federal habeas corpus relief in the district court. In a recommendation and report issued on May 22, 1998, the magistrate judge recommended that relief be granted based on Hurtado's insufficiency of the evidence claim. SeeaHurtado, 90 F. Supp. 2d at 120-35.10 The magistrate judge acknowledged that, in the wake of the AEDPA, his task was to determine whether the Massachusetts Appeals Court's decision was "contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States." 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) (1) (West Supp. 2000). Specifically, the magistrate judge focused on whether the Appeals Court's decision was an unreasonable application of Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307 (1979), the governing Supreme Court precedent for sufficiency of the evidence claims. At the time the magistrate judge issued his report and recommendation, there was no First Circuit decision on the language contained in § 2254(d) (1).11 Although the Appeals Court did not cite to the constitutional rule on sufficiency of the evidence set forth in Jackson, it did articulate the substance of that rule, as the magistrate judge recognized. The fault the magistrate judge found in the decision of the Appeals Court, and the sole basis of the recommendation to grant habeas relief, lay in the Appeals Court's application of the Jackson rule to a single element of the offense. Specifically, while the magistrate concluded that there was sufficient evidence to infer Hurtado's knowledge of and ability to control the drugs in the third-floor apartment, he found the evidence insufficient to establish Hurtado's intent to exercise dominion and control over those drugs.
The district court adopted the magistrate judge's report and recommendation and concluded that much of the evidence "recited and relied upon by the state court did not exist; it was not in the record." Id. at 119. The district court also reviewed the report and recommendation in light of this court's interpretation of § 2254(d) (1) in O'Brien v. DuBois, 145 F.3d 16 (1st Cir. 1998), issued shortly after the magistrate judge filed the report.
The district court found that the magistrate judge incorrectly decided the case under § 2254(d) (1)'s "unreasonable application of" prong. On its reading of O'Brien, the district court found the claim should have instead been decided under the statute's "contrary to" prong. See Hurtado, 90 F. Supp. 2d at 120. The district court ultimately concluded, however, that for the reasons stated in the report and recommendation, the Appeals Court's decision was "contrary to" the clearly established Supreme Court law of Jackson v. Virginia, and that habeas relief should therefore be granted. Id.
The outcome of this case is dictated by the interpretation of § 2254(d) (1) contained in Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362 (2000), decided after our O'Brien decision. Neither the district court nor the magistrate judge had the benefit of the Supreme Court's views. The case is also our first occasion to apply Williams to a habeas petition challenging the sufficiency of the evidence under the Jackson standard.13
28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) (1) (West Supp. 2000) (emphasis added).
In Williams, the Supreme Court gave independent meanings to the "contrary to" and "unreasonable application of" clauses of § 2254(d) (1). See 529 U.S. at 405. The Court said that a state court decision would be "contrary to" the Court's clearly established precedent if it "applie[d] a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth in [the Court's] cases." Id. "A state-court decision will also be contrary to th[e] Court's clearly established precedent if the state court confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of th[e] Court and nevertheless arrives at a result different from our precedent." Id.aat 406.
Here, the Appeals Court applied the correct standard by articulating the standard set forth in Jackson. Indeed, this case presents a good example of one to which § 2254(d) (1)'s "contrary to" prong does not apply: "a run-of-the-mill state-court decision applying the correct legal rule from [the Supreme Court's] cases to the facts of a prisoner's case." Williams, 529 U.S. at 406. Because this case is therefore not properly analyzed under the "contrary to" standard, we turn to "the second step of the requisite analysis: whether the state court decision constitutes an unreasonable application of clearly established Supreme Court case law." Williams v. Matesanz, 230 F.3d at 426.
The Supreme Court in Williams held that a state court decision would involve an "unreasonable application of" clearly established Supreme Court precedent if it "identifies the correct governing legal principle from [the] Court's decisions but unreasonably applies that principle to the facts of the prisoner's case." 529 U.S. at 413.14 The Court also underscored that "an unreasonable application of federal law is different from an incorrect application of federal law." Id. at 410 (emphasis in original). Indeed, because Congress used the word "unreasonable" in § 2254(d) (1), and not words like "erroneous" or "incorrect," a federal habeas court "may not issue the writ simply because that court concludes in its independent judgment that the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established federal law erroneously or incorrectly. Rather, that application must also be unreasonable." Id. at 411.
This court has since noted that the "unreasonable application of" prong of § 2254(d) (1) "reduces to a question of whether the state court's derivation of a case-specific rule from the [Supreme] Court's generally relevant jurisprudence appears objectively reasonable." Williams v. Matesanz, 230 F.3d at 425 (quoting O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 25).
Williams and our own precedent thus suggest the following guidelines as to some, but not all, of the principles in an insufficiency-of-the-evidence case to be used in making the evaluation of "objective unreasonableness" under § 2254(d) (1):
Applying these standards, we cannot say that the state court's affirmation of the verdict was objectively unreasonable, notwithstanding the Appeals Court's purported overstatements of fact.18 The state court directly addressed the point at issue -- sufficiency of the evidence -- after its own survey of the entire record. It did not ignore material evidence or a key argument made by defendant. Its articulated reasons went to the conclusions it reached. Even if the state court were imprecise in its description of two primary facts, there is some room for mistakes under § 2254(d) (1). SeeaWilliams, 529 U.S. at 410. The real question is whether the state court decision is "objectively unreasonable," id. at 409, in its assessment that the weight of the evidence is sufficient under Jackson to support conviction.
The Commonwealth urges that the "objective unreasonableness" standard of review requires that, in a Jackson case, we adopt a flat rule of deference to any state rule permitting inferences to be made, and refers us to a long line of Massachusetts cases sustaining drug convictions based on inferences from various types of evidence. We think that is the wrong approach to a Jackson challenge under § 2254(d) (1). The question of "objective unreasonableness" is one of federal law. That other cases with some factual similarities resulted in inferences of guilt is surely pertinent to the "objective unreasonableness" test, but it does not eliminate the need for case by case scrutiny. We suspect that there are few if any differences between what inferences state law would regard as reasonable and what inferences federal law would regard as reasonable. Nonetheless, historically some inferences or presumptions permitted by state law have been invalidated as contrary to the Constitution. See, e.g., Thompson v. Louisville, 362 U.S. 199, 205-06 (1960) (cannot infer "disorderly conduct" merely from fact that defendant was dancing in a cafe and became argumentative in asking why he was being arrested); cf. Zant v. Stephens, 462 U.S. 862, 885 (1983) (statutory aggravating circumstance required to impose death penalty would be invalid if "it authorizes a jury to draw adverse inferences from conduct that is constitutionally protected").