Opinion ID: 856487
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Retroactivity in state proceedings

Text: Whether and how the federal rules of retroactivity should be applied in state proceedings are separate questions. The Supreme Court has clarified that Teague was a rule that was “tailored to the unique context of federal habeas and therefore had no bearing on whether States could provide broader relief in their own postconviction proceedings than required by that opinion.” Danforth, 552 U.S. at 277. The language of Griffith, meanwhile, leaves no question as to its applicability in state courts: new federal rules of criminal procedure must be applied retroactively “to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final.” Griffith, 479 U.S. at 326 (emphasis added). The “[f]ailure to apply a newly declared constitutional rule to criminal cases pending on direct review violates basic norms of constitutional adjudication.” Id. at 322. In Danforth, the Court acknowledged that it is appropriate for states to develop their own “state law to govern retroactivity in state postconviction proceedings.” 552 U.S. at 289. But the opinion also reiterated the principle that a state’s authority to make and enforce its own laws exists “as long as they do not infringe on federal No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 20 constitutional guarantees.” Id. at 280. Because the Griffith retroactivity rule draws its authority from the Constitution, it provides a retroactivity floor that governs the law applicable on direct review. As a result, a state postconviction court determining what law should have been applied on direct review may afford greater retroactivity than Griffith requires (or that Teague allows), but no less. In the criminal context, as in the civil context, federal law “sets certain minimum requirements that States must meet but may exceed in providing appropriate relief.” Danforth, 552 U.S. at 288 (quoting Am. Trucking Ass’ns, Inc. v. Smith, 496 U.S. 167, 178–79 (1990)). In the wake of Danforth and Greene, we are left to consider what standard of review to give to state-court retroactivity determinations. Prior to those two cases, we held that federal habeas courts should review state Teague inquiries under the deferential §2254(d) standards accorded to determinations on the merits. See Henley v. Bell, 487 F.3d 379, 385 (6th Cir. 2007) (noting AEDPA deference would apply to a state court’s determination of retroactivity). Both parties in this case assume that §2254(d) should continue to apply to those determinations, and we agree—at least to the extent that the state-court determination appears to depend on an interpretation of Griffith or Teague, as opposed to an independent and more forgiving state-law retroactivity standard. c. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals decision We turn now to the last reasoned state-court decision in Lovins’s case—the September 14, 2007 postconviction decision of the Court of Criminal Appeals. As the basis for the conclusion that Blakely did not apply retroactively in Lovins’s case, the decision cited a prior unpublished opinion of that court, Burch, 2005 WL 1584379, at , for the core retroactivity rule—and specifically cited to Burch’s reference to another unpublished case, Herron, 2004 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 1181. To understand the reasoning of the court’s decision in Lovins’s case, therefore, we look to the retroactivity reasoning in Herron. In Herron, which pre-dated any consideration of Blakely by the Tennessee Supreme Court, the petitioner had filed a motion to re-open a request for state No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 21 postconviction relief after Blakely was published. This motion came almost twenty years after the petitioner’s conviction had become final. While the Herron court acknowledged that Tennessee has created a separate retroactivity determination for state constitutional rules, Herron, 2004 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 1181, at  n.6, the court identified Griffith and Teague as governing the retroactivity analysis with regard to the federal constitutional rule announced in Blakely, id. at –13. Because Herron’s case was no longer pending on direct review at the time Blakely was announced, Griffith did not mandate the retroactive application of Blakely. Thus, after determining that the rule in Blakely did not fit into either of the two narrow Teague exceptions, the Herron court concluded that Blakely was not retroactively applicable to the petitioner’s case on collateral review. We find no fault with the analysis in Herron, but we do find fault with how the Court of Criminal Appeals applied that analysis in Lovins’s case. The factual distinction between the two cases causes the Griffith/Teague analysis articulated in Herron to produce a different result for Lovins. When Blakely was decided, Lovins’s case was not yet final, but Herron’s conviction had been final for decades. Unlike Herron’s claim, Lovins’s Blakely claim is therefore available under Griffith and not barred by Teague. By holding otherwise, the Court of Criminal Appeals misconstrued the federal Teague standard and infringed the federal constitutional Griffith guarantee. In denying federal habeas relief to Lovins, the district court made a similar mistake. The district court cited our decision in Humphress v. United States, 398 F.3d 855, 860 (6th Cir. 2005), for the proposition that ‘Blakely is not retroactively applicable to cases on collateral review.’ In Humphress, however, we followed the three-step Teague analysis elaborated above. 398 F.3d at 860. Humphress’s conviction had become final in January 2000, several months prior to Apprendi, over four years prior to Blakely, and five years prior to the Booker decision extending Blakely to the federal sentencing guidelines. To determine whether the rule in Blakely/Booker was “new,” the Humphress panel then surveyed the legal landscape as of January 2000 to see if the rule was “dictated by precedent” at that time and concluded correctly that it was not. Id. at No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 22 860–61. Of course, the outcome of this second prong of the Teague analysis is entirely different where—as in Lovins’s case—a Supreme Court decision has resolved the precise legal question at issue prior to the date at which the defendant’s direct review became final. In such a case, barring some relevant factual distinction, there is no question that the rule is “dictated by precedent.” In applying the deferential § 2254(d) standard of review here, we consider the rulings of the United States Supreme Court in place at the time of “the last state-court adjudication on the merits.” Greene, 132 S. Ct. at 44. We therefore consider Supreme Court jurisprudence as it existed on September 14, 2007, the date the Court of Criminal Appeals decided Lovins’s case. As of that date, Blakely had been decided, Cunningham had been decided, and the United States Supreme Court had vacated the Gomez I decision in which the Tennessee Supreme Court had held that its sentencing regime satisfied Blakely. Thus, when the Court of Criminal Appeals rendered the last reasoned state-court decision in 2007, there is no question (and the State does not contest) that Blakely was clearly established federal law. While the AEDPA standard of review is a high bar, the application of the Griffith/Teague retroactivity analysis here does not indicate that courts could reasonably come to different conclusions. Like Blakely, Griffith was clearly established federal law at the time of the decision by the Court of Criminal Appeals. See Williams, 529 U.S. at 412 (explaining that “‘clearly established Federal law’ in § 2254(d)(1) ‘refers to the holdings . . . of [the Supreme Court’s] decisions as of the time of the relevant state-court decision”). And considering whether Griffith required retroactive application of Blakely does not involve a multi-factor test; it involves only the calendar, which we use to determine whether Lovins’s case became final before or after the Supreme Court’s decision in Blakely. Neither the state courts, nor the State, nor the district court below suggest that Lovins’s conviction became final—in the language of Griffith and Teague—before the Blakely decision. It was therefore both contrary to and an unreasonable application of Griffith for the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals to deny Lovins relief on the basis of non-retroactivity. No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 23 d. Remedies Retroactivity concerns aside, the State does not contest that the judicial factfinding in Lovins’s sentencing was unconstitutional under Blakely. The Court of Criminal Appeals acknowledged as much in its decision denying postconviction relief to Lovins, and the Tennessee Supreme Court confirmed this conclusion in Gomez II, 239 S.W.3d at 740. The Tennessee sentencing statute wrongly allowed “a presumptive sentence”—in Lovins’s case, twenty years—“to be enhanced based on judicially determined fact.” Id. Because the statute “permitted enhancement based on judicially determined facts other than the fact of a prior conviction, it violated the Sixth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Apprendi, Blakely, and Cunningham.” Id. Of course, the determination that the Court of Criminal Appeals unreasonably applied Griffith and Teague—and therefore that Blakely applies retroactively in this case—does not alone mandate relief for Lovins. As the Supreme Court recently clarified, “retroactivity jurisprudence is concerned with whether, as a categorical matter, a new rule is available on direct review as a potential ground for relief.” Davis v. United States, 131 S. Ct. 2419, 2430 (2011). “Retroactive application under Griffith lifts what would otherwise be a categorical bar to obtaining redress for a government’s violation of a newly announced constitutional rule.” Id. (citing Danforth, 552 U.S. at 271). “Retroactive application does not, however, determine what ‘appropriate remedy’ (if any) the defendant should obtain.” Id. While the question of whether a constitutional violation occurred in a § 2254 case is a “pure question of federal law,” the “availability or nonavailability of remedies” is a “mixed question of state and federal law.” Danforth, 552 U.S. at 291 (quoting Am. Trucking, 496 U.S. at 205 (Stevens, J. dissenting)). Thus, the retroactive application of a new rule is generally “subject . . . to established principles of waiver, harmless error, and the like.” Shea v. Louisiana, 470 U.S. 51, 58 n.4 (1985) (applying pre-Griffith retroactivity doctrine); see also United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 268 (2005) (noting Blakely would be applicable to all federal sentencing guidelines cases pending No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 24 on direct review, but “expect[ing] reviewing courts to apply ordinary prudential doctrines, determining, for example, whether the issue was raised below and whether it fails the ‘plain-error’ test”). Similarly, the determination that a new rule of constitutional law is retroactively available does not limit a state court from invoking procedural default based on state procedural rules. It follows that the outcome in Lovins’s case would be very different if the Court of Criminal Appeals had denied relief to Lovins because he had failed to raise an Apprendi claim on direct appeal and could not meet a state-law “cause and prejudice” procedural default standard. As discussed above, though, our procedural default doctrine leaves the determination of state procedural issues to the state courts to decide. And the fact that a state court “could have” applied a state procedural rule to bar review of the merits of a claim is only relevant where a petitioner never properly exhausted his claims in state court—which is not the case here. See supra Part III.A.1. Harmless error, however, here is a federal-law question. In determining the proper remedy for a Blakely error, we ordinarily consider whether the error was harmless. See Villagarcia v. Warden, Noble Corr. Inst., 599 F.3d 529, 536 (6th Cir. 2010). In Villagarcia, we adopted the “more ‘state-friendly standard’” of Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619, 631 (1993), for determining harmless error in cases “involving collateral review of state-court decisions.” Villagarcia, 599 F.3d at 536–37 (citing Hereford v. Warren, 536 F.3d 523, 532–33 (6th Cir. 2008)). Under that standard, “an error is considered not harmless when ‘the matter is so evenly balanced that the habeas court has grave doubt as to the harmlessness of the error.’” Id. at 537 (quoting Hereford, 536 F.3d at 533). Like procedural default, the harmless error defense can be waived. See United States v. Johnson, 467 F.3d 559, 564 (6th Cir. 2006) (finding the government waived the harmless error defense because it provided only a “perfunctory discussion” in its briefing, without any relevant case law). Here, the State did not argue harmless error before the district court and did not argue it in briefing this appeal. While the State did contend at oral argument that the error was harmless, we “need not reward No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 25 quick-thinking counsel by entertaining grounds brought to [the court’s] attention for the first time at oral argument.” Vaughn v. Lawrenceburg Power Sys., 269 F.3d 703, 714 (6th Cir. 2001). The State’s waiver is of no consequence, however, because the Blakely error was not harmless. The Tennessee trial judge enhanced Lovins’s sentence on the basis of the judge’s finding of four aggravating factors: that Lovins (1) had a history of criminal convictions or behavior, (2) had a history of unwillingness to comply with conditions of release, (3) possessed a firearm during the commission of his offense, and (4) showed no hesitation about committing a crime with a high risk to human life. Of these four, only the existence of prior criminal convictions and the possession of the firearm could possibly be considered to be facts found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. And, with regard to the criminal-history factor, the judge noted that it was “not a lengthy criminal history,” suggesting that this factor was not important in determining the sentence. A finding that the error was not harmless in this case is supported by Villagarcia, in which we recognized that the sentencing court could end up exercising more discretion on remand than it had the first time around. Nonetheless, we still concluded there that “we simply cannot know whether the sentencing judge would accord the relevant factors the same weight when reassessing the matter outside the dictates of the severed provisions.” 599 F.3d at 539. Such a finding is also supported by Gomez II, in which the Tennessee Supreme Court reviewed the judicial factfinding of only two factors—a previous history of criminal convictions or behavior and a finding that Gomez had been a “leader” in the commission of the offense. 239 S.W.3d at 736. On application of the plain error standard, the Tennessee Supreme Court found that this judicial factfinding had “adversely affected” a substantial right of the accused, id. at 741, and that consideration of the error was “necessary to do substantial justice,” id. at 742. In sum, even had the State not waived the argument in Lovins’s case, we would conclude that the Blakely sentencing error was not harmless. Having considered the procedural default doctrine, Teague nonretroactivity, the deferential AEDPA standard of review on the merits, and the harmless error doctrine, No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 26 we are constrained to conclude that the judicial factfinding in Lovins’s sentencing was unconstitutional and that the remedy Lovins requests is due. We need not instruct the State how to provide this remedy, only that the remedy must either result in a reduction of Lovins’s sentence from twenty-three to twenty years, or in resentencing under a procedure that does not violate the Sixth Amendment. We afford the State 180 days from the date of this order to initiate the necessary proceedings.