Opinion ID: 2789470
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the riverside petition

Text: In 1987, following the conclusion of Medina’s Orange County trial, the Riverside County District Attorney charged Medina with special circumstances murder, robbery, and burglary arising from the Riverside County homicide. The trial court impaneled a jury to decide whether Medina was competent to stand trial. Medina II, 906 P.2d at 17. After hearing testimony from four experts, the jury found that Medina was competent. Id. In early 1989, proceedings were temporarily suspended in light of disruptive conduct by Medina, and a second competency determination was MEDINA V. CHAPPELL 27 ordered. Id. After competency experts filed reports, the trial court terminated the competency proceedings and ordered Medina to stand trial with waist chains and leg shackles. Id. During the guilt phase of the trial, which began on August 14, 1989, Medina attempted to relitigate his competence to stand trial, but otherwise did not present any evidence. Id. The jury found Medina guilty. Id. During the penalty phase, Medina’s counsel presented testimony from Irene McIntosh, one of Medina’s sisters. Id. at 17, 46. Medina’s counsel offered no other mitigating evidence. The prosecution introduced a range of aggravating evidence, including Medina’s Orange County murder convictions as well as convictions for numerous other violent offenses. Id. at 17. The jury recommended and the trial court imposed a sentence of death. Id. at 16. The California Supreme Court affirmed Medina’s conviction and sentence on direct appeal. Id. The United States Supreme Court denied his petition for a writ of certiorari. Medina v. California, 519 U.S. 854 (1996). Medina filed a state petition for habeas corpus, which the California Supreme Court denied “on the merits” in a onepage summary order. Medina then initiated his federal proceedings by requesting appointment of counsel and a stay of execution. He filed his federal habeas petition on September 1, 1998, after the effective date of AEDPA. On April 25, 2000, the district court held an evidentiary hearing on several of Medina’s claims. On June 17, 2008, the court issued a sealed order denying all of Medina’s habeas claims. Roughly seven months later, the court unsealed the order, and granted a limited certificate of appealability. 28 MEDINA V. CHAPPELL While Medina’s appeal was pending before us, the Supreme Court held in Cullen v. Pinholster, 131 S. Ct. 1388 (2011), that federal habeas review under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) is “limited to the record that was before the state court that adjudicated the claim on the merits.” Id. at 1398. We remanded Medina’s case so that the district court could reconsider its denial of habeas relief in light of Pinholster. On May 3, 2012, the district court reaffirmed its denial of habeas relief. ADEPA governed the district court’s resolution of Medina’s Riverside County petition. Under AEDPA, federal courts may not grant a writ of habeas corpus with respect to any claim that was: adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication of the claim—
or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or
unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d). Medina’s state habeas petition, which the California Supreme Court denied in a one-page summary order, was “adjudicated on the merits” within the meaning of MEDINA V. CHAPPELL 29 § 2254(d). See Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86, 97–100 (2011).7 Just as in the Orange County case, all of Medina’s certified claims in the Riverside County case allege ineffective assistance of counsel. As discussed at the outset of Part II, Strickland requires the petitioner to demonstrate that “counsel’s representation fell below an objective standard of reasonableness,” 466 U.S. at 688, as well as “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different,” id. at 694. When we view a Strickland claim through the lens of AEDPA, “the question is not whether counsel’s actions were reasonable,” but “whether the state court’s application of the Strickland standard was unreasonable.” Richter, 562 U.S. at 105, 101. In the absence of any reasoned state court decision on Medina’s ineffective assistance claims, we “must determine what arguments or theories . . . could have supported” the state court’s summary denial, and then “ask whether it is possible fairminded jurists could disagree that those arguments or theories are inconsistent with” Strickland and its progeny. Richter, 562 U.S. at 102. 7 Medina argues that applying Richter to his petition violates the Eighth Amendment because state procedural rules deprive California death row prisoners of the opportunity to obtain at least one reasoned state decision on the merits of their habeas claims. According to Medina, these rules prevent death row prisoners from filing state habeas petitions in Superior Court, where—if the petition is denied—they are guaranteed at least a “brief statement of the reasons for the denial.” Cal. R. Ct. 4.551(g). However, Medina has identified no authority prohibiting death row prisoners from filing their state habeas petitions in Superior Court. 30 MEDINA V. CHAPPELL B. Competency Phase Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Claims Medina argues that defense counsel’s failure to investigate Medina’s psychiatric history during the competency phase of the Riverside trial, and his resulting failure to provide this information to the experts who evaluated Medina’s competency, constituted ineffective assistance. We disagree. Medina bore the burden of establishing his incompetence to stand trial. See Medina, 505 U.S. at 452–53 (affirming the constitutionality of California’s presumption of competence). At Medina’s Riverside County competency trial, Drs. Rath, Oshrin, and Sharma testified for the prosecution that Medina was competent to stand trial, and Dr. Kania testified for the defense that he was incompetent. Medina II, 906 P.2d at 17. All three prosecution experts testified that they believed Medina was malingering. Id. Dr. Kania has since declared that defense counsel “never met with me or called me to discuss my opinions and conclusions before I testified in the 1988 competency jury trial.” He also declared that if he had been given additional information about Medina’s medical and social history, his “opinions and conclusions regarding Mr. Medina’s severe psychosis would have been greatly strengthened.” Dr. Rath stated that defense counsel “never made any written or oral contact with me,” and that “it was my custom and practice to contact both the district attorney and defense counsel to seek their input in the preparation of my written evaluation.” However, neither Dr. Kania nor Dr. Rath asserted that they actually contacted defense counsel to request information. MEDINA V. CHAPPELL 31 That omission is fatal to Medina’s claim. Although defense counsel have a general obligation to investigate, see Strickland, 466 U.S. at 690–91, the Supreme Court has never held that they have an affirmative duty to provide psychiatric information to experts who will be evaluating their clients for purposes of determining competency to stand trial. Although Dr. Rath declared that it was his “custom and practice” to request information from defense counsel, he did not state that he actually made such a request. Therefore, the California Supreme Court’s determination that Medina’s counsel did not perform deficiently during the competency phase because Dr. Rath never made a specific request for information was not contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). C. Failure to Pursue Mitigation Evidence in the Penalty Phase Medina contends that his Riverside County trial counsel, a different attorney than in the Orange County trial, rendered ineffective assistance by failing to investigate and present meaningful mitigation evidence at the penalty phase. We need not decide whether counsel’s performance was deficient, as we hold that any such error was harmless. We therefore turn directly to the question of prejudice and conclude that “fairminded jurists could disagree” as to whether counsel’s deficient performance—assuming without deciding that counsel’s performance was deficient—prejudiced Medina. Richter, 562 U.S. at 102. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s denial of habeas relief. 32 MEDINA V. CHAPPELL During the penalty phase, defense counsel presented only one mitigation witness: Medina’s sister Irene McIntosh. McIntosh testified that Medina was a “normal, responsible child,” but that after he was released from prison, he was “sick in the head” and “not the brother [that she] grew up with.” On cross-examination, McIntosh admitted that she was afraid of Medina and that she feared she could have been his next victim. She explained that two days before Medina was arrested, he told her he dreamt that he saw her bleeding from scratches on her back. Although one of Medina’s other sisters was present in the courtroom and available to testify, counsel decided not to call her after hearing McIntosh’s testimony. Medina identifies three types of evidence that defense counsel should have investigated and presented in mitigation: his family background, including his history of abuse as a child; his head injuries and possible brain damage; and his psychiatric history. Habeas counsel obtained the declarations from family members regarding evidence of physical abuse, childhood injuries, and mental illness, none of which was presented at trial.8 Nor did counsel call any medical experts, even though several had testified earlier in the penalty phase of Medina’s Orange County trial. Dr. Sharma, who testified during Medina’s Riverside County competency hearing, declared that if he had been privy to the information regarding Medina’s history of mental illness, he would have been prepared to testify at the penalty phase regarding Medina’s “mental impairment and longstanding psychiatric illness.” 8 These declarations were before the state habeas court and therefore may be considered on federal habeas under Pinholster, 131 S. Ct 1388. MEDINA V. CHAPPELL 33 Dr. Gold, who had been Medina’s treating psychiatrist in Arizona state prison, also stated that he would have testified as a mitigation witness.9 Other psychiatrists who subsequently reviewed Medina’s full psychiatric and social history also declared that they would have testified as mitigation witnesses on the basis of that evidence. To succeed in his ineffective assistance claim, Medina must establish that “there is a reasonable probability that, absent the errors, the sentencer . . . would have concluded that the balance of aggravating and mitigating circumstances did not warrant death.” Pinholster, 131 S. Ct. at 1408 (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 695) (internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, “we reweigh the evidence in aggravation against the totality of available mitigating evidence,” Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 534, and then ask whether it would have been unreasonable for the California Supreme Court to conclude based on this evidence that Medina failed to establish prejudice. As discussed in Part II.B., supra, Medina was not prejudiced within the meaning of Strickland in the Orange County case by counsel’s failure to investigate and discover the abuse Medina suffered as a child. Unlike in the Orange County case, counsel in the Riverside County case also failed to present evidence of Medina’s psychiatric history, which suggested that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Yet as the Supreme Court recently noted, evidence of mental illness is “by no means clearly mitigating, as the jury might have concluded that [petitioner] was simply beyond 9 Dr. Gold’s declaration explicitly mentions his willingness to testify at the Orange County trial, but there is no reason to doubt that he would have been willing to do so at the Riverside County trial as well. 34 MEDINA V. CHAPPELL rehabilitation.” Pinholster, 131 S. Ct. at 1410. Indeed, Medina’s Orange County counsel presented much of the same psychiatric evidence during the penalty phase of that trial, yet the jury there voted for the death penalty. Moreover, just as in the Orange County trial, the prosecution presented unusually strong aggravating evidence at the penalty phase, which included multiple murder and rape convictions as well as numerous assaults that Medina committed while in custody. Reweighing this evidence against all available mitigating evidence, and deferring as we must under AEDPA, we conclude that fairminded jurists could disagree as to whether defense counsel’s alleged failure to investigate and present additional mitigating evidence prejudiced Medina. See Richter, 562 U.S. at 102 (reiterating that “even a strong case for relief does not mean the state court’s contrary conclusion was unreasonable”). We therefore affirm the district court’s denial of relief on this claim. D. Failure to Present an Insanity Defense Medina argues that his Riverside County counsel rendered constitutionally ineffective assistance by failing to investigate Medina’s mental state at the time of the crimes and consequently failing to present an insanity defense. We have found deficient performance where defense counsel was “on notice about [his client’s] mental health and drug abuse problems,” yet failed to investigate a potential mental state defense. Jennings v. Woodford, 290 F.3d 1006, 1015–16 (9th Cir. 2002) (citing Seidel v. Merkle, 146 F.3d 750, 755–57 (9th Cir. 1998)). MEDINA V. CHAPPELL 35 At the Riverside County trial, Medina’s counsel did not present an insanity defense, and he has since declared that he “never investigated nor pursued in any way an insanity defense.” He was, however, aware that in Orange County Medina had a separate trial to determine whether he was not guilty by reason of insanity when he committed the crimes, pursuant to California Penal Code § 1026, which provides for a separate trial on “the question whether the defendant was sane or insane at the time the offense was committed.” He was found to be legally sane at the time all the charged crimes were committed. Assuming without deciding that Medina’s counsel performed deficiently by failing to investigate a potential insanity defense, it would not have been unreasonable for the California Supreme Court to conclude that Medina failed to establish prejudice. Medina’s Orange County counsel pursued an insanity defense, but it failed, despite Dr. Gold’s testimony that Medina was probably insane at the time he committed those murders. While the circumstances of the Riverside County murder and Medina’s contemporaneous Orange County crimes might not be per se incompatible with an insanity defense, his careful planning and attempts to avoid apprehension would have made an insanity defense difficult. As a result, “fairminded jurists could disagree” as to whether Medina met Strickland’s prejudice requirement, Richter, 562 U.S. at 102, and the district court correctly denied habeas relief. 36 MEDINA V. CHAPPELL