Opinion ID: 72026
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: the caldwell v. mississippi claim

Text: Davis contends that prosecutorial comments coupled with judicial comments and jury instructions combined to diminish the jury’s sense of responsibility in violation of Caldwell v. Mississippi, 472 U.S. 320, 105 S. Ct. 2633 (1985). The district court held that this claim is not procedurally barred, 853 F. Supp. at 1555, a holding the State does not contest before us. Turning to the merits, the district court discussed the relevant law and facts at some length before rejecting the claim. See id. at 155557. Instead of supplanting the district court’s explanation of why Davis’ Caldwell claim fails, we will supplement it. We begin with the applicable law. As the district court pointed out, two key decisions setting out Caldwell law are en banc decisions of this Court issued on the same day in Mann v. Dugger, 844 F.2d 1446 (11th Cir. 1988) (en banc), and Harich v. Dugger, 844 F.2d 1464 (11th Cir. 1988) (en banc). The district court reasoned that the facts 24 of the present case made it more like Harich, a case in which the claim was rejected, than it was like Mann, a case in which the claim was held to have merit. See 853 F. Supp. at 1557. We agree with that conclusion and would add to the legal analysis only an observation about how the law relating to Caldwell claims has developed since Mann and Harich. In both of those en banc decisions the Court at least implied that a prosecutorial or judicial comment or instruction could constitute Caldwell error even if it was a technically accurate description under state law of the jury’s actual role in capital sentencing. See Mann, 844 F.2d at 1457; Harich, 844 F.2d at 1475 (plurality opinion).5 Those implications cannot survive the Supreme Court’s subsequent holdings that in order “to establish a Caldwell violation, a defendant necessarily must show that the remarks to the jury improperly described the role assigned to the jury by local law,” Romano v. Oklahoma, 512 U.S. 1, 9, 114 S. Ct. 2004, 2010 (1994) (quoting Dugger v. Adams, 489 U.S. 401, 407, 109 S. Ct. 1211, 1215 (1989)). “The infirmity identified in Caldwell is simply absent” in a case where “the jury was not affirmatively misled regarding its role in 5 Judge Tjoflat’s opinion in Harich describes him as “specially