Opinion ID: 1041693
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Ake v. Oklahoma

Text: In Ake, defense counsel informed the trial court that he planned to raise an insanity defense and asked that the court either arrange or pay for a psychiatric examination for his client, an indigent. 470 U.S. at 72. The court refused, effectively precluding defense counsel from presenting any evidence regarding defendant’s sanity at the time of the offense. Id. The Supreme Court concluded that this rendered the trial fundamentally unfair, and held that “when a defendant demonstrates to the trial judge that his sanity at the time of the offense is to be a significant factor at trial, the State must, at a minimum, assure the defendant access to a competent psychiatrist who will conduct an appropriate examination and assist in evaluation, preparation, and presentation of the defense.” Id. at 83. Ake does not clearly extend to Varghese’s constitutional claim. Ake held that the state must in some circumstances 2 During oral argument, Varghese’s counsel identified Ake and Nobles as the two strongest Supreme Court cases supporting Varghese’s position. Varghese further relies on Smith v. McCormick, 914 F.2d 1153 (9th Cir. 1990). But because McCormick, a circuit case, is not clearly established Supreme Court precedent, it is not controlling here. McCormick is “relevant persuasive authority,” Himes, 336 F.3d at 853, but it adds little to Varghese’s argument that the state court’s decision was objectively unreasonable. On appeal, Varghese does not renew his argument that Powell v. Alabama clearly extends to this case. VARGHESE V. URIBE 15 provide indigent defendants with access to a particular kind of expert, a psychiatrist, to ensure fundamental fairness at trial. Varghese neither asserts that he was indigent, nor claims that he asked the state to provide a psychiatrist or any other kind of expert to assist in the preparation of his defense. He had, in fact, retained his own DNA expert, Dr. Blake. Even if this expert was unable to conduct a confidential DNA test, he could help defense counsel evaluate the methodology used by the state’s lab, decide whether to attack it at trial, and prepare for cross-examination of the state’s lab technician. See United States v. Chischilly, 30 F.3d 1144, 1152–53 (9th Cir. 1994); cf. Ake, 470 U.S. at 81. This is simply not a case, as was Ake, where the defendant lacked “the raw materials integral to the building of an effective defense.” Ake, 470 U.S. at 77. Second, Ake did not concern expert testing of physical evidence, much less testing that would consume a vanishing quantity of such evidence. Ake thus provided the state court with no guidance on how to balance the defendant’s interest in conducting his own DNA test with the state’s legitimate interest in corroborating its initial results. Even if we accept Varghese’s argument that Ake acknowledges the importance of expert assistance generally—as opposed to the assistance of psychiatric experts in particular—that case simply did not involve the tradeoffs at stake here. Varghese contends that the state’s interest in additional testing is weak because (1) it already had a reliable test and (2) Varghese agreed not to challenge the state’s blood evidence if his own testing confirmed the state’s results. But the state, which has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, has an interest in bulletproofing its evidence that the blood recovered from the crime scene belonged to Varghese. 16 VARGHESE V. URIBE See John Devlin, Genetics and Justice: An Indigent Defendant’s Right to DNA Expert Assistance, 1998 U. Chi. Legal F. 395, 407 (1998) (noting the prosecutor ordered multiple tests of the DNA evidence in the O.J. Simpson trial). Nothing in Ake suggests that, where physical evidence is concerned, a defendant’s interest in confidential testing trumps the state’s interest in confirming its results.