Opinion ID: 148961
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Did the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Rely on an Independent and Adequate State Ground Precluding Federal Merits Review?

Text: The next key issue is whether the state court reached the merits of the claim or instead ruled that the habeas application was procedurally flawed. This distinction matters in a Section 2254 proceeding because we do not reach the merits when the state court denied relief due to a state law that provides an adequate basis for the decision, independent of the merits of the federal claim. Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 729, 111 S.Ct. 2546, 115 L.Ed.2d 640 (1991); Finley v. Johnson, 243 F.3d 215, 218 (5th Cir.2001). The Supreme Court has held that if the state court decision rests primarily on federal law or the state and federal law are interwoven, and if the adequacy and independence of any possible state law ground is not clear from the face of the opinion, we will construe the state court ruling as one applying federal law. Ruiz v. Quarterman, 504 F.3d 523, 527 (5th Cir.2007) (quoting Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1040-41, 103 S.Ct. 3469, 77 L.Ed.2d 1201 (1983)). An independent and adequate state ground must be express in order to avoid the Michigan v. Long default rule. Finley, 243 F.3d at 218. Consequently, if the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals did not clearly rely on an independent state ground in its September 22, 2009 order, we will conclude that it reached the merits and did not reject the claim for not having been exhausted. Such a conclusion would undermine our failure to stay the federal suit in 2008 in order to allow the claim to be presented first in state court, a refusal based on the view that the state would not countenance such a claim. We now apply these principles to the state court order. By statute, a Texas state prisoner has a limited right to have a successive application for habeas relief considered in state court. (a) If a subsequent application for a writ of habeas corpus is filed after filing an initial application, a court may not consider the merits of or grant relief based on the subsequent application unless the application contains sufficient specific facts establishing that: (1) the current claims and issues have not been and could not have been presented previously in a timely initial application or in a previously considered application filed under this article or Article 11.07 because the factual or legal basis for the claim was unavailable on the date the applicant filed the previous application; (2) by a preponderance of the evidence, but for a violation of the United States Constitution no rational juror could have found the applicant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; or (3) by clear and convincing evidence, but for a violation of the United States Constitution no rational juror would have answered in the state's favor one or more of the special issues that were submitted to the jury in the applicant's trial under Article 37.071, 37.0711, or 37.072. Tex.Code Crim. Proc. Ann. art. 11.071, § 5(a). The application may be filed in the court of conviction, but the clerk of that court is to send the application to the Court of Criminal Appeals. Id. § 5(b). The Court of Criminal Appeals then decides whether one of the limited bases for consideration of the application on the merits has been shown. On August 21, 2009, Balentine filed a successive application. In a two-page order, the Court of Criminal Appeals first summarized the prior proceedings. It then addressed the most recent filing: Applicant presents two allegations in his application. In the first allegation, applicant asserts that he was deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of trial counsel because counsel failed to adequately investigate, develop, and present mitigation evidence in the punishment phase of the trial. In his second allegation, applicant asserts that the prosecution unconstitutionally exercised peremptory challenges on two venire persons in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986). We have reviewed the application and find that his allegations fail to satisfy the requirements of Article 11.071 § 5. Accordingly, applicant's application is dismissed, and his motion to stay his execution is denied. Likewise, applicant's motion to vacate the judgment rendered in his initial state writ application is denied, and the Court otherwise declines to reconsider that case. Ex parte Balentine, Nos. WR-54071-01, WR-54071-02, 2009 WL 3042425 (Tex. Crim.App. Sept. 22, 2009). We find substantial guidance for interpreting the Court of Criminal Appeals's order in Ruiz v. Quarterman, 504 F.3d 523. The procedural steps in Ruiz were the same as heredirect appeal, state habeas, federal habeas, successive application in state court, then a Rule 60(b) motion in federal court. Id. at 525-26. There we concluded that the Court of Criminal Appeals order denying relief on the second habeas application could not be considered a decision based on independent and adequate state grounds. Id. at 526. Part of the reason was the fact that there were only four votes at the Court of Criminal Appeals for the lead opinion that denied the writ; the judge casting the fifth vote necessary for the decision reached the merits. Id. at 527. Such vote-counting is not involved in Balentine's Court of Criminal Appeals decision. However, another reason Ruiz found that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could not be said to have ruled on an independent state ground was because the Texas court, in an earlier case, explained how it reached decisions such as Ruiz. Id. at 527. In 2007, the Court of Criminal Appeals held that satisfying Section 5 of Article 11.071 had two separate components: 1) the factual or legal basis for an applicant's current claims must have been unavailable as to all of his previous applications; and 2) the specific facts alleged, if established, would constitute a constitutional violation that would likely require relief from either the conviction or sentence. Ex parte Campbell, 226 S.W.3d 418, 421 (Tex.Crim.App.2007) (discussed in Ruiz, 504 F.3d at 527). On that basis, Ruiz concluded that a boilerplate dismissal by the [Court of Criminal Appeals] of an application for an abuse of the writ is itself uncertain on this point, being unclear whether the [Court's] decision was based on the first element, a state-law question, or on the second element, a question of federal constitutional law. Ruiz, 504 F.3d at 527. The district court in Ruiz had held, when rejecting the Section 2254 application, that a stay and a return to state court would be futile because the claim had not been exhausted the first time. Id. at 525. Futile or not, Ruiz returned to state court and got the ruling from the Court of Criminal Appeals that we construed as merits-based. As the Ruiz opinion put it, this merits ruling pulled the ground from under the federal district court's earlier judgment dismissing the claim and refusing to hold the federal claim in abeyance while Ruiz returned to state court with his unexhausted claim. Id. at 525. Importantly, the Court of Criminal Appeals's ruling in Ruiz that was construed as one on the merits is not readily distinguishable from the one here. The September 22, 2009 ruling stated that Balentine's allegations fail to satisfy the requirements of Article 11.071, § 5. Under the Court of Criminal Appeals's explanation in Campbell, that denial could have been a decision that the facts were previously available and no excuse from presenting the claim earlier existedan adequate and independent state groundor that denial could have been based on a finding that the facts as alleged did not indicate a federal constitutional violation. There is at least one distinction, though, besides the lack of a five-vote majority in Ruiz, between the state court order in Ruiz and the order here. The distinction helps Balentine. In the Ruiz four-judge order, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said that the application was dismissed as an abuse of the writ, but that phrase does not appear in the same court's Balentine order. The abuse of the writ language is significant because of our decision in Hughes v. Quarterman, 530 F.3d 336 (5th Cir. 2008). The Hughes court neither cited Ruiz nor discussed the decision of the Court of Criminal Appeals in Campbell. The Hughes court held that a finding by the Texas court that a second application was an abuse of the writ could be considered an adequate state ground independent of the merits of the federal claim. Id. at 342. The Court of Criminal Appeals order in Hughes said that the application fails to satisfy the requirements of Art. 11.071, Sec. 5(a), V.A.C.C.P. Accordingly, the application is dismissed as an abuse of the writ. Ex parte Hughes, No. 45-876-02 (Tex.Crim.App. Nov. 14, 2001) (not designated for publication). Because the abuse of the writ language was not included in the Court of Criminal Appeals's order on Balentine's successive state habeas application, Hughes has no direct application. True, the statute itself says that a successive application that fails to satisfy its requirements (presumably either for procedural or for merits reasons) should be dismissed as an abuse of the writ. Tex.Code.Crim. Proc. art. 11.071, § 5(c). However, giving our imprimatur to the statute's unvarying abuse of the writ label when a second state habeas application is denied, is inconsistent with our precedents. For example, we have held that the Texas abuse of writ approach could not always be considered a procedural ruling because at times it requires a determination of whether a prima facie constitutional claim has been shown: Although Texas' abuse of the writ doctrine is superficially procedural in that it has a procedural effect, [because it leads to] determining which claims are remanded to the state trial courts for further development, it steps beyond a procedural determination to examine the merits of an Atkins claim. Rivera v. Quarterman, 505 F.3d 349, 360 (5th Cir.2007). Similarly, the Campbell explanation by the Court of Criminal Appeals reveals that the court may rule on the basis that the specific facts alleged, if established, would constitute a constitutional violation that would likely require relief from either the conviction or sentence. Ex parte Campbell, 226 S.W.3d at 421. Further, a ruling that the facts, if established, did not constitute a violation would also be interwoven with federal constitutional law. Regardless of the effect of Hughes and its focus on abuse of the writ language in a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals order, we give some weight to the absence of express language of abuse in Balentine's order from that court. We give weight because of the interplay between the responsibilities and procedures of state and federal courts in this area: each court likely is attentive or at least aware of the effects of its decision on the other. The Ruiz court believed that how the federal courts will react to the language of a state court habeas decision is a rote rule at the fingertips of every writing member of state courts of last resortwhere studied ambiguity or clarity in the decisional footing is an art form and an absence of clarity in an opinion is seldom inadvertent. Ruiz, 504 F.3d at 527. We do not decide that the absence of abuse of the writ language was an omission meant for our eyes, but we see it all the same. Moreover, to the extent there is inconsistency between Hughes and the careful examination of abuse of the writ determinations required by Ruiz and Rivera and Hughes did not address either precedentwe are bound by the decisions predating Hughes because one panel cannot overrule earlier decisions. United States v. Castro-Guevarra, 575 F.3d 550, 552 (5th Cir.2009). Ruiz compels us to construe the September 22, 2009 Court of Criminal Appeals ruling as one on federal grounds, because it was not clearly based on an adequate state ground independent of the merits.