Opinion ID: 2494
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Procedural Concerns

Text: At the outset, we discuss two procedural issues addressed by the district court. First, we note our agreement with the district court that the Appellate Division, Second Department, nowhere clearly and expressly indicated that it rejected Acosta's constitutional challenge to the admission of his confession on an independent state law ground. See Acosta v. Artuz, 375 F.Supp.2d at 178; People v. Acosta, 224 A.D.2d at 629-30, 639 N.Y.S.2d at 709. Thus, the concerns of comity and federalism that bar federal review of claims denied on such grounds are not implicated here. Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. at 730, 111 S.Ct. 2546.
Second, as the district court observed, a federal court must consider whether a habeas petitioner adequately exhausted state remedies by fairly presenting both the factual and legal premises for his federal claim to the appropriate state courts. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(1); Baldwin v. Reese, 541 U.S. at 30-34, 124 S.Ct. 1347; Daye v. Att'y Gen. of N.Y., 696 F.2d 186, 191-92 (2d Cir.1982) (en banc). [T]he question of whether a federal constitutional question was sufficiently asserted in state courts to form the basis of a federal habeas petition is ultimately a question of federal law which the federal courts must resolve for themselves. DiSimone v. Phillips, 461 F.3d 181, 189 (2d Cir.2006). To the extent Acosta relies on Detective Aguilar's disclosure of the lineup identifications as a factual premise for his claim that his confession was coerced in violation of constitutional rights and, therefore, inadmissible, it is undisputed that Acosta did not present this argument to Justice Starkey at the time a hearing was conducted on his suppression motion. Nor did Acosta ask Justice Kay to reconsider the issue of suppression at trial when Detective Aguilar first testified to the identification disclosure. [2] Acosta nevertheless insists that he adequately exhausted state remedies because, on direct appeal, he did not ask the appellate court to review the propriety of the hearing court decision, but rather argued that, upon the facts elicited at trial, appellant's statement should have been suppressed by the trial court.  Appellant's Br. at 21-22 (emphasis in original). We are not persuaded.
Whether a state prisoner adequately exhausts unprotested claims by presenting them on direct appeal admits no easy answer. While some commentators have suggested that raising a claim on direct appeal can satisfy a federal habeas petitioner's exhaustion obligation, see 2 RANDY HERTZ & JAMES S. LIEBMAN, FEDERAL HABEAS CORPUS PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE § 23.3b, at 1068 & n. 19 (5th ed.2005), a question arises as to whether this conclusion is properly applied only to cases in which the appellate court actually addresses the unprotested claim. The Supreme Court has, after all, ruled that where a constitutional challenge to a state court conviction has been presented to the state courts for the first and only time in a procedural context in which its merits will not be considered unless there are special and important reasons therefor[, r]aising the claim in such a fashion does not ... constitute fair presentation. Castille v. Peoples, 489 U.S. 346, 351, 109 S.Ct. 1056, 103 L.Ed.2d 380 (1989) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Bell v. Cone, 543 U.S. 447, 451 n. 3, 125 S.Ct. 847, 160 L.Ed.2d 881 (2005) ([A]s a general matter, the burden is on the petitioner to raise his federal claim in the state courts at a time when state procedural law permits its consideration on the merits, even if the state court could have identified and addressed the federal question without its having been raised.). Acosta argues that Castille v. Peoples applies only to claims raised in applications for discretionary review. See 489 U.S. at 351, 109 S.Ct. 1056 (The Court of Appeals below held ... that the submission of a new claim to a State's highest court on discretionary review constitutes a fair presentation. We disagree.); St. Helen v. Senkowski, 374 F.3d 181, 183 (2d Cir.2004) ([R]aising a federal claim for the first time in an application for discretionary review to a state's highest court is insufficient for exhaustion purposes. (citing Castille v. Peoples, 489 U.S. at 351, 109 S.Ct. 1056)). He submits that his appeal to the Appellate Division was, by contrast, as of right. Appellant's Br. at 24 (emphasis omitted). Even if we were to agree with Acosta that Castille 's holding applies only to discretionary appeals  a point we need not here decide  the exhaustion issue is more complex than Acosta might wish. To be sure, a convicted New York defendant has a right of appeal to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. See N.Y.Crim. Proc. Law § 450.10. Moreover, the jurisdiction of New York's intermediate appellate courts is broad and extends even to errors not protested at trial. See id. § 470.15(1); see also People v. Cona, 49 N.Y.2d 26, 33, 424 N.Y.S.2d 146, 149, 399 N.E.2d 1167 (1979). The law is clear, however, that a state prisoner has no right to Appellate Division review of unprotested errors; the Appellate Division may review such errors [a]s a matter of discretion in the interest of justice. N.Y.Crim. Proc. Law § 470.15(3)(c), (6)(a). It is this language that appears to bring the Castille rule to bear and signals caution in concluding that unprotested claims not addressed by the Appellate Division are exhausted. In this case, the Appellate Division gave no indication that it chose to exercise its discretion to review possible constitutional error in the trial judge's failure, unprotested by Acosta, to declare his confession inadmissible in light of Detective Aguilar's trial testimony. The Appellate Division's silence on this point is significant because, as the district court noted, [i]t is well settled in New York that trial testimony may not be considered in evaluating a suppression ruling on appeal, and that where the defendant fails to move to reopen a suppression hearing, he or she may not rely upon the trial testimony to challenge the suppression ruling. People v. Gold, 249 A.D.2d 414, 415, 670 N.Y.S.2d 789, 789 (2d Dep't 1998); see also People v. Gonzalez, 55 N.Y.2d 720, 722, 447 N.Y.S.2d 145, 146, 431 N.E.2d 630 (1981) (noting that propriety of the denial [of suppression motion] must be judged on the evidence before the suppression court); People v. South, 47 A.D.3d 734, 735, 849 N.Y.S.2d 603, 605 (2d Dep't 2008) (Insofar as [defendant] relies upon [trial] testimony in arguing that his statements were not voluntarily made [and thus should have been suppressed], his contention is not properly before this Court.); People v. Douglas, 8 A.D.3d 980, 981, 778 N.Y.S.2d 622, 623 (4th Dep't 2004) (To the extent that defendant relies upon trial testimony in challenging the court's determination, his claims are not properly before us.); People v. Williams, 305 A.D.2d 804, 807-08, 759 N.Y.S.2d 580, 584 (3d Dep't 2003) ([W]e must discount defendant's reliance on the trial testimony of a witness to the pat-down as our review in this respect is limited to the suppression hearing testimony.); People v. Canteen, 295 A.D.2d 256, 256, 744 N.Y.S.2d 380, 381 (1st Dep't 2002) (Since defendant never requested that the court reopen the suppression hearing, his claim that his trial testimony established the involuntariness of his statements is unpreserved, and we decline to review it in the interest of justice. (citation omitted)); but see People v. McCormick, 39 A.D.2d 590, 590, 331 N.Y.S.2d 840, 841 (2d Dep't 1972) (reversing denial of suppression motion and ordering new trial in interests of justice where officer's trial testimony was in basic and flagrant contradiction with that presented at suppression hearing). It was in these legal and factual circumstances that the district court concluded that the evidence of Aguilar's trial testimony was presented [to the Appellate Division] in a context where it would not ordinarily have been considered, and, thus, under Castille, any claim of error based on this evidence should not be deemed exhausted absent some record indication that the appellate court actually addressed the merits. Acosta v. Artuz, 375 F.Supp.2d at 179-80. While this reasoning is persuasive, we identify a more fundamental flaw in Acosta's exhaustion argument: the record does not demonstrate a fair presentation to the Appellate Division of the same challenge to the admissibility of his confession that he now pursues in his federal habeas petition.