Opinion ID: 768370
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Fourth Maupin Prong - The Cause and Prejudice Test

Text: 67 The district court's primary rationale for excusing procedural default as to the unanimity instruction claim was that Scott had shown cause and prejudice to excuse his failure to object. The court's only explanation of cause is that Scott reasonably believed a contemporaneous objection would be futile because, as demonstrated in the Ohio Supreme Court's three-sentence disposition of this claim, that court's precedent at the time required jury verdicts as to both guilt and life sentences to be unanimous. The United States Supreme Court, however, has explicitly rejected this idea:the futility of presenting an objection to the state courts cannot alone constitute cause for a failure to object at trial. If a defendant perceives a constitutional claim and believes it may find favor in the federal courts, he may not bypass the state courts simply because he thinks they will be unsympathetic to the claim. Even a state court that has previously rejected a constitutional argument may decide, upon reflection, that the contention is valid. Allowing criminal defendants to deprive the state courts of this opportunity would contradict the principles supporting Sykes. 68 Engle, 456 U.S. at 130 (footnotes omitted). Scott does not address cause and prejudice on appeal, 6 and even if he did he would be hard-pressed to distinguish this holding; it was made in the context of Ohio's contemporaneous-objection rule, and the Court has said that the standard for cause should not vary depending on the timing of a procedural default or on the strength of an uncertain and difficult assessment of the relative magnitude of the benefits attributable to the state procedural rules [involved]. Murray v. Carrier, 477 U.S. 478, 491 (1986). 69 The district court's finding of prejudice was based on the merits of Scott's claim, and on its conclusion that the sentencing proceedings might reasonably have come to a different result absent the instruction of which Scott complains. Of course, evaluating the merits to determine the applicability of procedural default is circular and undermines the federalism concerns behind the doctrine. Moreover, while Sykes left open the definition of prejudice, Frady eliminate[d] any doubt about its meaning for a defendant who has failed to object to jury instructions at trial, Frady, 456 U.S. at 168: 70 [Henderson] summarized the degree of prejudice we have required a prisoner to show before obtaining collateral relief for errors in the jury charge as whether the ailing instruction by itself so infected the entire trial that the resulting conviction violates due process, not merely whether the instruction is undesirable, erroneous, or even universally condemned. We reaffirm this formulation, which requires that the degree of prejudice resulting from instruction error be evaluated in the total context of the events at trial. As we have often emphasized[,] a single instruction to a jury may not be judged in artificial isolation, but must be viewed in the context of the overall charge. Moreover, a judgment of conviction is commonly the culmination of a trial which includes testimony of witnesses, argument of counsel, receipt of exhibits in evidence, and instruction of the jury by the judge. Thus not only is the challenged instruction but one of many such instructions, but the process of instruction itself is but one of several components of the trial which may result in the judgment of conviction. 71 Id. at 169 (internal quotations, citations, and alterations omitted). Presumably, this same approach applies to jury instructions in the sentencing phase as well. Our review of the briefs and record leaves us convinced that there is no such prejudice here. Scott offers no help in making that assessment, however, and, in any event, we find that Scott cannot show cause for his default. 72 Although neither the district court nor Scott mentions it, it is worth noting that an exception to the requirement that a federal habeas petitioner demonstrate cause and prejudice in order to obtain review of his defaulted claims may bemade when the petitioner is able to demonstrate that failure to consider those claims will result in a fundamental miscarriage of justice. Coleman, 501 U.S. at 750; Engle, 456 U.S. at 135. The Court has explained that although, ordinarily, petitioners who can show a fundamental miscarriage of justice will also be able to meet the cause and prejudice requirement, in extraordinary cases, where a constitutional violation has probably resulted in the conviction of one who is actually innocent, a federal habeas court may grant the writ even in the absence of a showing of cause for the procedural default. Carrier, 477 U.S. at 496; Dugger, 489 U.S. at 410 n. 6. In Dugger, the Court noted that this exception will apply to death sentences only in extraordinary cases, given the difficulty of translating the concept of actual innocence from the guilt phase to the sentencing phase of a capital trial. See id. The Court observed that although it would not attempt to define what it means to be 'actually innocent' of a death sentence, id., it could not find such extraordinary injustice under the facts of that case, where the mitigating and aggravating factors had been found to be equal. See id. Scott has made no attempt to demonstrate this kind of fundamental miscarriage of justice, and we are confident that he cannot do so. 73 Accordingly, we hold that the district court erred in concluding that Scott's claim of constitutional error with regard to the penalty-phase unanimity instruction was not procedurally defaulted, and in further concluding that even if the claim were defaulted, Scott demonstrated cause and prejudice to excuse the procedural default. We further hold that the Ohio Supreme Court relied on Ohio's contemporaneous-objection rule--an adequate and independent state ground--in holding that this claim had been defaulted; that Scott failed to demonstrate cause and prejudice to excuse the default, and that the district court erred in reaching the merits of this claim. We therefore REVERSE the district court's issuance of a writ of habeas corpus. 74