Opinion ID: 2317416
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 22

Heading: Questions/comments designed to limit consideration of mitigating evidence

Text: DeRosa contends the prosecutor violated his Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights by asking questions of potential jurors during voir dire designed to educate [them] that evidence that did not reduce guilt or moral culpability was not to be considered by them. Aplt. Br. at 78. The types of mitigating evidence dismissed in this questioning, he asserts, included classic kinds of mitigating evidence: family history, bad childhood, lack of brain function, lack of capacity. Id. DeRosa argues that the prosecutor then continued this theme in [second-stage] closing argument by asserting that DeRosa would claim the crimes were the fault of others, including his parents, the daycare center, his grandmother, and the military. Id. The problem for DeRosa is that he never presented these arguments to the Oklahoma state courts. To be sure, in his application for post-conviction relief, DeRosa argued that his trial counsel was ineffective for failing to object to the district attorney's purported efforts, during voir dire and at second-stage closing arguments, to unconstitutionally limit DeRosa's mitigating evidence (the OCCA declined to review this claim, concluding it was procedurally barred due to DeRosa's failure to assert it on direct appeal). But at no time has DeRosa ever directly brought the purported prosecutorial misconduct to the OCCA's attention; he did not, for example, include it in his direct appeal brief, even though he argued other examples of purported prosecutorial misconduct. Were DeRosa to now attempt to return to the OCCA and file a second application for post-conviction relief raising the claim, it would clearly be procedurally barred. The applicable rule of the OCCA provides that a second application for post-conviction relief must be filed within sixty days from the date a previously unavailable factual basis for an application is discovered. Smith v. State, 245 P.3d 1233, 1238 (Okla. Crim.App.2010) (citing Rule 9.7(G)(3), Rules of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, Title 22, Ch. 18, App. (2010)). Because DeRosa was obviously aware of the factual basis for the claim at the time he filed his initial application for post-conviction relief, he is now well outside the sixty-day window afforded by the OCCA's rule and thus would be procedurally barred from filing a second application for post-conviction relief based upon this claim of prosecutorial misconduct. And DeRosa has made no attempt to overcome this anticipatory procedural bar to federal habeas review. As we have noted, DeRosa cannot make a credible claim of actual innocence, and thus cannot rely on the fundamental miscarriage of justice exception to procedural bar. Coleman, 501 U.S. at 750, 111 S.Ct. 2546. Further, DeRosa has made no attempt to argue cause and prejudice, i.e., that his appellate or post-conviction counsel was ineffective for failing to raise the claim. [6] Thus, the claim is procedurally barred.