Opinion ID: 22204
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Background: Cage-Victor Error and Retroactivity

Text: 12 The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the accused against conviction except upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime withwhich he is charged. In re Winship, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1073 (1970); see also Jackson v. Virginia, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 2786 (1979). In Cage, a direct appeal, the Supreme Court held that a reasonable doubt instruction ran afoul of Winship and violated the Due Process Clause because, when read as a whole, it equated a reasonable doubt with a 'grave uncertainty' and an 'actual substantial doubt,' and stated that what was required was a 'moral certainty' that the defendant was guilty. See Cage, 111 S.Ct. at 329. 1 The Court found that the combination of these terms, given their common meaning, resulted in an instruction pursuant to which a reasonable juror could find guilt based on a lesser degree of proof than required by the Due Process Clause. See id. at 330. 2 13 The Supreme Court subsequently refined Cage but left its holding essentially intact. In Estelle v. McGuire, the Court clarified that the standard for reviewing jury instructions in challenges to state criminal convictions was not whether an instruction could have been applied in an unconstitutional manner, as the Cage Court stated, but whether there is a reasonable likelihood that a jury in fact applied the challenged instruction unconstitutionally. See McGuire, 112 S.Ct. at 482 & n.4 (citations omitted). In Victor v. Nebraska, 114 S.Ct. 1239 (1994), the Court upheld, in one case on direct appeal and in another on appeal from denial of state habeas relief, two other reasonable doubt instructions that contained some (but not all) of the three suspect phrases in Cage. Victor, 114 S.Ct. at 1242. The Court reasoned that the phrases moral certainty and substantial doubt did not impermissibly lower the government's burden of proof because the context of the instructions clarified the meaning of the terms as being congruent with reasonable doubt. See id. at 1248, 1249-1251. 14 As noted above, Williams was convicted in 1981 and the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed his conviction in 1985, five years before Cage was issued. The state contends that in light of AEDPA, Williams cannot benefit from the new rule of constitutional law announced by Cage and later cases. The threshold question, therefore, is whether Williams may now avail himself of Cage and Victor, which were both announced well after his conviction became final. See Caspari v. Bohlen, 114 S.Ct. 948, 953 (1994) (noting that if the state argues that a habeas petitioner seeks the benefit of a new rule, the habeas court must resolve the issue of retroactivity before considering the merits of the claim) (citation omitted). 15 It is undisputed that Cage announced a new rule of constitutional law. In re Smith, 142 F.3d 832, 835 (5th Cir. 1998). In general, a new rule will not apply retroactively to the habeas petition of a prisoner whose conviction became final before the Supreme Court announced the rule. See Teague v. Lane, 109 S.Ct. 1061, 1073 (1989). There are two exceptions to Teague'sgeneral non-retroactivity principle, however: the first is irrelevant here, but the second provides that a new rule may be applied retroactively if the rule requires the observance of those procedures that . . . are implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. See id. (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 16 This Court has held that Cage-Victor error falls within the second Teague exception and therefore applies retroactively on collateral review. See Humphrey v. Cain, 138 F.3d 552, 553 (5th Cir. 1998) (en banc) [hereinafter Humphrey II], adopting reasoning of Humphrey v. Cain, 120 F.3d 526, 529 (5th Cir. 1997) [hereinafter Humphrey I]. The Humphrey I panel based this conclusion on the Supreme Court's opinion in Sullivan v. Louisiana, 113 S.Ct. 2078, 2082-83 (1993), which held on direct appeal that Cage-Victor error was a structural defect and therefore not subject to harmless error analysis. See Humphrey I, 120 F.3d at 529. Because Sullivan found that conviction based on a constitutionally defective reasonable doubt instruction takes away a basic protection without which a criminal trial cannot reliably serve its function, Humphrey I held that the second Teague exception applied to Cage-Victor error. See id. (citations omitted). However, both Humphrey opinions were careful to point out that they did not consider what effect, if any, AEDPA might have on the continued retroactivity of the Cage-Victor rule. See Humphrey II, 138 F.3d at 553 n.1; Humphrey I, 120 F.3d at 529. 3 The Humphrey I panel noted that a finding that Cage and Victor apply retroactively on collateral review might not have a very significant impact in a post-AEDPA regime because AEDPA's new barriers, such as the one-year statute of limitations, restrictions on successive petitions, and heightened standard of review under section 2254(d)(1), might shut out future petitioners in Humphrey's situation. See Humphrey I, 120 F.3d at 529. It added that [o[f course, we do not have occasion to measure how high those barriers might be. Id. 17 As noted above, in denying Williams's petition, the district court relied upon the fact that Williams was subject to AEDPA to support its conclusion that he could not benefit from Humphrey because he could not overcome unspecified barriers of AEDPA. 4 We conclude that based on Muhleisen, the district court's ultimate conclusion-that AEDPA precludes Williams from availing himself on habeas of the rule announced by Cage and later cases-is correct. 18