Opinion ID: 814497
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Claim One – Challenge to state court decision on

Text: § 1405 motion Cooper’s first claim is a pure horizontal appeal of the state court’s decision. Cooper’s complaint fundamentally mischaracterizes the state court’s holding, attempting to cast the claim as an attack on the state court’s statutory construction of § 1405. A review of Cooper’s grievances makes clear, however, that his complaint in actuality challenges the fact-specific determination in his case. The first claim states: [B]y finding that allegations of tampering “cannot serve as a basis for satisfying the specific statutory requirements” of § 1405, and by holding that the potential to identify the minor contributor(s) to the DNA samples is of no “practical significance” and cannot satisfy the condition of § 1405(f)(6)(B), the Superior Court of the State of California has made it impossible for Plaintiff to utilize § 1405 to prove that he was framed. This interpretation deprives Plaintiff of his liberty and property interests in § 1405 without due process of law. COOPER V . RAMOS 13 The state court, however, did not render a categorical holding that tampering allegations can never serve as a basis for § 1405 relief. Cooper’s complaint omits crucial parts of the quoted decision. After carefully addressing Cooper’s allegations of tampering the Superior Court held: Defendant has not produced any evidence to support his unspecified tampering theory. Mere speculation that evidence tampering has occurred is not a sufficient basis for good cause discovery. It also cannot serve as the basis for satisfying the specific statutory requirements for post-conviction DNA testing. The Superior Court firmly rested its decision on the inadequacy of Cooper’s evidence. In his § 1983 suit, Cooper “essentially invite[s] [a] federal court[] of first instance to review and reverse [his] unfavorable state-court judgment[].” Exxon Mobil, 544 U.S. at 283. This invitation is laid bare by other allegations in the first claim. Cooper alleges that he “met all of the factors enumerated in § 1405,” and he requests relief that includes “[a] declaratory judgment that [he] is entitled to access and to perform DNA testing on the evidence requested in his 2010 § 1405 motion.” Perhaps realizing that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine squarely bars the review he seeks, Cooper tries in briefing before this court to recast his complaint as a general constitutional attack on the DNA testing statute. He argues that he is not attacking the specific interpretation that the Superior Court applied to his case, but rather that “Section 1405, as written by the California legislature and as interpreted by the California courts, constitutes an 14 COOPER V . RAMOS unconstitutional denial of due process.” Cooper relies heavily on Skinner v. Switzer to support his position. The facts of Skinner bear some resemblance to Cooper’s case. Skinner was convicted of murder and failed to obtain state or federal postconviction relief. He moved for DNA testing under a Texas statute allowing prisoners to obtain such testing in limited circumstances. The Texas courts denied his motions, finding no reasonable probability that Skinner would not have been convicted if DNA tests were exculpatory and finding fault on Skinner’s part in not requesting the testing earlier. Skinner then brought a § 1983 action against the District Attorney seeking an injunction entitling him to the testing he sought. Skinner, 131 S. Ct. at 1295. The Supreme Court rejected the argument that RookerFeldman barred Skinner’s suit. The Court’s reasoning hinged on the fact that Skinner did “not challenge the prosecutor’s conduct or the decisions reached by the [state court],” but rather “challenge[d], as denying him procedural due process, Texas’ postconviction DNA statute ‘as construed’ by the Texas courts.” Id. at 1296.1 In essence, Skinner’s § 1983 suit launched a general challenge to the adequacy of the state-law process available to him. Cooper urges us to read Skinner as “approv[ing] the exact type of claim at issue here.” Cooper’s first claim, however, differs in several critical respects from Skinner’s suit. Throughout his complaint, Cooper explicitly attacks both the 1 Specifically, Skinner argued that the state courts had “construed the statute to completely foreclose any prisoner who could have sought DNA testing prior to trial, but did not, from seeking testing postconviction.” Id. at 1296 (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted; emphasis added). COOPER V . RAMOS 15 prosecutor’s conduct in his specific case and the state court’s application in his specific case of the statutory factors governing entitlement to DNA testing. Cooper alleges at length that Ramos and Myers withheld exculpatory information during his trial and that the prosecution planted and tampered with evidence. Cooper alleges that the District Attorney conspired with the state criminalist to deny him access to testing under § 1405, specifically “[b]y knowingly and/or intentionally submitting materially misleading and factually erroneous information to the Superior Court.” Cooper accordingly maintains that the Superior Court erred in rejecting these allegations of tampering. As set forth above, the complaint asserts that, contrary to the state court’s own assessment of the § 1405 factors, Cooper meets each of the eight requirements. In alleging that the Superior Court’s findings have “made it impossible for Plaintiff to utilize § 1405 to prove that he was framed,” the emphasis is on this plaintiff. It simply cannot be said that, here, Cooper “does not challenge the adverse [state court] decision[] [itself].” Skinner, 131 S. Ct. at 1298. He attacks the Superior Court judgment explicitly, and so encounters the Rooker-Feldman obstacle that Skinner avoided. In contrast to Skinner, where the prisoner asserted that the Texas statute was constitutionally inadequate as to any prisoner who failed to seek DNA testing before trial, Cooper does not actually launch a broadside against the constitutionality of § 1405. In Skinner, the Court made clear that, unlike a state court decision, “a statute or rule governing the decision may be challenged in a federal action.” Id. at 1298. But Cooper articulates no general challenge to the statute. As the district court noted: 16 COOPER V . RAMOS [T]he only argument regarding the constitutionality of Section 1405 that even arguably could be gleaned from the Complaint is that “Section 1405 violates due process by foreclosing access to DNA testing for convicted criminals who allege that they were framed through planted DNA evidence.” Although Cooper maintains that this contention contemplates a general constitutional attack on the statute, nothing in the text of § 1405 prevents victims of framing from obtaining DNA testing, and the Superior Court’s decision eschewed any categorical holding regarding the adequacy of tampering allegations. Notably, the state court declined to read the text of the DNA testing statute—specifically, its requirement that a defendant demonstrate that the evidence he seeks to test was subject to a sufficient chain of custody, § 1405(f)(2)—to categorically bar relief premised upon evidence tampering claims. The government argued that it was a contradiction for Cooper “to allege an unspecified tampering theory relating to items of evidence that he is also contending meet the necessary chain of custody requirement for purposes of his post-conviction DNA testing motion.” The state court found no incongruity and found that Cooper had met his statutory burden on the requirement: Cooper’s “allegations of tampering do not preclude [Cooper] from meeting his burden under subdivision (f)(2).” In addition, as noted above, the Superior Court denied Cooper’s § 1405 motion not because a tampering theory was categorically insufficient for the statutory requirements, but because Cooper “ha[d] not produced any evidence to support his unspecified tampering theory.” No California court has interpreted § 1405 as COOPER V . RAMOS 17 binding the Superior Court to preclude relief based on tampering. Cf. Skinner, 131 S. Ct. at 1297 (characterizing Skinner’s complaint as “assailing the Texas statute as authoritatively construed [by Texas courts]”). Because Cooper in fact challenges the particular outcome in his state case, “[i]t is immaterial that [Cooper] frames his federal complaint as a constitutional challenge to the state court[’s] decision[], rather than as a direct appeal of th[at] decision[].” Bianchi, 334 F.3d at 900 n.4. Cooper “both asserts as [his] injury legal error or errors by the state court and seeks as [his] remedy relief from the state court judgment.” Kougasian v. TMSL, Inc., 359 F.3d 1136, 1140 (9th Cir. 2004). The Rooker-Feldman doctrine therefore bars the claim. Having established that the essence of Cooper’s first claim is “at least in part a forbidden de facto appeal of a state court judgment,” we next consider whether his additional claims regarding the actions of Ramos, Myers, and the other defendants are “‘inextricably intertwined’ with an issue resolved by the state court judicial decision from which the forbidden de facto appeal is taken.” Noel, 341 F.3d at 1165.