Opinion ID: 797646
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Ege's Due Process Claim

Text: 36 Ege asserts she was deprived of her due process right to a fair trial because of the trial court's improper admission of Dr. Warnick's bite-mark testimony, which she claims was both substantively and probabilistically unsound. Both parties, as well as the district court, have correctly highlighted the critical portion of Dr. Warnick's trial testimony: 37 Q: Now, Doctor, with regard to your testimony, you indicated that it's highly consistent with the dentition of Defendant Carol Ege; is that correct? 38 A: Yes. 39 Q: Okay. With regard to — let me ask you a question. Let's say you have the Detroit Metropolitan Area, three, three and a half million people. Would anybody else within that kind of number match like she did? 40 A: No, in my expert opinion, nobody else would match up. 41 Tr. Vol. VIII, at 42. Also critical is the judgment of the state court which considered Ege's claims on collateral review: 42 This Court agrees that the testimony regarding the probability that the bite matched the defendant lacked a proper foundation. Expert forensic testimony regarding identification of the defendant based upon a statistical analysis requires a proper foundation. To make a statistical evaluation it is necessary to know the frequency of a particular characteristic in the population. The probability of any combination of known characteristics is equal to the product of the frequency of each. In this case there was no evidence offered to support the expert's conclusion regarding the probability that the defendant made the mark. In other words, the expert did not testify that he had identified particular features of the bite mark that had a known rate of occurrence. Neither did the expert did [sic] testify that he had multiplied these values to reach his conclusion. 43 People v. Ege, Oakland Circuit Case No. 93-125655-FC, January 11, 2000, at 5 (internal citation omitted) (emphasis added). Thus, the state habeas court found it highly problematic not that the prosecution had used Dr. Warnick to introduce bite mark evidence in the first place, but that Warnick had tied his observations to a statement about probabilities that was wholly without foundation. We agree. The prosecution failed to lay any foundation whatsoever, either for Dr. Warnick's connection of the bite mark to Ege's dentition in general, or for Warnick's assertion that the two were connected by a probability of 3.5 million to one. 44 But the state habeas court then ruled that any possible prejudice that could have resulted from improper admission of Dr. Warnick's testimony was negated by the fact that Ege had been permitted to present her own experts in opposition to Dr. Warnick, both of whom rejected Warnick's conclusion that the mark on Thompson's cheek was a bite mark and not simply livor mortis. Id. at 6. Furthermore, the state habeas court noted that 45 this was not a case where the guilt or innocence of the defendant hinged on an unchallenged and suspect expert opinion. Numerous independent witnesses testified to the efforts which the defendant made to secure help in killing the victim, to the steps which she took in one attempt to kill the victim, and to her statements before the murder which accurately predicted the manner in which the victim was ultimately murdered. 46 Id. at 10. Following Michigan Supreme Court precedent, see People v. Mateo, 453 Mich. 203, 551 N.W.2d 891, 896 (1996), the state habeas court inquired into the nature of the evidentiary error and assesse[d] its effect in light of the weight and strength of the untainted evidence. The court concluded that [t]he untainted evidence in this case overwhelmingly pointed to the guilt of [Ege]. People v. Ege, No. 93-125655-FC, at 6. 47 The lack of prejudice notwithstanding, the state habeas court also ruled that Ege's claim was barred by Michigan's contemporaneous objection rule, because her trial counsel failed to object to admission of Dr. Warnick's testimony at any point in the proceedings. 48 (1) The State Habeas Court's Application of Prejudice under Chambers 49 Any review of habeas due process claims based on improper admission of evidence must be cognizant of the Supreme Court's mandate that it is not the province of a federal habeas court to reexamine state-court determinations on statelaw questions. Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U.S. 62, 68, 112 S.Ct. 475, 116 L.Ed.2d 385 (1991). Under this very deferential standard, due process is violated, and thus habeas relief warranted, only if an evidentiary ruling is so egregious that it results in a denial of fundamental fairness. Bugh, 329 F.3d at 512 (6th Cir.2003). Whether the admission of prejudicial evidence constitutes a denial of fundamental fairness turns upon whether the evidence is material in the sense of a crucial, critical highly significant factor. Brown v. O'Dea, 227 F.3d 642, 645 (6th Cir.2000). 50 These principles have their roots in the Supreme Court decision of Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 302-03, 93 S.Ct. 1038, 35 L.Ed.2d 297 (1973), which held that trial errors cannot defeat the ends of justice or otherwise deprive a defendant of her right to a fair trial. In Chambers, the Court was looking at a state trial court's improper exclusion of certain evidence that would potentially have assisted the defendant, but its tenets are equally applicable to situations involving a state trial court's improper admission of certain evidence injurious to the defendant. The ultimate question is therefore whether the state habeas court, in finding that admission of Dr. Warnick's testimony was not prejudicial to the ultimate outcome of Ege's case, unreasonably applied Chambers. 5 51 In the instant case, hindsight assessment of the impact of Dr. Warnick's testimony requires two intertwined assessments of the evidence against Ege: the first, taken in the context of defense counsel's rebuttal experts, and the second, taken in the context of the prosecution's other evidence, all of which was only circumstantial. As to the first assessment, the effectiveness of Ege's rebuttal experts must be viewed in comparison to the substance of the rebutted testimony. We agree with the district court that Dr. Warnick's opinion that the petitioner was the only person in the entire Detroit metropolitan area who could have made the mark on the corpse carried an aura of mathematical precision pointing overwhelmingly to the statistical probability of guilt, when the evidence deserved no such credence. D. Ct. Op., July 22, 2005, at 35. Bite mark evidence may by its very nature be overly prejudicial and unreliable, 6 but it may nevertheless be admitted under Michigan evidence law, and we do not question the Michigan courts' judgment with respect to admission of the bite mark evidence standing alone. See People v. Marsh, 177 Mich. App. 161, 441 N.W.2d 33 (1989). However, Dr. Warnick's statement that among the 3.5 million residents of the Detroit metropolitan area, Ege's teeth, and only Ege's teeth, could have made the mark on Thompson's cheek, was without doubt highly prejudicial. It strains credulity to think that a jury hearing Dr. Warnick's testimony would not immediately place Ege at the scene of Thompson's violent murder, if only her teeth, and not those of 3,499,999 other Detroit residents, were linked to a bite mark on Thompson's cheek. Such testimony expressing opinions or conclusions in terms of statistical probabilities can make the uncertain seem all but proven, and suggest, by quantification, satisfaction of the requirement that guilt be established `beyond a reasonable doubt.' People v. Carlson, 267 N.W.2d 170, 176 (Minn.1978); see also generally Lawrence H. Tribe, Trial by Mathematics, 84 HARV. L.REV. 1329 (1971). Furthermore, the injurious effect of Dr. Warnick's probability testimony was not in any way diffused by the experts put on by Ege's counsel. Both of these experts opined that the mark on Thompson's cheek was livor mortis, and not a bite mark, but neither directly refuted Dr. Warnick's methods in coming to his 3.5 million-to-1 probability determination. Thus, even if a majority of jurors did not believe Dr. Warnick's testimony that the mark was a bite mark, the minority who did would have been inclined to think that such a mark could only have come from Ege. 52 As to the second prejudice inquiry, we must assess the relative influence of the prosecution's non -bite-mark evidence, all of which was circumstantial and none of which placed Ege at the scene of Thompson's murder. We recognize that presentation of physical scene-of-the-crime evidence is not a necessary condition to support a guilty verdict. Obviously, many cases are tried on nonphysical circumstantial evidence alone, and in many cases this circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly points toward the defendant's guilt. And in this case, it is undeniable that some of the circumstantial evidence against Ege — for example, one witness's testimony that Ege told her she could stomp the baby out of [Thompson], slit her throat, rip her up in little pieces and think nothing of it — was strong on its face, even if the witness was later significantly, if not completely, discredited on cross-examination. This case differs from other circumstantial evidence cases, however, in that it appears the prosecution was not willing to try Ege until it had Dr. Warnick's bite mark testimony, indicating its desire to have in hand the one piece of physical evidence potentially linking Ege to the crime. After all, nothing in the record suggests that a single one of the compelling circumstantial proofs offered by the prosecution at trial in 1993 could not also have been offered nine years earlier in 1984, far closer in time to when the murder was actually committed. We are thus led to believe that while the State may have had a good circumstantial case against Ege in 1984, it was not until 1993, when the State finally obtained expert physical evidence connecting Ege to the murder victim, that it felt comfortable moving forward with Ege's prosecution. If the prosecution felt that the bite mark evidence was so important, it does not take much of a cognitive leap to believe that the jury viewed it as important as well. 53 It is not unreasonable to conclude, therefore, that this single piece of physical evidence substantially prejudiced the outcome of Ege's trial, even in light of other circumstantial evidence against her. Furthermore, any argument by the State that its non-bite-mark evidence against Ege was overwhelming simply flies in the face of the findings of its own State Court of Appeals, which noted on direct review how troubling Ege's conviction was, and how many other logical suspects still exist. See People v. Ege, No. 173448, 1996 WL 33359075, at  n. 1 (Mich.Ct.App. Sept. 17, 1996) (noting also that while the volume of circumstantial evidence concerning Ege's animosity towards Thompson was considerable, [t]he credibility of much of this evidence was called into question). This finding by a state court that Ege's conviction was troubling is quite different from the situation in Brown, in which a state court twice concluded that the evidence against the defendant was sufficient to justify his conviction, and thus this Court held it was not objectively unreasonable for the state court to have determined that such evidence did not rise to the level of a crucial or critical factor in the jury's decision to convict. 227 F.3d at 645. 54 In Ege's case, once the state habeas court had concluded that the admission of Dr. Warnick's testimony was error, it was objectively unreasonable, under the tenets espoused by the Supreme Court in Chambers, for the state court to have concluded that this testimony was not prejudicial. It seems clear to us that the bite-mark evidence was a crucial, critical highly significant factor, Brown, 227 F.3d at 645, in the jury's determination of Ege's guilt. 55 (2) Procedural Default — Trial Counsel's Failure to Contemporaneously Object 56 Even though the state habeas court reached the question of whether admission of Dr. Warnick's testimony unfairly prejudiced her trial (concluding, unreasonably, that it did not), the state court ruled that Ege's due process complaint could be disposed of prior to reaching this question. Specifically, the state habeas court ruled that because Ege's trial counsel had failed contemporaneously to object to Dr. Warnick's testimony, any subsequent federal habeas claims raising the evidentiary issue were barred under of the doctrine of procedural default. 57 Ege does not dispute that Michigan's contemporaneous objection rule is a valid state procedural rule. She therefore must confront a hurdle inherent to our federalist system, namely, that a habeas petitioner who has failed to meet the State's procedural requirements for presenting [her] federal claims has deprived the state courts of an opportunity to address those claims in the first instance. Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 732, 111 S.Ct. 2546, 115 L.Ed.2d 640 (1991). In such case, a habeas petitioner is required to demonstrate cause for [her] state-court default of any federal claim, and prejudice therefrom, before the federal habeas court will consider the merits of that claim. Edwards v. Carpenter, 529 U.S. 446, 451, 120 S.Ct. 1587, 146 L.Ed.2d 518 (2000) (emphasis added). Thus, in order to overcome the State's procedural default defense, Ege must show both cause and prejudice for her failure to comply with Michigan's contemporaneous objection rule. The Supreme Court has acknowledged that cause may be established through a showing of counsel's ineffectiveness in failing properly to preserve a claim for review in state court. Id. Not just any deficiency in counsel's performance will do, however; the assistance must have been so ineffective as to violate the Federal Constitution — in Ege's case, her Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. Id. 58 The district court correctly noted that as a general rule, trial counsel's strategic decisions on how the trial is to be conducted are afforded great deference. See Strickland, 466 U.S. at 689, 104 S.Ct. 2052 (holding that a court must indulge a strong presumption that counsel's conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance); see also Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 510, 521, 123 S.Ct. 2527, 156 L.Ed.2d 471 (2003) (declining to articulate specific guidelines for trial counsel conduct, and instead emphasizing that the proper measure of attorney performance remains simply reasonableness under prevailing professional norms.) Nevertheless, the district court was also correct that there must be some limit to this deference: 59 In this case, it is difficult to conceive of a reason for not objecting to the bite mark evidence and the statistical opinion. As the state court of appeals observed in its opinion on direct appeal, [t]he defense's theory as presented in its opening statement was that defendant could not have been at the crime scene on the evening of the murder because as [sic] she was at the home all evening, and [n]one of the evidence submitted to the crime lab connected defendant to the crime. Since the bite mark evidence was the only physical evidence connecting the petitioner to the crime scene at the time of the murder, challenging its admissibility likely would have been a sound decision with no adverse consequence. Although bite mark evidence had been used in other Michigan prosecutions, Dr. Warnick never examined the bite wound himself, and the use of a photograph of the wound to make the comparison appears to be novel. Even if defense counsel could not have anticipated the prosecutor's question soliciting the unsupported statistical evidence, one might expect that lodging a contemporaneous objection and moving to strike the evidence, or perhaps for a mistrial, would be standard operating procedure for a competent defense lawyer. The flaw in Dr. Warnick's statistical opinion should have been obvious and its admissibility readily assailable. . . . The basis for objecting to this damaging yet unsubstantiated opinion evidence should have been obvious to defense counsel, and the failure to lodge the objection was substandard performance under prevailing professional norms. 60 D. Ct. Op., July 22, 2005, at 27-31 (internal citations omitted). We agree with the district court's resolution of the matter. It is true that Strickland and Wiggins compel a federal habeas court to give a wide berth to trial counsel's actions, and that in most instances, an attorney's decision to put on counter-experts rather than object directly to expert testimony is strategically reasonable. But where, as in the instant case, physical evidence is presented linking a defendant to the crime scene, and it is the only physical evidence showing such a link, then defense counsel must object to its admission if no proper foundation has been laid by the presenter. Anything else is objectively unreasonable. Furthermore, the fact that defense counsel chose to introduce counter-experts to Warnick's testimony does not insulate counsel's performance. There is no reason counsel could not simultaneously have objected to Warnick's testimony and attempted to rebut it with experts of his own. 61 To establish sufficient prejudice to overcome procedural default with an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, a petitioner must show a reasonable probability that, but for her counsel's errors, a different result likely would have occurred. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052. A petitioner does not have to establish, however, that counsel's error more likely than not altered the outcome of the case. Id. at 693, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Reasonable probability under Strickland, then, is a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome. Id. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Given our previous discussion of actual prejudice caused by erroneous admission of Dr. Warnick's testimony, supra, we conclude that the Strickland prejudice standard is met as well. Thus, Ege has met both the nested cause and nested prejudice prongs required to use an ineffective assistance of counsel claim as cause for her procedural default. 7 Ege's non-compliance with Michigan's procedural default rule may therefore be excused. 62