Opinion ID: 3000054
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Judicial Bias Claim

Text: In adjudicating section 2254 claims, we are generally bound by the deference requirements of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). Pursuant to AEDPA, a state habeas petitioner can succeed if he demonstrates that the state court judgment was either contrary to or an unreasonable application of federal law. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). However, for the reasons discussed above, in this case there is no state court decision on the merits of the issue at hand. We are thus required to “dispose of the matter as law and justice require.” See Harrison v. McBride, 428 F.3d 652, 665 (7th Cir. 2006) (citing 28 U.S.C. § 2243). To qualify for a writ of habeas corpus, Guest must demonstrate that “he is in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.” See id. at 665 (quoting 28 U.S.C. § 2254). The Supreme Court has observed that “[a] fair trial in a fair tribunal is a basic requirement of due process.” In re No. 04-3736 7 Murchison, 349 U.S. 133, 136 (1955); see also McBride, 428 F.3d at 667 (“Fairness of course requires an absence of actual bias in the trial of cases . . .”). As we stated in McBride, “due process is violated when a judge presides in a case that ‘would offer a possible temptation to the average man . . . to forget the burden of proof required to convict the defendant’ or would ‘lead him not to hold the balance nice, clear, and true between the state and the accused.’ ” Id. (quoting Tumey v. State of Ohio, 273 U.S 510 (1927)). Guest alleges that Judge Pompey’s rulings were unduly harsh, exhibiting bias; he specifically identifies Judge Pompey’s actions: (1) “inducing Guest to waive his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial”; (2) “failing to determine that Guest’s waiver was [not] knowing and voluntary”; (3) “failing to declare a mistrial or, alternatively, a continuance for a hearing to determine what happened to possibly exculpatory evidence”; (4) “curtailing crossexamination of a State witness on key testimony about the timing and duration of critical events”; and (5) “returning guilty verdicts on multiple counts of murder (and refusing to provide specific findings of fact) notwithstanding a weak case from the State and inexplicably missing evidence.” The gravamen of Guest’s judicial bias claim is that as Operation Greylord approached a climax and Judge Pompey became aware of his possible indictment, he sought to bolster his conviction statistics by exhibiting bias against the defendants in certain of his cases in which he had not accepted bribes. This “compensatory bias” theory, which reaches deep into the very psyche of Judge Pompey for its essential premise, depends on four principal types of evidence uncovered by Guest during his investigation: (1) testimony from Robinson (Judge Pompey’s bailiff) that he passed bribes to Judge Pompey on “hundreds” of occasions; (2) testimony from a former 8 No. 04-3736 federal prosecutor involved in Operation Greylord that Judge Pompey was involved in significant corruption; (3) evidence from FBI files implicating Judge Pompey as a bribe-taker; and (4) evidence from the U.S. Attorney’s Office files implicating Judge Pompey. We need not engage in an exhaustive discussion of this evidence. It is clear from the record that, as Judge Hibbler found, Judge Pompey was almost certainly involved in significant bribe-taking and corruption during his time on the bench.1 The only major source of factual disagreement on this point between the district court and Guest stems from the district court’s conclusion that there was little evidence of corruption around the time of Guest’s trial. Judge Hibbler found that most of the evidence related to an earlier period in Judge Pompey’s career—the time when he was presiding over the Cook County preliminary hearing courtroom. Guest argues that the evidence suggests that Judge Pompey was engaged in bribe-taking contemporaneously with his trial. The district court relied on our decision in Bracy v. Schomig, 286 F.3d 406, 408 (7th Cir. 2002),2 in concluding that Guest’s evidence was insufficient to succeed on his compensatory bias claim. In Bracy, this court, sitting en banc, vacated the sentences but allowed the convic- 1 Indeed, in Bracy v. Gramley, the United States Supreme Court took note of the evidence against Judge Pompey that surfaced in the investigation of Judge Maloney. 520 U.S. 899, 907 n. 7 (1997) (“The Government introduced evidence that Maloney regularly bribed Judge Maurice Pompey and Cook County Deputy Sheriff Lucius Robinson (who would later serve as Maloney’s ‘bag man’)”). 2 Bracy v. Schomig was decided on remand from the Supreme Court, which reversed our earlier decision and found that the petitioners were entitled to discovery on their bias claims. See Bracy v. Gramley, 520 U.S. at 908-09. No. 04-3736 9 tions to stand of two individuals who were tried before Judge Maloney. Unlike Judge Pompey, Judge Maloney was actually convicted of taking bribes, and his conviction was for activity that occurred contemporaneously with the petitioners’ trials. The petitioners in Bracy asserted the same type of compensatory bias theory asserted here by Guest. Just as the district court concluded with respect to Judge Pompey in the instant case, we found in Bracy that “Maloney is not entitled to the usual presumption that ordinarily informs judicial bias cases—a presumption that public officials have ‘properly discharged their official duties.’ ” Id. at 409 (quoting United States v. Chem. Found., 272 U.S. 1, 15 (1926)). Nevertheless, we concluded that “the fact that Maloney was so exceedingly corrupt does not support a per se finding that every case over which he presided was infected.” Id. at 410. We observed that a petitioner pressing a judicial bias claim must demonstrate that the judge was “actually biased in petitioner’s own case.” Id. (quoting Bracy v. Gramley, 520 U.S. at 909).3 In attempting to do so, the petitioners in Bracy pointed out minor unfavorable rulings on various evidentiary issues. We observed that “[f]indings of this sort, which judges often make favoring a law enforcement version of conflicting events, do not support a claim of actual bias.” See id. at 415. Bracy dictates that Guest’s claims must fail. At both ends of the case, Guest’s judicial bias claim is weaker than 3 Judge Evans’s opinion for the court, sitting en banc, also noted that there was substantial disagreement within the court on several questions related to the meaning of this phrase (Judges Posner and Rovner both filed opinions concurring in part and