Opinion ID: 4022040
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Collateral-Estoppel Argument

Text: Sampson argues at greater length that collateral estoppel, which is embodied in the Fifth Amendment guarantee against double jeopardy, Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436, 445 (1970), bars the relitigation of the two non-statutory aggravating 8 Sampson argues that Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), indicates that a lower court may depart from controlling Supreme Court precedent when it addresses issues implicating the Eighth Amendment. Whatever Roper's implications for stare decisis in the Eighth Amendment capital punishment context -- an issue we do not address today -- we know of no support for such a proposition in the context of the Double Jeopardy Clause, and Sampson provides none. - 18 - factors.9 His argument again runs directly against Supreme Court precedent, and fares no better than his acquittal argument.10 As the Supreme Court explained in Bies, issue preclusion, also known as collateral estoppel, bars successive litigation of 'an issue of fact or law' that 'is actually litigated and determined by a valid and final judgment, and . . . is essential to the judgment.' 556 U.S. at 834 (alteration in original) (quoting Restatement (Second) of Judgments § 27 (1980)). The Bies Court emphasized that [a] determination ranks as necessary or essential only when the final outcome hinges on it. Id. at 835 (citing 18 C. Wright, A. Miller & E. Cooper, Federal Practice & Procedure § 4421, at 543 (2d ed. 2002)). The Bies Court found that the issue for which collateral estoppel had been claimed -- evidence of the defendant's mild to 9 One might wonder why, if a Fifth Amendment Double Jeopardy Clause argument that there was an acquittal on the merits fails, as a matter of logic there is still a double-jeopardy claim available to make. No party makes an issue of this and both accept the analytical structure presented by Sampson, so we have done so as well. We conclude that Bies, Sattazahn, and Poland resolve this question against Sampson. 10 The district court rejected Sampson's collateralestoppel argument on two grounds. It held that, because the penalty-phase jury's verdict was vacated for juror bias, the penalty-phase verdict does not have any preclusive effect. And it held that collateral estoppel did not apply because the rejection of [the non-statutory aggravating factors] was not essential to the judgment of death. Because we find the latter rationale sufficient to dispose of the issue, it is unnecessary to address the effect of the vacatur for jury bias on Sampson's collateralestoppel argument. - 19 - borderline mental retardation, which served as a mitigating factor in the original jury's sentencing deliberations, id. at 828 -- failed to meet this standard, id. at 835. The defendant had been sentenced to death by the original jury, and that sentence was affirmed on review by the Ohio appellate courts, with the Ohio Supreme Court observ[ing] that Bies' 'mild to borderline mental retardation merit[ed] some weight in mitigation,' but conclud[ing] that 'the aggravating circumstances outweigh[ed] the mitigating factors beyond a reasonable doubt.' Id. at 828 (second and fourth alterations in original) (quoting State v. Bies, 658 N.E. 2d 754, 761-62 (Ohio 1996)). The Bies Court reasoned that it [was] clear that the [Ohio] courts' statements regarding Bies' mental capacity were not necessary to the judgments affirming his death sentence. Id. at 835. The Court held that the Sixth Circuit, which found that collateral estoppel did apply to the issue of the defendant's retardation, erred by conflat[ing] a determination necessary to the bottom-line judgment with a subsidiary finding that, standing alone, is not outcome determinative. Id. The Court concluded that [i]ssue preclusion cannot transform Bies' loss at the sentencing phase into a partial victory. Id. The same is true here. The two non-statutory aggravating factors rejected by the first penalty-phase jury were not necessary to Sampson's death - 20 - sentence. Indeed, [f]ar from being necessary to the judgment, the jury's failure to find unanimously that the government proved the two non-statutory aggravating factors beyond a reasonable doubt, like the retardation mitigating factor in Bies, cuts against [the judgment] -- making [it] quintessentially the kind[] of ruling[] not eligible for issue-preclusion treatment. Id. (quoting Bies v. Bagley, 535 F.3d 520, 533 (6th Cir. 2008) (Sutton, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc)). And at least one other federal court has come to the same conclusion: that collateral estoppel does not bar the introduction at a second penalty-phase proceeding of non-statutory aggravating factors presented to, and not found proven by, an earlier penalty-phase jury. United States v. Stitt, 760 F. Supp. 2d 570, 584 (E.D. Va. 2010). Sampson attempts unsuccessfully to distinguish Bies. He first observes that the prior determination [in Bies] . . . was made by a court in an opinion (emphasis omitted), whereas the prior determinations in this case were made by a jury in special findings (emphasis omitted). He contrasts the spare statements reviewed in Bies, 556 U.S. at 834, with the more elaborate process of the special findings at issue here. But the collateral-estoppel principle articulated in Bies makes no distinction between judge- and jury-made determinations, nor any distinction based on the - 21 - procedure for making the determination -- it focuses on whether the determination was necessary to the prior judgment. Sampson also argues that unlike here, where the issues being relitigated are legally identical to issues in the prior determination, the issue in the second proceeding in Bies -- whether, under the rule announced in Atkins, the defendant's retardation rendered him ineligible for the death penalty -- involved a legal principle that was new and different from the prior determination. He argues that the Court noted that novelty as another basis for not finding collateral estoppel. See Bies, 556 U.S. at 836–37. But the Court made the observation that this would be an alternative ground to reject the collateral-estoppel argument even if the core requirements for issue preclusion had been met, id. at 836; its essential point was that, as here, those core requirements were not present. All of Sampson's other purported distinctions11 share the same flaw. They do not affect the principle articulated in Bies 11 Sampson argues that here, unlike in Bies, there was every incentive to fully litigate the non-statutory aggravating factors; that the non-statutory factors must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt under the FDPA, unlike the Ohio mitigating factors at issue in Bies; that the appeal in Bies, unlike Sampson's, was governed by the limitations on federal habeas review of state judgments; and that Bies involved a second run at vacating [the defendant's] death sentence, 556 U.S. at 834 (quoting Bagley, 535 F.3d at 531 (Sutton, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc)), and not an effort by the State to retry him or to increase his punishment, id. The government correctly notes that none of these distinctions is material to the collateral-estoppel - 22 - that collateral estoppel requires a determination that is essential to the prior judgment. That principle dictates that we reject Sampson's collateral-estoppel argument. There is simply no way the two non-statutory aggravating factors at issue here were essential to the first jury's death sentence.12 Sampson further contends that a number of other decisions of federal courts provide alternative analyses that support his collateral-estoppel claim. They do not. He relies on language in this court's decision in United States v. BravoFernandez, 790 F.3d 41 (1st Cir. 2015), cert. granted, 136 S. Ct. 1491 (2016), including that collateral-estoppel claims must be set in a practical frame and viewed with an eye to all the circumstances of the proceedings, id. at 46 (quoting Ashe, 397 U.S. at 444), and that if a review of [the record of the prior proceeding] shows that a 'rational jury,' as a practical matter, decided adversely to the government an issue to be relitigated in the new prosecution, then the defendant gets the benefit of collateral estoppel, id. But that language comes from an inquiry principles articulated by the Bies Court and the Second Restatement of Judgments. 12 The government admitted at oral argument that as a matter of logic its position is that a sentencing jury's determinations on non-statutory aggravating factors can never be essential to the judgment in an FDPA case, because non-statutory aggravating factors are neither necessary to nor sufficient for the imposition of the death penalty under the FDPA. - 23 - into the preclusive effect of acquittals on an attempt to prove various facts in a retrial of vacated convictions arising from the same split verdict. See id. at 43, 48. In other words, the determinations at issue in Bravo-Fernandez were potentially necessary to the prior judgment; the determinations that Sampson attacks could not have been. Sampson's reliance on Delap v. Dugger, 890 F.2d 285 (11th Cir. 1989), abrogated on other grounds by Floyd v. Sec'y, Fla. Dep't of Corr., 638 F. App'x 909, 924 (11th Cir. 2016) (per curiam) (citing Fry v. Pliler, 551 U.S. 112, 119–20 (2007), and Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619, 631 (1993)) is equally misplaced. He argues that the case illustrates that an impact on the express terms of a judgment is not an absolute prerequisite for collateral estoppel. This proposition is simply not so, and misconstrues Delap. Delap, in any event, does not control our decision. Delap was decided in 1989, 27 years ago, and well before Sattazahn and Bies, the Supreme Court cases that dictate our holding. Delap concerned a trial in which the prosecution pursued multiple theories of guilt on one count of murder. The defendant was convicted of murder on one theory (first-degree premeditation), and the trial judge found that there was insufficient evidence to convict the defendant on a theory that the murder was committed during a felony. 890 F.2d at 308–12. The Eleventh Circuit first held that the insufficiency-of-the- - 24 - evidence finding on the theory that there was a concomitant felony constituted an acquittal, because the finding decide[d] that the prosecution has not proved its case. Id. at 313 (quoting Bullington, 451 U.S. at 443). It then asked whether the felony murder acquittal as to guilt bar[red on retrial] a finding that the murder occurred during the commission of a felony so as to constitute an aggravating factor justifying imposition of the death penalty. Id. at 314. The court emphasized that in this case Delap's acquittal of felony murder occurred during the guilt/innocence phase of his first trial. Id. at 318. It distinguished and said that it need not address what collateral estoppel effect, if any, would result had the jury at the sentencing phase of Delap's first trial concluded that he had not committed murder during the course of a felony. Id. Sampson pled guilty, and his challenge concerns the collateral-estoppel effect of one sentencing-phase determination on another. Delap is inapposite. As we explained in Manganella v. Evanston Ins. Co., 700 F.3d 585 (1st Cir. 2012), another case Sampson cites: We do not ask whether the resolution of an issue was necessary to reach the same outcome; rather, the inquiry is whether the issue was necessary to the decision actually rendered. Id. at 594. By that standard, his argument fails: the non-statutory aggravating factors simply could not have been necessary to the decision - 25 - actually rendered. Id.; see Bies, 556 U.S. at 835. Because the non-statutory aggravating factors were not necessary to the determination of his original death sentence, the government may relitigate them at the new penalty-phase proceeding. In the end, Sampson's argument is that there should be a more relaxed standard for collateral-estoppel claims in the context of capital sentencing. But the Supreme Court's scrupulous doctrinal reliance on the Second Restatement of Judgments in Bies, 556 U.S. at 834, makes clear that the core requirements of collateral estoppel apply with full force in the capitalsentencing context. Sampson's argument fails to meet those requirements. Finally, Sampson makes a vague Eighth Amendment values argument trying to strengthen his collateral-estoppel position. He emphasizes the general principle that [the Supreme] Court has demanded that factfinding procedures aspire to a heightened standard of reliability, Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399, 411 (1986) (plurality opinion), and argues from it that [r]eliability could only be impaired by allowing prosecutors multiple opportunities to pursue particular aggravating factors. The argument cannot save a double-jeopardy claim when the claim fails on its own terms. The district court correctly ruled that it would not strike the government's notice of intended use of the non-statutory - 26 - aggravating factors of future dangerousness and murder to obstruct justice because the earlier jury's findings were not an acquittal, nor were they essential to the jury's death sentence. The Double Jeopardy Clause does not bar the government from alleging those non-statutory aggravating factors again at Sampson's new penaltyphase proceeding.