Opinion ID: 182274
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Inapplicability of Van Arsdall as a Source of Clearly Established Federal Law.

Text: Petitioner's reliance on Van Arsdall as the primary legal authority governing his confrontation claim is misplaced. Van Arsdall involved a constitutional challenge to restrictions imposed on a defendant's impeachment, on cross-examination, of a prosecution witness for bias. There, the Supreme Court announced that a criminal defendant states a violation of the Confrontation Clause by showing that he was prohibited from engaging in otherwise appropriate cross-examination designed to show a prototypical form of bias on the part of the witness, and thereby `to expose to the jury the facts from which jurors ... could appropriately draw inferences relating to the reliability of the witness.' Van Arsdall, 475 U.S. at 680, 106 S.Ct. 1431 (alteration in original) (quoting Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 318, 94 S.Ct. 1105, 39 L.Ed.2d 347 (1974)). Before turning to the facts of the case before it, the Van Arsdall Court emphasized that trial judges retain wide latitude insofar as the Confrontation Clause is concerned to impose reasonable limits on ... cross-examination. Id. at 679, 106 S.Ct. 1431. It explained that such reasonable limits may be justified by concerns about, among other things, harassment, prejudice, confusion of the issues, the witness' safety, or interrogation that is repetitive or only marginally relevant. Id. It also reiterated its previous admonition that `the Confrontation Clause guarantees an opportunity for effective cross-examination, not cross-examination that is effective in whatever way, and to whatever extent, the defense might wish.' Id. (quoting Delaware v. Fensterer, 474 U.S. 15, 20, 106 S.Ct. 292, 88 L.Ed.2d 15 (1985) (per curiam)). The Van Arsdall Court nevertheless concluded that, [b]y ... cutting off all questioning about an event that the State conceded had taken place and that a jury might reasonably have found furnished the witness a motive for favoring the prosecution in his testimony, the court's ruling violated [Van Arsdall]'s rights secured by the Confrontation Clause. Id. (emphasis added). The Supreme Court's application of Van Arsdall has always involved evaluation of restrictions on cross-examination intended to impeach the credibility of the witness being examined. Nonetheless, the petitioner invites us to hold that Van Arsdall clearly extends to a restriction on his cross-examination of two prosecution witnesses (Officer Gouveia and Officer Smith) for the purpose of impeaching a third (Lynch). We decline the invitation. Van Arsdall 's application of its own rule was both narrow and fact-specific. That narrow application and the decision's bias-specific considerations provide little guidance on how the rule ought to apply in a case as different as the one at bar. Indeed, the blanket rule suggested by the petitioner, under which the Confrontation Clause is violated by any restriction on cross-examination excluding evidence that would have left the jury with a significantly different impression of the issue for which the evidence was offered, reflects the consequences of unmooring the rule articulated in that decision from its direct impeachment context. Moreover, applying Van Arsdall to the facts of the instant petition is in tension with both the internal logic of the Van Arsdall decision and existing case law. A central premise of the Van Arsdall decision was that the focus of the ... inquiry in determining whether the confrontation right has been violated must be on the particular witness, not on the outcome of the entire trial, because the focus of the Confrontation Clause is on individual witnesses. Id. at 680, 106 S.Ct. 1431. Yet the primary evidentiary function of the testimony sought by the petitioner would have been to impeach the identification made by Lynch, a witness other than the one being examined. In contrast to Van Arsdall 's explicit witness-specific approach, the petitioner implores us to hold that Van Arsdall clearly established that the significance to his defense of that missed extrinsic impeachment opportunity is the single relevant factor in finding a Confrontation Clause violation. However, we have previously explained that the Supreme Court's Confrontation Clause jurisprudence left a defendant's right to introduce extrinsic impeachment evidence as an open constitutional question. [11] See, e.g., United States v. Catalan-Roman, 585 F.3d 453, 465 (1st Cir.2009) (Although the ability to pursue an impeaching line of inquiry with the introduction of extrinsic evidence supporting that inquiry might be viewed as part and parcel of the right to cross-examination, this circuit has yet to decide whether the Confrontation Clause provides defendants a right to impeach witnesses through extrinsic evidence.). Since the rule of Van Arsdall was articulated in a case, and applied to circumstances, much different from the circumstances in which the petitioner now seeks to employ it, we cannot conclude that Van Arsdall squarely established a specific legal rule applicable to the petitioner's case. See Knowles v. Mirzayance, ___ U.S. ___, 129 S.Ct. 1411, 1419, 173 L.Ed.2d 251 (2009). Van Arsdall does provide a clearly established federal rule for a class of cases, but it is not the class within which the petitioner's case falls. Therefore, the Kirouac test is not contrary to the rule Van Arsdall adopted nor was Van Arsdall unreasonably applied in this case.