Opinion ID: 4211658
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Mesarosh Claim Relating to Gilcrest

Text: In claim 17, Sanders maintains that Gilcrest’s testimony at Freeman’s trial revealed that “Gilcrest was a complete and total liar.” Stewart’s ex-boyfriend, Gilcrest was one of the first informants to implicate Sanders in the robbery and his trial testimony about his visit to Bob’s Big Boy with Stewart on September 27 was critical to establishing the existence of a conspiracy. The district court analyzed this claim under Mooney-Napue, but Sanders has consistently cited Mesarosh v. United States, 352 U.S. 1 (1956) as the clearly established Supreme Court precedent for this claim. In Mesarosh, the defendants were convicted of violating the Smith Act for advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government. 352 U.S. at 3. When the case reached the Supreme Court on direct review, the Solicitor General informed the Court that one of the principal government witnesses had given false testimony in other similar proceedings, which raised serious doubt as to his veracity in the Mesarosh case. Id. at 4–7. In fact, the Solicitor General conceded that without the witness’s testimony, the conviction of two of the five defendants could not stand. Id. at 10. The government suggested that the case SANDERS V. CULLEN 57 be “remanded to the District Court for a full consideration of the credibility of the testimony” of the witness. Id. at 8. Instead, the Supreme Court reversed the judgments below and directed the lower court to grant the defendants a new trial. Id. at 14. The Court explained: “The dignity of the United States Government will not permit the conviction of any person on tainted testimony. This conviction is tainted, and there can be no other just result than to accord petitioners a new trial.” Id. at 9. The Court deemed the situation in Mesarosh “entirely different” from “a motion for a new trial initiated by the defense, . . . presenting untruthful statements by a Government witness subsequent to the trial as newly discovered evidence affecting his credibility.” Id. at 9–10. One of the reasons cited by the Court was that the government questioned the credibility of its own witness based on testimony “in other proceedings in the same field of activity,” some of which was “positively established as untrue.” Id. at 10. The Supreme Court concluded it would be unreasonable to find the witness “testified truthfully in this case . . . , yet concurrently appeared in the same role in another tribunal and testified falsely.” Id. at 13. Mesarosh applies in “those ‘rare’ situations ‘where the credibility of a key government witness has been “wholly discredited” by the witness’[s] commission of perjury in other cases involving substantially similar subject matter.’” United States v. Berry, 624 F.3d 1031, 1043 (9th Cir. 2010) (quoting United States v. Krasny, 607 F.2d 840, 845 (9th Cir. 1979)). We have granted habeas relief twice in factual circumstances that closely paralleled those found in Mesarosh. See Williams v. United States, 500 F.2d 105 (9th Cir. 1974); United States v. Chisum, 436 F.2d 645 (9th Cir. 1971). In both cases, the 58 SANDERS V. CULLEN government’s case relied heavily on the testimony of narcotics agents who were subsequently charged with perjury and conspiracy to deprive a defendant of his civil rights “in an investigation similar in nature and contemporaneous in time” to the investigation of the habeas petitioners. See Williams, 500 F.2d at 106–08; Chisum, 436 F.2d at 646–48. This case is not one of the rare situations governed by Mesarosh. Sanders identifies a series of inconsistencies between Gilcrest’s testimony at Sanders’s trial and Gilcrest’s testimony at Freeman’s trial but they are a far cry from testimony “in the same field of activity” that was “positively established as untrue.” The first alleged inconsistency pertains to Gilcrest’s testimony at Sanders’s trial that he went to the restaurant “just to drink coffee with [Stewart],” and that Stewart “wanted to go to see how many people [were] working that night.” At Freeman’s trial, Gilcrest testified that Stewart “wanted to see who all was going to work that night or how many people [were] going to be there during closing,” and was then asked: “You have never told us this before, have you?” Gilcrest answered, “No,” apparently forgetting that he gave very similar testimony during Sanders’s trial. Second, Gilcrest was asked explicitly at Freeman’s trial whether he was part of a plan or conspiracy with the people who told him they were going to rob Bob’s Big Boy, and whether he willingly joined such a plan. Gilcrest answered “yes.” When asked what he meant by that, Gilcrest stated: “I went to the restaurant with her to do the planning. I knew what was going down.” But Gilcrest also denied that he intended to take part in the robbery on September 27 and testified that he was not involved in the events of December 14. SANDERS V. CULLEN 59 Third, at Sanders’s trial, Gilcrest testified that he may have asked for the $10,000 reward, but at Freeman’s trial he unequivocally stated that he asked for the money. Fourth, at Freeman’s trial, Gilcrest admitted that he often lied about his name to avoid getting in trouble and that he used a fake name for traffic tickets and to forge stolen money orders. Asked about his use of false names, Gilcrest testified that he did not have a “moral objection to lying to the police” or to Deputy District Attorney Giss, and admitted that he lied at Sanders’s and Stewart’s joint preliminary hearing about whether he wore glasses for farsightedness. Gilcrest also admitted that he lied to the police in his initial statement about a conversation he allegedly had with Sanders, Stewart, and Freeman. He testified at Freeman’s trial that he had never spoken to Sanders, and that he made up the conversation because he “was nervous at the time.” Finally, Sanders argues that Gilcrest may have lied about his income and employment when he testified at Freeman’s trial that he could make $10,000 in six months and that he made “pretty good money.” After testifying that he did electrical work, painting, and plumbing “under somebody else’s license,” the court appointed an attorney to advise Gilcrest, and he thereafter refused to answer questions about his income and employment on the grounds of self- incrimination. Gilcrest’s testimony at Freeman’s trial demonstrates that he lied on a number of occasions and had little hesitation about doing so. He was certainly much more forthcoming about his role in planning the failed robbery attempt at 60 SANDERS V. CULLEN Freeman’s trial,21 but Gilcrest was also exposed as a liar at Sanders’s trial. For example, Sanders’s defense counsel cross-examined Gilcrest about two letters that he sent to Stewart in jail after she was arrested. Defense counsel went through the letters line-by-line with Gilcrest, eliciting multiple admissions that the letters were replete with lies that Gilcrest told Stewart to make himself “look good.” In her closing argument at Sanders’s trial, defense counsel emphasized that the letters contained thirty-seven lies. Also during Sanders’s trial, defense counsel cross-examined Gilcrest extensively about his motivations for coming forward shortly after the crime, and argued in closing that Gilcrest was motivated by the reward money, by jealousy of Sanders’s relationship with Stewart, and by a desire to protect himself from being implicated in the crime. The state court could have distinguished the present case from Mesarosh on at least three grounds. First, unlike the witnesses in Mesarosh, Williams, and Chisum, Gilcrest was not a government agent. Second, Gilcrest’s testimony was only critical to the conspiracy conviction and it was corroborated, at least in part, by Givens’s and Mitchell’s testimony at Sanders’s trial. Finally, the state court could have reasonably distinguished Mesarosh because Sanders’s jury had multiple reasons to doubt Gilcrest’s credibility, and their findings with 21 Giss described Gilcrest as “everything we all despise and detest,” “slippery,” “evasive,” “selfish,” “possibly immoral,” “an opportunist,” and a “type of sleaze,” among other disparaging remarks, in his closing argument at Freeman’s trial. SANDERS V. CULLEN 61 respect to the overt acts of the conspiracy demonstrate that they did not believe all of what Gilcrest had to say. The jury found that Stewart went to the restaurant on September 27, 1980 “for the purpose of planning and facilitating a robbery,” and that she went to the restaurant “a second time to take Brenda Givens home.” Contrary to Gilcrest’s testimony, the jury found that Stewart did not meet with Sanders and Freeman that night for the purpose of planning the robbery. This suggests that the jury may have only believed the parts of Gilcrest’s testimony that were corroborated by Givens and Mitchell. For all of these reasons, we affirm the district court’s denial of Sanders’s habeas petition with respect to the Gilcrest Mesarosh claim.