Opinion ID: 162318
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Refusal to Instruct on Second Degree Murder

Text: 24 Mr. Willingham argues that he was improperly denied an instruction on second degree depraved-mind murder, citing Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625, 100 S.Ct. 2382, 65 L.Ed.2d 392 (1980) (invalidating death sentence for first degree murder where jury was not permitted to consider lesser included offense). In light of radical swings in state law as to whether depraved-mind murder even qualifies as a lesser included offense (LIO) of first degree malice murder, this is not simply a straightforward Eighth Amendment claim under Beck and its progeny. A brief history of the pertinent Oklahoma case law will indicate why Mr. Willingham has joined ex post facto and equal protection objections to his Beck claim. 25 Prior to Mr. Willingham's direct appeal in 1997, the OCCA considered second degree murder a LIO of first degree murder. Hooks v. Ward, 184 F.3d 1206, 1233 n. 25 (10th Cir.1999) (quoting Boyd v. Ward, 179 F.3d 904, 916 (10th Cir.1999), cert. denied, 528 U.S. 1167, 120 S.Ct. 1188, 145 L.Ed.2d 1093 (2000)). However, his claim that the trial court had violated Beck by refusing to instruct on second degree murder prompted the OCCA to take note of a 1976 amendment to the state's murder scheme that it had theretofore overlooked. Willingham, 947 P.2d at 1081 (Apparently, our case law failed to recognize this change in the statutes.). In light of that amendment, second degree depraved-mind murder now requires an act imminently dangerous to another person, Okla. Stat. tit. 21, § 701.8(1) — an element that malice murder, which turns on the intent to kill rather than on any particular characterization of the means used to carry out that intent, does not require, see Okla. Stat. tit. 21, § 701.7. Consequently, pursuant to the statutory elements test for identifying LIOs in Oklahoma at the time, the OCCA concluded that depraved-mind murder was not a LIO of malice murder and, hence, could not provide a basis for Mr. Willingham's Beck claim. Willingham, 947 P.2d at 1081-82. 26 Two years later, however, in Shrum v. State, 991 P.2d 1032 (Okla. Crim.App. 1999), the OCCA returned to the view that second degree murder is a LIO of first degree malice murder — this time notwithstanding the 1976 statutory change — pursuant to a global reassessment of its approach to LIOs in the murder context. Abandoning the elements test altogether, the OCCA held as a categorical matter that all lesser forms of homicide are necessarily included and instructions on lesser forms of homicide should be administered if they are supported by the evidence. Gilson v. State, 8 P.3d 883, 917 (Okla.Crim.App. 2000) (summarizing Shrum ), cert. denied, 532 U.S. 962, 121 S.Ct. 1496, 149 L.Ed.2d 381 (2001). 27 This is the legal backdrop against which Mr. Willingham claims Beck entitled him to a LIO instruction on second degree murder. Should his Beck claim fail based on the brief break in state law during which second degree murder was not considered a LIO of malice murder, Mr. Willingham insists he must be afforded relief under ex post facto and/or equal protection principles.
28 In fact, the district court did rely on the window of unfavorable state LIO law to deny Mr. Willingham's Beck claim. Invoking Hopkins v. Reeves, 524 U.S. 88, 95-100, 118 S.Ct. 1895, 141 L.Ed.2d 76 (1998), for the principle that Beck is not violated if a state court refuses to instruct on an offense that, under state law, is not a LIO of first degree murder, the district court held that the OCCA's construction of the second degree murder statute on his direct appeal controlled and defeated his Beck claim. We agree. While Hopkins indicated that state courts may not frustrate the values embodied in Beck through arbitrary interpretation of hierarchical murder schemes, see Hopkins, 524 U.S. at 100, 118 S.Ct. 1895; see also Bagby v. Sowders, 894 F.2d 792, 794-95 (6th Cir.1990) (en banc), no such impropriety has been demonstrated here. As explained above, the OCCA's rejection of Mr. Willingham's Beck claim was grounded in a reasoned, albeit belated, application of the prevailing LIO standard to the controlling statutory definitions of the offenses involved. 29 Before turning to Mr. Willingham's resultant ex post facto argument, we briefly consider two other bases for rejecting his Beck claim which would not implicate any ex post facto problem. First, the state trial court did instruct the jury on first degree heat of passion manslaughter, which suggests the district court could have denied the Beck claim because, under Schad v. Arizona, 501 U.S. 624, 111 S.Ct. 2491, 115 L.Ed.2d 555 (1991), [t]he Beck requirement is satisfied so long as the jury had the option of at least one lesser included offense, even if there are other lesser included offenses also supported by the evidence. James v. Gibson, 211 F.3d 543, 555 (10th Cir.2000), cert. denied, 531 U.S. 1128, 121 S.Ct. 886, 148 L.Ed.2d 794 (2001). However, Schad's qualification on Beck presumes that the LIO presented to the jury had evidentiary support in the record, as otherwise it would not have provided a true third option to obviate the death-or-acquittal dilemma Beck was intended to resolve. Valdez v. Ward, 219 F.3d 1222, 1242 (10th Cir.2000), cert. denied, 532 U.S. 979, 121 S.Ct. 1618, 149 L.Ed.2d 481 (2001); see Schad, 501 U.S. at 648, 111 S.Ct. 2491 (explaining that, while Beck dilemma can be obviated by one LIO, [t]hat is not to suggest that Beck would be satisfied by instructing the jury on just any [LIO], even one without any support in the evidence); cf. Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 325, 334-35, 96 S.Ct. 3001, 49 L.Ed.2d 974 (1976) (invalidating, as arbitrary, state procedure allowing juries to avoid death penalty through use of LIOs regardless of supporting evidence). Here, both the OCCA and the district court held that the evidence did not warrant a heat of passion manslaughter instruction, and the trial record bears out that determination. The minimal nature of the alleged provocation, and the length of time between that provocation and the murder, during which Mr. Willingham made other office calls showing nothing remarkable in his demeanor, clearly undercut this LIO. Thus, we cannot rely on Schad to provide an alternative rationale for rejecting Mr. Willingham's Beck claim. 30 A second possibility is that the evidence simply did not warrant the second degree murder instruction Mr. Willingham insists that he should have received. The OCCA's opinion is unclear on this question. At one point the OCCA did note, as one of three bases upon which Beck can be distinguished from this case, that  Beck only requires an instruction on lesser included offenses when the evidence supports such an instruction, but then went on to discuss the inadequacy of the evidence solely with respect to the manslaughter instruction. Willingham, 947 P.2d at 1082-83. The district court, which relied exclusively on the Hopkins rationale cited above, also did not assess whether the trial evidence would have warranted a second degree murder instruction in any event. 31 Our own review of the trial record leads us to conclude that, had a second degree murder instruction otherwise been available under state LIO law, the evidence was legally sufficient to warrant such a charge. The critical elements of depraved-mind murder are that the death was caused by conduct which was imminently dangerous to another person and that the conduct [was] not done with the intention of taking the life of any particular individual. Id. at 1081. The former element is clearly established by the violent nature of Mr. Willingham's physical assault on Mrs. Van Wey, and the latter element, while ultimately rejected by the jury's verdict, was nevertheless a plausible option on the evidence—indeed, as the OCCA noted, lack of intent to kill was the only theory of defense at trial, id. at 1080. 32 Thus, the Hopkins analysis discussed above, which rests on the temporary swing in Oklahoma LIO law conclusively disadvantageous to Mr. Willingham, appears to be the only rationale available for rejecting the Beck claim on the merits. As a result, Mr. Willingham's ex post facto objection cannot be avoided.
33 It might appear that this claim, which arose only in response to the OCCA's new construction of the amended second degree murder statute in its decision on Mr. Willingham's direct appeal, has never been exhausted in state court. However, Mr. Willingham raised it in a petition for rehearing from that decision, which was denied without explanation by the OCCA. Under Aycox v. Lytle, 196 F.3d 1174, 1177-78 (1999), the latter disposition could still be entitled to deference under § 2254(d), even though it would be left to the federal courts to articulate an appropriate rationale for the OCCA's summary decision. As it happens, the OCCA explained in a later case why the change in LIO law effected by its decision on Mr. Willingham's appeal did not violate any ex post facto prohibition. In Phillips v. State, 989 P.2d 1017, 1034 (Okla.Crim.App. 1999), the OCCA rejected an essentially identical claim for the following reason: 34 Although Willingham was handed down six (6) months after the trial in this case, the law upon which the decision that second degree depraved mind murder is not a lesser included offense of malice murder was based was the 1976 amendment to the statute. Therefore, as the statutory language upon which this Court relied for its authority was in effect at the time of the murder and trial in this case, it appears that no possible ex post facto violation is present. 35 The problem with this rationale, which might be upheld under § 2254(d) in the context of a retroactive legislative change as a reasonable application of Ex Post Facto Clause jurisprudence, is that, as noted in footnote 3 above, Mr. Willingham's claim arises, rather, under the Due Process Clause and is therefore governed by somewhat different principles never considered by the OCCA. 36 The Supreme Court recently clarified that due process limitations on the retroactive application of judicial interpretations of criminal statutes apply to those decisions that are `unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue.' Rogers, 532 U.S. at 461, 121 S.Ct. 1693 (quoting Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 354, 84 S.Ct. 1697, 12 L.Ed.2d 894 (1964) (quotation omitted)). This court employed appropriate due process standards in this context before Rogers' clarification/reaffirmation of Bouie. Of particular relevance here is Fultz v. Embry, 158 F.3d 1101 (10th Cir.1998), in which we held that a state decision, much like Willingham, belatedly interpreting and applying legislative amendments a number of years ... after passage of these new laws was an example of the sort of foreseeable decision whose retroactive application was constitutionally permissible. Id. at 1103-04. 37 Of course, the question whether the OCCA's decision in Willingham was unexpected and indefensible also depends on the merit or plausibility of its holding in light of the legal principles and statutory language on which it was based. In that regard, it should be clear from what has been said above that the OCCA's application of its statutory elements test to the amended second degree murder statute cannot be characterized as indefensible, even if the OCCA's prior failure to acknowledge the statutory change made its sudden attention to the matter unexpected. Further, the OCCA's later reversal of position in Shrum reflected a global reassessment of its approach to the LIO question — resulting in its abandonment of the straightforward but inflexible elements test for a broader approach permitting instruction on any lesser homicide offense supported by the trial record — and, thus, Shrum's contrary result does not suggest that the OCCA's analysis in Willingham was indefensible on its own terms. In sum, we hold that Mr. Willingham has failed to make out a due process violation under the Rogers-Bouie standard.
38 Mr. Willingham argues that when the OCCA restored the law preceding Willingham, in Shrum,  but left out in the cold those few cases [denying LIO claims] which had begun with Willingham,  the OCCA irrationally denied [him] the protections mandated by Beck and afforded Oklahoma capital defendants both before and after him, thereby violating his right to equal protection under the law. Aplt. Br. at 25-26. This contention merits little comment. In light of the preceding discussion of the OCCA's reasoning in Willingham and Shrum, the charge of irrational discrimination is unfounded. Moreover, as Mr. Willingham concedes, he did not raise this equal protection issue below (nor has he exhausted it in the state courts).