Opinion ID: 809802
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Judgment of the State Trial Court

Text: The State insists that Hartfield is being held pursuant to the 1977 judgment of the state trial court, which was then appealed, reversed, and, maybe, revived in some way by the Governor’s order and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ silence. Two magistrate judges and two district courts have already disagreed, determining that the reversal of Hartfield’s conviction by the Court of Criminal Appeals in 1980 eliminated the 1977 judgment of conviction, and it remained eliminated even after the proclamation by the Governor. The State asserts that the reversal by the Court of Criminal Appeals was contingent and was nullified when the Governor commuted Hartfield’s sentence. No Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decision regarding Hartfield has so stated. Indeed, the only time commutation was mentioned by that court was in 1983, when the court on rehearing quoted from the State’s brief that it wanted time to seek a commutation. See Hartfield v. State, 645 S.W.2d at 442. No Texas court has ever assessed how the events in this case affect the judgment of conviction. The issue is a question of law which we consider de novo. See United States v. Willingham, 310 F.3d 367, 370-71 (5th Cir. 2002). We 7 Case: 11-40572 Document: 00512013886 Page: 8 Date Filed: 10/09/2012 No. 11-40572 apply Texas law. The caselaw to apply is that which comes from the state’s highest court. Chaney v. Dreyfus Serv. Corp., 595 F.3d 219, 229 (5th Cir. 2010). In Texas criminal cases, the highest judicial authority is the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Tex. Const. art. V, § 1. If the court’s caselaw is silent on the issue, we must make an Erie guess. See Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938). “When making an Erie guess, our task is to attempt to predict state law, not to create or modify it.” Gilbane Bldg. Co. v. Admiral Ins. Co., 664 F.3d 589, 593 (5th Cir. 2011). There is no dispute that Hartfield was in state custody pursuant to a judgment between the date he was convicted in the trial court and the date the resolution of his appeal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals became final. On direct review of Hartfield’s conviction, the court in 1980 concluded “that the judgment must be reversed and the cause remanded for a new trial.” Hartfield, 645 S.W.2d at 441. The Court of Criminal Appeals has compared such a ruling to a grant of a new trial by the trial court: When the judgment of the appellate court reverses the judgment of the trial court and grants a new trial to the defendant, the cause shall stand as it would have stood in case the new trial had been granted by the trial court, and if in custody and entitled to bail the defendant shall be released upon his giving bail. Ex parte Nickerson, 893 S.W.2d 546, 548 (Tex. Crim. App. 1995) (quoting then Tex. R. App. Proc. 87(b)(2)). Additionally, the effect of granting a new trial is to restore the case ‘to its position before the former trial.’ This means no finding of guilt and no sentence exist. No conviction remains when the case is restored to a position before the former trial, unlike the situation when a defendant has been convicted and the case is pending on appeal. Id. (quoting then Tex. R. App. Proc. 32). The State does not dispute the conclusion that a judgment that has been finally reversed no longer exists. It does argue that the reversal was at least 8 Case: 11-40572 Document: 00512013886 Page: 9 Date Filed: 10/09/2012 No. 11-40572 implicitly contingent. Events such as commutation might cancel the reversal. The Court of Criminal Appeals never so held, and no one asked it to do so. Yet the State persists. Even if plausible arguments exist that the judgment remained reversed, the State essentially posits these are just arguments that need to be brought in a timely manner in in federal court. There was enough of a judgment, it asserts, perhaps faded and tattered as a result of the Court of Criminal Appeals reversal but still in view because of the unsettled effects of the Governor’s action, to leave Hartfield “in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court.” 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1). Until a court definitively declares the judgment post-commutation still to be reversed, the State argues there is still a court judgment that holds Hartfield in place. Consequently, Hartfield is attacking the validity of the 1977 state-court judgment, and his claim is governed by Section 2254. See Carmona v. Andrews, 357 F.3d 535, 537 (5th Cir. 2004). The State raises a legitimate legal question. If we agree with the district court that the judgment of conviction remained reversed after the commutation, that is a judicial ruling being made for the first time by federal judges. Does that mean Hartfield was being held pursuant to a questionable judgment but not without any judgment at all? Is being held “pursuant to” a judgment a question of whether the existence of a judgment is plausible or can be supported by good faith arguments? The statute certainly does not say that the custody must be “pursuant to a valid judgment.” The State sees the claimed deficiency here as no different than the usual claims made by prisoners that their judgments of conviction are facially valid but substantively defective. The State’s argument is not frivolous, but we conclude that the answers are clear and contrary to the State’s position. We first examine what courts that have considered Hartfield’s claims have done. By the plainest of terms, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed 9 Case: 11-40572 Document: 00512013886 Page: 10 Date Filed: 10/09/2012 No. 11-40572 the conviction and remanded for a new trial.2 The final action by that court was to deny rehearing on March 1, 1983, and to issue its mandate on March 4, requiring a new trial. No state court has thereafter acted. The Governor acted, but he was acting not under a condition of the court’s judgment that explained what the result of those actions would be, such as a reinstatement of the conviction. A postcard from a state trial court clerk notified the higher court that the clerk apparently considered the mandate satisfied by something other than what the mandate said. No court, though, ever said – either prior to the Governor’s actions or afterwards – that the reversal and remand for new trial would be a nullity if the Governor commuted the sentence. The State argues, though, that the district court clerk was correct. By reading the later Executive proclamation with the reasons for the earlier reversal, the prior judgment of conviction was, in effect, reinstated. The State asserts that the order denying rehearing provided it with a vehicle to salvage the conviction. The court’s 1983 order acknowledged that the State’s petition for rehearing requested “a reasonable time to seek commutation of ‘sentence’ from the Governor.’” Hartfield, 645 S.W.2d at 442. The State is correct about what the court stated. The court also said that the “decision of the Court shall be final at the expiration of 15 days from the ruling on the final motion for rehearing or from the rendition of the decision if no motion for rehearing is filed.” Id. (quoting then Tex. Cr. App. R. 310). A “15 day period between the rendition of our decision and the date that the mandate issues is a ‘reasonable time to seek commutation of sentence from the Governor.’” Id. The order issued on January 26, 1983. Despite the 15-day period between decision and mandate mentioned in the order, the court’s mandate did not issue 2 Part of the State’s argument relies on its assertion that authorities have acted on the good faith belief that an actual judgment exists. We conclude Section 2244(d)(1) does not give weight to the subjective understanding of various officials of whether there is a judgment. 10 Case: 11-40572 Document: 00512013886 Page: 11 Date Filed: 10/09/2012 No. 11-40572 until March 4. Even with that delay, the Governor did not act in time. His proclamation came on March 15. Thus, we need not decide whether a timely proclamation would have reanimated the judgment of conviction. The State argues that we are counting incorrectly. It asserts that the 15day calendar commenced with the court’s denial on March 1 of the State’s second motion for leave to file a petition for rehearing. The court rule, though, starts the count when the final rehearing motion is denied, not when the final motion for leave to file a motion is denied. There was only one motion for rehearing. A judgment must be final at some point. According to state law, that point is “15 days from the ruling on the final motion for rehearing.” Id. The Governor’s proclamation was not speedy enough. We also adopt the reasoning of Magistrate Judge Smith that by the time the Governor acted on March 15, the mandate reversing the conviction and sentence had already issued on March 4. There was no longer a death sentence to commute, and thus the Governor’s order could not have had any effect. The State raised an alternative argument for the eventuality that we would hold, and we just did, that the judgment of conviction remained reversed after the commutation. It asserted that because the holding about the judgment is a decision being made definitively only now, we still should view Hartfield’s incarceration as being pursuant to a judgment. The State argues that what we have resolved is a dispute about a judgment, no different in kind than other assaults on judgments of convictions brought every day by prisoners. When those petitioners succeed in their claims, they do not then have an additional claim that their prior custody has not been pursuant to a judgment. The State would categorize our holding about the 1977 state-court judgment as one reached under Section 2254. There is an important difference here, though. The district court sought to identify the difference when it held the 1977 judgment was a “nullity.” We do not adopt that label. Our resolution 11 Case: 11-40572 Document: 00512013886 Page: 12 Date Filed: 10/09/2012 No. 11-40572 does not turn on whether the judgment after the reversal and issuance of a mandate was null, or void as compared to voidable, or some other absolute versus qualified label. What controls is that the highest court in Texas for Hartfield’s claims reversed the judgment of conviction and ordered a new trial. The State is not so bold as to argue that if no commutation had been granted, yet Hartfield still received neither a new trial nor his freedom, that this would be a run-of-the-mill dispute subject to the AEDPA time bar. Instead, they argue that non-judicial acts altered the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that reversed the conviction. We cannot agree. The mandate from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the judgment of conviction. No court entered any order thereafter to alter that reversal. The events that allegedly make this simply a dispute about a possibly reversed judgment were not judicial acts. They were acts of another branch of government with no authority to alter the rulings of courts. Had the Court of Criminal Appeals stated in its original decision that a commutation would reinstate the judgment, or had a motion been filed after the commutation that sought a ruling on the effect of the commutation, the court’s explanations would largely control. Controlling instead is the unrevised final act of the highest Texas court, which was to reverse the judgment of conviction. Hartfield is not “in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court.” 28 U.S.C. § 2244(d)(1). Hartfield’s claim encounters no time bar.