Court Opinion

ID: 9469958
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:53:14.754941+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:39.005216
License: Public Domain

COFFEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part.
I agree with the majority that the judgment should be reversed. However, I do not agree that a hearing should be held to determine whether the petitioner should be allowed at this time to make a show of “cause and prejudice” in order to obtain a habeas corpus relief judgment for his failure to make an adequate offer of proof during the course of this trial in the Illinois state court some eleven long years ago.
The majority correctly holds that no adequate offer of proof was made in the state trial court at that time. I would go further, and hold that the petitioner’s able and experienced trial counsel did not even attempt to make a proper offer of proof. The reason is obvious. Counsel was attempting to set up a constitutional challenge to the Illinois Notice of Alibi Statute. If he had made a proper offer of proof, it would necessarily include the names of the alleged alibi witnesses and what proof they would have stated under oath. Under the ruling of the experienced Illinois trial judge, their testimony would then be admissible and the constitutional objection would fall by the wayside. Faced with this dilemma, the defense counsel made a tactical choice to retain the constitutional objection and sacrifice his client’s purported alibi. He rolled the dice, and/or flipped the coin, and lost, so as to say to the judge and citizens of Illinois, “heads I win, tails you lose.”
By intentionally failing to make an offer of proof, the petitioner Veal made a tactical choice to by-pass the state court’s orderly procedure for raising as error the possible exclusion of alibi witnesses. Even under the more lenient standard which preceded the current “cause and prejudice” test, Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72, 87, 97 S.Ct. 2497, 2506, 53 L.Ed.2d 594 (1977), federal habeas corpus relief was unavailable where the petitioner, “whether for strategic, tactical, or any other reasons” had “deliberately chosen to by-pass orderly state procedures .. .. ” Murch v. Mottram, 409 U.S. 41, 44, 47, 93 S.Ct. 71, 72, 74, 34 L.Ed.2d 194 (1972). Thus, remanding for a “cause and prejudice” hearing is a waste of the district court’s time because a party, such as Veal, who has chosen to deliberately by-pass the state court’s orderly procedure obviously cannot show “good cause for his procedural default .... ” Norris v. United States, 687 F.2d 899 at 900 (7th Cir.1982). The majority’s remand for an evidentiary hearing in this case fails to recognize that the “cause and prejudice” test is meant to serve as a “gatekeeping procedure designed to prevent the courts from being flooded by unworthy postconviction motions .... ” Id.
The Illinois Appellate Court ruled that the record failed to support a claim of prejudice. Thereafter, both the Supreme Courts of the United States and Illinois denied review. Now the majority of this court’s panel gives counsel a new set of dice and a new table on which to roll them, changes the rules some eleven years after the trial and finds a way to disregard and change the accepted way for making an offer of proof under the guise of a questionable constitutional claim. The majority’s decision to remand for an evidentiary hearing frustrates the policy expressed in Engle v. Isaac, 452 U.S. 107, 127, 102 S.Ct. 1558, 1571, 71 L.Ed.2d 783 (1982), in which the Supreme Court warned against use of *652the habeas corpus writ to undercut a state’s ability to enforce its well established procedural rules:
“Liberal allowance of the writ, moreover, degrades the prominence of the trial itself. A criminal trial concentrates society’s resources at one ‘time and place in order to decide, within the limits of human fallibility, the question of guilt or innocence.’ Our Constitution and laws surround the trial with a multitude of protections for the accused. Rather than enhancing these safeguards, ready availability of habeas corpus may diminish their sanctity by suggesting to the trial participants that there may be no need to adhere to those safeguards during the trial itself.” (citation omitted).
Similarly, the United States Supreme Court cautioned that constant federal intrusions in state criminal proceedings undermine the morale of state judges:
“there is ‘nothing more subversive of the judge’s sense of responsibility, of the inner subjective conscientiousness which is so essential a part of the difficult and subtle art of judging well, than an indiscriminate acceptance of the notion that all the shots will always be called by someone else.’ ”
Id. at 128 n. 33, 102 S.Ct. at 1572 n. 33, quoting Bator, Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, 76 Harv.L.Rev. 441, 451 (1963).
The majority says the petitioner will be required to prove to the district judge that his alibi witnesses did in fact exist and were available at the time of his trial some eleven long years ago. This is exactly what the petitioner’s counsel was required to show to the Illinois trial judge at the time of trial, but the petitioner’s counsel instead displayed his arrogance toward the accepted rules of evidence by refusing to make the required offer of proof. The proper time and place to have made the showing which the majority now requires was eleven years ago in the Illinois trial court and the federal courts should not put themselves in the position of second-guessing the state courts more than a decade after the fact. In an eloquent and forceful speech delivered to a recent meeting of the American Bar Association, Chief Justice Burger noted that:
“We must not be misled by cliches and slogans that if we but abolish poverty, crime will also disappear. There is more to it than that. A far greater factor is the deterrent effect of swift and certain consequences: swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty, and — at some point — finality of judgment.”
Address by Chief Justice Burger, ABA MidYear Meeting (February 8, 1981). Chief Justice Burger cautioned that such an absence of finality in criminal proceedings makes a mockery of our system of justice, and stressed that the courts must,
“re-examine our judicial process and philosophy with respect to finality of judgments. The search for ‘perfect’ justice has led us on a course found nowhere else in the world.... [T]he judicial process becomes a mockery of justice if it is forever open to appeals and retrials for errors in the arrest, the search, or the trial. Traditional appellate review is the cure for errors, but we have forgotten that simple truth.”
It is important to emphasize that the petitioner Veal has already raised the same issue on appeal as is presented in this habe-as corpus action, i.e., the exclusion of purported alibi witnesses. The Illinois Appellate Court rejected Veal’s argument and affirmed the conviction, and both the Illinois and United States Supreme Courts declined to review the conviction. Thus, Veal has already availed himself of “traditional appellate review” on three separate occasions, while others in our society must wait two or three years for just one appellate review. Now Veal has decided that he has nothing to lose by trying his luck again in the federal court system, hoping that an alleged technical error which purportedly occurred at trial eleven years ago will permit him to escape punishment for his crimes.
“Our trial and appellate procedures are not so unreliable that we may not afford their completed operation any binding ef-*653feet beyond the next in a series of endless post-convietion collateral attacks.”
Norris v. United States, 687 F.2d 899 at 902-903 (7th Cir.1982).
In his speech to the American Bar Association, Chief Justice Burger further warned that:
“Our search for true justice must not be twisted into an endless quest for technical errors unrelated to guilt or innocence.
The system has gone so far that Judge Henry Friendly, in proposing to curb abuses of collateral attack, entitled his article, ‘Is Innocence Irrelevant?’
And Justice Jackson once reminded us that the Constitution should not be read as a ‘suicide pact.’ ”
* * * * * *
“[0]ur criminal process often goes on two, three, four or more years before the accused runs out all the options. Even after sentence and confinement, the warfare continues with endless streams of petitions for writs, suits against parole boards, wardens and judges.
So we see a paradox — even while we struggle toward correction, education and rehabilitation of the offender, our system encourages prisoners to continue warfare with society. The result is that whatever may have been the defendant’s hostility toward the police, the witnesses, the prosecutors, the judge and jurors — and the public defender who failed to win his case — those hostilities are kept alive. How much chance do you think there is of changing or rehabilitating a person who is encouraged to keep up years of constant warfare with society?”
Similarly, the opinions of the United States Supreme Court also recognize that an absence of finality in criminal proceedings frustrates the very goals of our criminal justice system, deterrence and rehabilitation.
“No effective judicial system can afford to concede the continuing theoretical possibility that there is error in every trial and that every incarceration is unfounded. At some point the law must convey to those in custody that a wrong has been committed, that consequent punishment has been imposed, that one should no longer look back with the view to resurrecting every imaginable basis for further litigation but rather should look forward to rehabilitation and to becoming a constructive citizen.”
SChneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 262, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 2065, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973) (Powell, J., concurring) (footnote omitted).
I dissent from the remand for an eviden-tiary hearing to determine the availability of alleged witnesses to the petitioner’s alibi because: (1) by remanding for an evidentia-ry hearing, the majority permits the defendant to avoid the consequences of his failure to make an offer of proof at trial, thus eviscerating the important purpose an offer of proof serves in criminal trials and creating a drastic new rule of procedure unfounded in law or common sense; and (2) I believe it is now time to recognize the finality of Veal’s murder conviction and to punish him for his crimes.