Court Opinion

ID: 9474628
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:03:39.979161+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:13.437355
License: Public Domain

LYNNE, District Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I concur in Parts I, II, III, and IV-A of the sensitive and carefully structured opinion of the court. My disagreement with the decision of the majority to remand the motion to supplement the record with the Friedman and Jenkins affidavits is a narrow, but critical one.
As the court acknowledges, one of the elements that Ross must establish under Townsend is that his failure to present the proffered material to the state court was not the result of inexcusable neglect. The only excuse discerned by the court on this record for failure to have to have done so is the single unsworn statement of Phipps, his attorney, at the state habeas hearing on December 9, 1796, as follows:
MR. PHIPPS: Your Honor, on claim 21, we have no evidence to present because when I went to the Clerk’s Office in Cloquitt County to examine the jury list that were [sic] in use at that time, I was informed by the Clerk that about a year ago the jury list was revised and the practice is that when they revise they discard the trial list. So the Clerk was unable to find a list that could be identical as the one in use at that time. So we don’t have any further evidence on that, uh, claim.
If the two affidavits are to be credited, they establish beyond peradventure that the relevant jury lists were in existence at the time of the state habeas hearing since they were made available to Friedman approximately one month later by either the clerk of the court or by the jury commissioners.
On February 25, 1977, Friedman’s statistical study of the jury lists was relied upon by the defendants in the Nicolai case to support their challenge to the jury lists. On that date a front page article in The Moultrie Observer publicized the attack on the Colquitt County grand and petit juries with specific reference to the Friedman statistics.
It is incomprehensible that a lawyer who frequently practiced in Moultrie with a population of approximately fifteen thousand, the county seat of Colquitt County, was not aware of the purported factual basis for a challenge to the jury lists and of an opportunity to move to supplement the record either in the state habeas court or the record on appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court from its judgment. Of compelling *1480significance is the failure to come forward with the Friedman evidence in behalf of Ross at the federal habeas hearing on January 26 and 27, 1981.
Not until the eve of the oral argument before the en banc court was an effort made to supplement the record with material which was never before either the state or federal habeas court. Since in my view inexcusable neglect is so glaringly apparent on the record, I would recognize the motion to supplement for what it is, a last ditch effort to bolster a failing cause. I would forthrightly deny it.
From the order remanding such motion to the district court, I respectfully dissent.