Court Opinion

ID: 9491883
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:26:27.728353+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:59.654996
License: Public Domain

RICHARD S. ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join Judge Murphy’s opinion and add a few words of my own. In my view, Malone is not entitled to a stay for the following reasons:
1. When Malone’s habeas petition was first filed here, the District Court rejected his attack on the California conviction and death penalty for two reasons: it was procedurally barred, and it was without merit. On appeal, our panel held the point procedurally barred. We did not reject the claim on ripeness grounds. Malone now argues we were wrong. Maybe so; but the prior adjudication stands, and therefore Malone’s current motion is the equivalent of an attempt to file a successive petition. Both this Court and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri must necessarily have thought the Missouri state courts would have entertained on its merits an attack by Malone on his California conviction and sentence.
2. Malone is not actually innocent of the murder and does not claim to be. Nor is any new Supreme Court case cited that might satisfy the successive-petition statute.
3. A United States District Court in California has held Malone’s California death penalty invalid, but upheld the conviction. The case is on appeal tonight. Even if the California conviction itself is set aside on appeal, and even if this were somehow a new development that would avoid the successive-petition problem, I do not see how Malone can get relief. Missouri is not a weighing state. The pecuniary-gain aggravating circumstance has never been challenged, not before the Missouri Supreme Court, and not now.
4.Malone’s best argument, as I see it, is that his jury in Missouri was told he had already been sentenced to death in California. That information could have caused the jury to relax, so to speak, and to believe it could return a death sentence without worrying about it too much. We now know that the California death penalty was invalid. This argument, though, is foreclosed by Supreme Court precedent. Romano v. Oklahoma, 512 U.S. 1, 13-14, 114 S.Ct. 2004, 129 L.Ed.2d 1 (1994).
For these reasons, I believe that the law compels us to deny this stay.