Court Opinion

ID: 9480906
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:02:37.38549+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:59.921850
License: Public Domain

KING, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
The majority argues that the Frady cause and prejudice standard should not apply to the petitioner, Shaid, because Shaid, unlike Frady, claimed at trial not to have the required mens rea for conviction of the charged offense. See United States v. Frady, 456 U.S. 152, 102 S.Ct. 1584, 71 L.Ed.2d 816 (1982). Because Frady cannot be distinguished on this basis, and because Frady is controlling Supreme Court precedent, I respectfully dissent.
Frady was convicted of first degree murder by a jury in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. In Frady, as in the instant case, the Court of Appeals decided, subsequent to the instructions given at Frady’s trial, that the trial court’s instructions concerning mens rea were improper.1 Frady sought to overturn his conviction on § 2255 review based on the trial court’s improper instructions. The Supreme Court concluded that it could not reach the merits of Frady’s claim absent a showing of cause and prejudice for his failure to object.2 Frady could not demonstrate prejudice, the Supreme Court reasoned, because he defended only on the basis that he did not commit the crime and because the evidence of his guilt and malice was overwhelming.
The majority contends that Frady is distinguishable from the instant case because Shaid, unlike Frady, argued at trial that he did not have the proper mens rea to be convicted of willful misapplication of bank funds.3 In concluding that Frady could not show prejudice resulting from his failure to object to the improper mens rea instructions at trial, Justice O’Connor observes that the case would be different “had Fra-dy brought before the District Court affirmative evidence indicating that he had been convicted wrongly of a crime of which he was innocent.”4 If Frady had argued *995justification, mitigation, excuse, or lack of mens rea, Justice O’Connor contended, he might have demonstrated prejudice as a result of the improper jury instructions. Frady could not establish prejudice, Justice O’Connor reasoned, because he contended only that someone else committed the crime.
The majority ignores Justice O’Connor’s discussion of prejudice and claims that this passage reveals an exception to Frady’s cause and prejudice requirement that applies whenever the defendant argues that he is innocent under the applicable substantive law. Only if Shaid had never argued that he lacked the proper mental state for willful misapplication of bank funds, the majority reasons, would the Frady cause and prejudice standard have come into play. The majority’s analysis creates an exception to Frady that is larger than the general rule, that is unsupported by the case law, and that take Justice O’Connor’s discussion entirely out of context.
The majority claims that this non-existent exception has been applied in a series of cases in which prisoners have obtained reversal of mail fraud convictions on post-conviction review following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the intangible rights theory of mail fraud in McNally v. United States, 483 U.S. 350, 107 S.Ct. 2875, 97 L.Ed.2d 292 (1987). These cases establish no such exception.5 For example, in Callanan v. United States, 881 F.2d 229 (6th Cir.1989), cited by the majority, the Calla-nans, father and son, were convicted of mail fraud based on the intangible rights theory. Far from establishing the majority’s asserted exception to Frady, the Cal-lanan court applied Frady and found that cause existed because the Supreme Court’s decision in McNally had been completely unexpected.
In several of these post-McNally cases, the courts do not discuss the question of procedural default. The question of cause was not a significant issue in these cases because the law before McNally was well established that mail fraud convictions could be premised on the intangible rights theory. See Callanan v. United States, 881 F.2d 229, 231 (6th Cir.1989) (It was well settled that mail fraud could be based on intangible rights theory); United States v. Ochs, 842 F.2d 515, 521 (1st Cir.1988) (“It [.McNally ] was, without doubt, a departure from the law of every court of appeals — including this one — to consider the issue of intangible rights mail fraud prosecutions.”); United States v. Piccolo, 835 F.2d 517, 521 (3rd Cir.1987) (Aldisert, J., dissenting), cert. denied, sub nom., Piccolo v. United States, 486 U.S. 1032, 108 S.Ct. 2014, 100 L.Ed.2d 602 (1988) (McNally was “blockbusting”); United States v. Slay, 673 F.Supp. 336, 343 (E.D.Mo.1987), aff'd, 858 F.2d 1310 (8th Cir.1988) (McNally was “a total surprise”); United States v. Doherty, 675 F.Supp. 726, 728 (D.Mass.1987) aff’d in part, rev'd in part, 867 F.2d 47 (1st Cir.1989), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 109 S.Ct. 3243, 106 L.Ed.2d 590 (1989) (McNally was “wholly unexpected explication of the law of mail fraud.”). Under these circumstances, the defendant could hardly have been expected to object to the intangible rights theory. As we noted in United States v. Marcello:
Ordinarily, a habeas petitioner who raises an instructional error for the first time in a collateral attack must satisfy the cause and prejudice standard of Wainwright v. Sykes6_ It is well *996settled in this circuit, however, that the Sykes claim is waived if it is not raised.... In the case at bar, the government did not raise the procedural bar, but, rather, recognized that the defendants had cause for failing to object to the intangible rights theory.
United States v. Marcello, 876 F.2d 1147, 1153 (5th Cir.1989) (emphasis added). The courts presumably did not address the question of cause in these cases because, as in Marcello, the government conceded the issue.
At most, the cases cited by the majority indicate some uncertainty concerning whether ■ a petitioner must demonstrate cause and prejudice when the substantive theory on which his conviction was premised is subsequently determined to be invalid. No such uncertainty exists in the present case. Before McNally, the lower federal courts had interpreted the words “scheme or artifice to defraud” in the mail fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1341, to include schemes to defraud the public of “intangible rights,” such as the right to good government. The McNally Court, however, read the statute as “limited in scope to the protection of property rights.” 483 U.S. at 360, 107 S.Ct. at 2881. The instant case involves mens rea instructions subsequently determined to be improper, rather than a broad invalidation of the substantive theory under which Shaid was convicted. Even if an exception to Frady could be said to exist in instances where the substantive theory under which the defendant was convicted is invalidated, the Supreme Court’s decision in Frady clearly requires a showing of cause and prejudice for improper jury instructions concerning mens rea.
The majority claims that an exception exists to the Frady cause and prejudice standard, but also, inconsistently, asserts that the magistrate’s consideration of cause and prejudice was premature.7 The cause and prejudice standard, however, is a threshold question that determines whether we may consider the merits of a petitioner’s claim despite a procedural bar. The majority claims that the magistrate prematurely considered cause and prejudice and thus failed adequately to review the merits of Shaid’s claim. The majority, apparently, would require the district court to review the merits of a petitioner’s claim before considering cause and prejudice, a threshold issue that determines whether it needs to review the merits. Such reasoning is, to say the least, flawed.
The district court’s denial of Shaid’s § 2255 petition should be affirmed as to Shaid’s § 656 claims because, as the magistrate properly concluded, Shaid failed to demonstrate cause for failing to object to the improper mens rea instructions at trial.8 Because the majority misapplies con*997trolling Supreme Court precedent, and would require consideration of the merits before applying a threshold rule, I respectfully dissent.

. In Frady, the petitioner argued
that the Court of Appeals, in cases decided after his trial and appeal, had disapproved instructions identical to those used in his case. As determined by these later rulings, the judge at Frady’s trial had improperly equated intent with malice by stating that ‘a wrongful act ... intentionally done ... is therefore done with malice aforethought.’
United States v. Frady, 456 U.S. 152, 157-58, 102 S.Ct. 1584, 1589, 71 L.Ed.2d 816 (1982) (quoting United States v. Frady, 636 F.2d 506, 508, n. 6 (1980)).

. The district court decided that Frady could not raise the error on post-conviction review because he had not challenged the improper instructions on direct appeal or in prior motions. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the "plain error” rule applied. The Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals.

. Because our en banc decision in United States v. Adamson, 700 F.2d 953 (5th Cir.1983) (Unit B en banc), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 833, 104 S.Ct. 116, 78 L.Ed.2d 116 determined that the proper mens rea requirement under 18 U.S.C. § 656 is knowledge rather than reckless disregard, the majority reasons that Shaid may have been convicted of conduct that is no longer illegal. The jury convicted Shaid of willful misapplication of bank funds. Such conduct was, and remains, illegal. The erroneous jury instructions, as is true of virtually any erroneous jury instructions, created the possibility that the jury convicted Shaid on the basis of conduct that is not illegal. A defendant may not complain of erroneous jury instructions on post-conviction review, however, when he failed to object to such instructions at trial or on direct review, unless he demonstrates cause and prejudice for his failure to object. United States v. Frady, 456 U.S. 152, 102 S.Ct. 1584, 71 L.Ed.2d 816 (1982); Dugger v. Adams, 489 U.S. 401, 109 S.Ct. 1211, 103 L.Ed.2d 435 (1989).

.The passage states:
[W]e emphasize that this would be a different case had Frady brought before the District Court affirmative evidence indicating that he had been convicted wrongly of a crime of which he was innocent. But Frady, it must be remembered, did not assert at trial that he and Richard Gordon beat Thomas Bennett to death without malice. Instead, Frady claimed he had nothing whatever to do with the crime. The evidence, however, was overwhelming, and Frady promptly abandoned that theory on appeal. [Citation omitted]. Since that time, Frady has never presented colorable evidence, even from his own testimony, indicating such justification, mitigation, or excuse that would reduce his crime from murder to manslaughter.
United States v. Frady, 456 U.S. at 171, 102 S.Ct. at 1596. This passage occurs at the end of Justice O’Connor’s discussion in which she concludes that Frady failed to demonstrate prejudice.

. The majority cites two cases decided before Frady, and in which a procedural default was not at issue, for the proposition that when a subsequent change of the law results in a petitioner’s conviction for an act that the law no longer makes criminal, the claim is cognizable on collateral review even though the claim is neither jurisdictional nor constitutional in scope. Davis v. United States, 417 U.S. 333, 345 n. 15, 94 S.Ct. 2298, 2305 n. 15, 41 L.Ed.2d 109 (1974); United States v. Addonizio, 442 U.S. 178, 185, 99 S.Ct. 2235, 2240, 60 L.Ed.2d 805 (1979). Whatever validity this rule may have in other contexts, the Supreme Court clearly did not believe that this rule created an exception to the cause and prejudice requirement for jury instructions on mens rea that are subsequently determined to be improper. See Frady, 456 U.S. 152, 102 S.Ct. 1584, 71 L.Ed.2d 816 (1982).

. Frady applied the Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72, 97 S.Ct. 2497, 53 L.Ed.2d 594 (1977), cause and prejudice standard, applicable to state court habeas petitions, to § 2255 federal post-conviction review petitions. The reference to *996Wainwright rather than Frady apparently was an inadvertent error.

. The majority states:
We do not here review the magistrate’s application of the cause and prejudice standard. We do not do so because we find that the magistrate reached the issue prematurely. The result was a failure to consider adequately Shaid’s claim.
The majority fails to explain how the magistrate could reach a threshold, issue prematurely.

. A defendant shows cause for failing to object to a jury instruction if the change in law is so novel that its legal basis was not reasonably available or foreseeable at the time of trial. Reed v. Ross, 468 U.S. 1, 16, 104 S.Ct. 2901, 2910, 82 L.Ed.2d 1 (1984) (One way a petitioner can show cause is by showing that "a constitutional claim is so novel that its legal basis is not reasonably available to counsel.’’). In light of the law existing at the time of trial, however, Shaid should not be excused for failing to object tó the instructions concerning reckless disregard. See Murray v. Carrier, 477 U.S. 478, 486-87, 106 S.Ct. 2639, 2644, 91 L.Ed.2d 397 (1986) (”[M]ere fact that counsel failed to recognize the factual or legal basis for a claim, or failed to raise the claim despite recognizing it, does not constitute cause for a procedural default); Procter v. Butler, 831 F.2d 1251, 1254 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 888, 109 S.Ct. 219, 102 L.Ed.2d 210 (1987) (Petitioner failed to show cause for failing to object because legal basis for objection was reasonably available. Although Supreme Court did not rule on issue until after trial, previous decisions provided sufficient basis to anticipate and object). As the majority notes, our decision on Shaid’s direct appeal from his judgment first established for this circuit that reckless disregard was the proper mens rea in a § 656 case. See United States v. Adamson, 700 F.2d 953, 962-63 (5th Cir.) (Unit B en banc), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 833, 104 S.Ct. 116, 78 L.Ed.2d 116 (1983); United States v. Wilson, 500 F.2d 715, 720 (5th Cir.1974), cert. *997denied, sub nom., Levin v. United States, 420 U.S. 977, 95 S.Ct. 1403, 43 L.Ed.2d 658 (1975). Clearly, the law in the Fifth Circuit was not so well established that it excused Shaid’s failure to object.