Court Opinion

ID: 9495256
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:58:03.511405+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:54.349950
License: Public Domain

BOGGS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
■ I concur in the majority’s affirmance of the district court’s denial of Sawyer’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus in Sawyer v. Stovall; however, for the reasons herein, I respectfully dissent from the majority’s reversal of the district court’s denial in Sawyer v. Hofbauer.
The majority’s decision as it relates to Hofbauer gives short shrift to the very real restrictions AEDPA places upon the power of federal courts to grant writs of habeas corpus for claims adjudicated on the merits by state courts. According to AEDPA, a federal court may grant a writ of habeas corpus in such a case only where the state court adjudication was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, federal law as set out by the Supreme Court or if the state court decision was based on ah unreasonable determination of fact. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(l)-(2). The majority holds that it is empowered to grant the writ in the present case, because the state court’s adjudication of Sawyer’s claim based on Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 87, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), was an unreasonable application of Brady. The majority holds that this is so because the court “fail[ed] even to identify the evidence that was suppressed.” Majority Op. at 612.
While it is true that the opening sentence of the Michigan Court of Appeals’s treatment of this issue focuses on the trial court’s refusal to order DNA testing on the victim’s underwear, rather than on the failure of the state to disclose the fact of the negative test, this is both understandable given the circumstances and not automatically fatal to the reasonableness of the state court’s application of Brady. First, it is understandable in that the court was responding to Sawyer’s direct appeal of the judgment entered against him by the trial court, wherein Sawyer challenged the trial court’s refusal to permit testing. J.A. I at 110. Sawyer discovered that the underwear had actually been tested after filing his direct appeal, whereupon he filed a supplemental brief again requesting further testing of the underwear.1 J.A. I at *614130-32. Therefore, the court of appeals responded, understandably, to Sawyer’s request — made before he had evidence that the underwear was tested and renewed once he had that evidence — that the trial court permit further testing of the underwear.
More importantly, the opening sentence of the state court of appeals’s treatment of this issue is not fatal to its reasonableness under clearly established federal law as set forth by the Supreme Court, because the remainder of the court’s discussion suggests that the court did reasonably apply Brady. The court noted that “[t]he facts of the crime in this case were unlikely to have resulted in a semen deposit on complainant’s underwear.” People v. Sawyer, 215 Mich.App. 183, 545 N.W.2d 6, 11 (1996). The court then went on to hold that Sawyer’s theory to the contrary was “highly speculative” and, citing Brady, 373 U.S. at 87, held that the circumstances did not merit reversal of Sawyer’s conviction. Sawyer, 545 N.W.2d at 11-12. Therefore, contrary to the majority’s apparent view, the Michigan court’s decision is easily read as holding that, because the facts of the attack made it unlikely that the semen stain came from the attacker, the evidence that the semen stain did not come from Sawyer was not “material” for Brady purposes. See Brady, 373 U.S. at 87 (holding that “the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused ... violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment”).
While it is possible that some or all of the judges on this panel might have held that the withheld evidence was material if we were in the state judges’ shoes, we are not writing on a clean slate in deciding this issue. Because the state court’s necessary holding that the withheld evidence was not material is not contrary to, nor an unreasonable application of, Brady, and because it is not based on an unreasonable determination of the facts, this court is constrained by AEDPA to not grant the writ. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(l)-(2).
First, for withheld evidence to be material for Brady purposes, it must either be admissible or lead directly to admissible evidence. See United States v. Phillip, 948 F.2d 241, 249 (6th Cir.1991) (“information withheld by the prosecution is not material unless the information consists of, or would lead directly to, evidence admissible at trial”). However, the state trial court held, both during trial and in post-conviction proceedings, that any evidence of the semen stain in Miller’s underwear was inadmissible pursuant to Michigan’s rape shield law. See Trial Court Tr. at 614-15; J.A. I at 568. If the fact of the stain was inadmissible, then clearly any evidence that would have revolved around the stain (including that it did not come from Sawyer) was also inadmissible. The majority discounts this fact by stating that the trial court was not aware, at the time of its holding, that the stain had been tested and determined not to be from Sawyer. See Maj. Op. at 611 n. 2. However, this fact is irrelevant; the trial court refused to permit further testing of the underwear on the basis that, regardless of the results of such a test, any introduction of the fact of the semen stain would violate Michigan’s rape shield law. J.A. I at 564-65, 568.
Even if the withheld evidence were admissible, there is good reason to doubt its materiality. The withheld evidence would only be material if it would somehow assist *615in showing that Sawyer was not Miller’s attacker. However:
1) The prosecution never contended, either to the jury or to the judge, that the semen came from Sawyer. Indeed, the government specifically indicated to the judge that it believed the semen to be that of an unnamed boyfriend.
2) Both the government and Sawyer’s counsel believed that it would have been impossible for the attacker’s semen to have gotten on Miller’s underwear. Indeed, Sawyer’s counsel elicited testimony from Miller on two separate occasions to the effect that she herself had taken her underwear off, placed it on the other side of the car from where the attacker sat throughout the attack, and retrieved it from where she had placed it when permitted to put her clothes back on. J.A. I at 295, 297-98.
3) The defense made no attempt to secure a stipulation to the jury to these effects (indeed, the jury was never told that there was semen on the underwear). Further, it is doubtful that such a stipulation would have been admissible under Michigan’s rape shield law.
4) The defense made no attempt to secure, and almost certainly could not have compelled, a DNA sample from the putative boyfriend, even if the victim could have been coerced into naming a person. This is because of the rape shield law, and the likely unavailability of compulsory process against a potentially involved member of the community.
Further, Sawyer’s theory on habeas review is that if the stain is tested, it might prove not to have come from Miller’s putative boyfriend. This, in turn, would imply that the semen had been deposited by yet another third party — either consensually or as a result of coercion. However, the prosecution’s knowledge, even if expanded to include the result of the test undertaken by the state lab unbeknownst to the prosecutor, was merely that the semen did not come from the defendant and that it was believed to have come from an unnamed boyfriend. The only use of such evidence would have been to show that the victim had had sexual contact with a male who was not the defendant; this is exactly the type of evidence that is inadmissible under Michigan’s rape shield law.
It was upon this factual basis that the Michigan Court of Appeals noted that the semen was unlikely to have come from Miller’s attacker and that Sawyer’s newly-hatched theory to the contrary was “highly speculative.” It is also based on this factual record that the court rejected Sawyer’s Brady claim, implicitly holding that the withheld evidence (which served to confirm the belief, held by both sides throughout the pendency of this case, that the semen did not come from Sawyer) was not material under Brady. Because I believe that the state court’s adjudication was not contrary to, nor an unreasonable application of, federal law, and because it was not based on an unreasonable determination of fact, I believe that AEDPA constrains this court’s ability to grant the writ requested by Sawyer. I therefore respectfully dissent from the majority’s reversal of the district court’s denial of Sawyer’s petition.

. The mere fact that the semen stain did not belong to Sawyer was of no help to him, as the state had always agreed to that proposition. In fact, the trial court held argument about the semen stain outside of the presence of the jury during trial, and the state's attorney stated clearly that the state believed the semen stain to be completely unrelated to the attack, as it was believed to be from a boyfriend of Miller's, and stated for the record, "[w]e have never alleged, nor will we ever allege in the course of this [sic] proceedings that the semen found on those panties has anything to do with Thomas Sawyer.” J.A. I *614at 397. Therefore, for the semen stain to help Sawyer, he needed further testing against Miller’s boyfriend.