Court Opinion

ID: 9943644
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-23 23:00:39.539151+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:47:39.469853
License: Public Domain

FILED
                              FOR PUBLICATION
                                                                            FEB 23 2024
                    UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS                      MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
                                                                         U.S. COURT OF APPEALS

                           FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

THOMAS E. CREECH,                               No. 24-275

              Petitioner-Appellant,             D.C. No. 1:23-cv-00463-AKB

 v.
                                                OPINION
TIM RICHARDSON, Warden,

              Respondent-Appellee.

                   Appeal from the United States District Court
                             for the District of Idaho
                      Brailsford, District Judge, Presiding

                     Argued and Submitted February 22, 2024
                            San Francisco, California

Before: William A. Fletcher, Jay S. Bybee, and Morgan Christen, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM:

      Petitioner-Appellant Thomas Eugene Creech, a death row inmate in Idaho,

appeals the denial of his 28 U.S.C. § 2254 petition for a writ of habeas corpus. His

execution is currently scheduled for February 28, 2024, less than a week from now.

      In 1981, while serving two life sentences for first-degree murder, Creech

killed a fellow prisoner and was sentenced to death. The circumstances of the
killing and Creech’s previous post-conviction proceedings are discussed in our

opinion in Creech v. Richardson, 59 F.4th 372 (9th Cir. 2023).

      Creech filed two habeas petitions in federal court before filing the current

petition. His first petition led to the vacatur of his sentence and a resentencing

hearing in 1995. See id. at 378–79. At that hearing, the sentencing judge again

imposed a death sentence, acting without a jury as authorized by then-applicable

Idaho law. See id. at 379–80. Creech challenged his renewed death sentence in a

second federal habeas petition. Litigation of that petition ended in the district court

in 2017. We affirmed the district court’s denial of habeas in 2023. Id. at 394.

      Creech filed the current petition in October 2023, shortly after his death

warrant was issued and his execution date was set. His petition raises an Eighth

Amendment claim that society’s evolving standards of decency since Ring v.

Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002), have rendered unconstitutional a death sentence

imposed by a judge rather than a jury. Ring held that the Sixth Amendment

prohibits judicial factfinding of facts necessary to the imposition of the death

penalty; such facts must instead be found by a jury. See id. at 609. The Sixth

Amendment rule of Ring does not apply retroactively to sentences, like Creech’s,

that were final on direct review before Ring was decided. Schriro v. Summerlin,

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542 U.S. 348, 358 (2004). Creech argues that the Eighth Amendment

independently requires that a death sentence be imposed by a jury.

      The district court dismissed Creech’s petition. The court concluded that the

petition was barred by 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b), which mandates dismissal of most

claims filed in “second or successive” federal habeas petitions.

      We affirm. A later-filed petition is precluded as second or successive under

28 U.S.C. § 2254 if the claim it raises was ripe and could have been brought in the

prisoner’s prior petition challenging the same judgment. Panetti v. Quarterman,

551 U.S. 930, 945 (2007). Our holding in Allen v. Ornoski, 435 F.3d 946 (9th Cir.

2006), makes clear that Creech’s current petition is precluded as second or

successive.

      In Allen, we considered a so-called Lackey claim brought in a prisoner’s

second federal habeas petition—a claim that “suffering the ravages of death row

for a lengthy duration violate[s] the Eighth Amendment.” Id. at 956 (citing Lackey

v. Texas, 514 U.S. 1045 (1995) (Stevens, J., respecting denial of certiorari)).

Petitioner Allen argued “that his execution would violate the Eighth Amendment

because of the inordinate length of time, twenty-three years, he has spent on death

row and the ‘horrific’ conditions of his confinement.” Id. at 950.

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      We concluded in Allen that the petition was precluded as second or

successive. We distinguished Allen’s claim from the claim brought in Ford v.

Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986). The Supreme Court held in Ford that “the

Eighth Amendment prohibits a State from carrying out a sentence of death upon a

prisoner who is insane.” Id. at 409–10. We wrote in Allen that, unlike a Ford

claim, “a Lackey claim does not become ripe only after a certain number of years

or as the final hour of the execution nears. There is no fluctuation or rapid change

at the heart of a Lackey claim, but rather just the steady and predictable passage of

time.” Allen, 435 F.3d at 958.

      Much the same is true of Creech’s current Eighth Amendment claim. The

proposed factual predicate for Creech’s claim is a national movement away from

executions of judge-sentenced prisoners since Ring, evidencing, in Creech’s view,

an evolving standard of decency.

      Creech argues that his evolving standards of decency claim became ripe only

after a moratorium on all executions in Arizona was put in place in January 2023.

We disagree.

      Even when Ring was decided in 2002, only a small minority of jurisdictions

authorized judge-imposed death sentences. See Ring, 536 U.S. at 608 n.6; see also

Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639, 710–11 (1990) (Stevens, J., dissenting),

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overruled by Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002); Woodson v. North Carolina,

428 U.S. 280, 291–92 (1976) (plurality opinion). It was clear, once Ring was

decided, that the number of executions of judge-sentenced capital defendants

would decrease in the years to follow as those defendants were executed, were

granted clemency, or died of natural causes, or as their States imposed broader

restrictions on executions generally

      Even though some judge-sentenced capital defendants are on death row in

Arizona, Creech does not claim that Arizona’s moratorium was motivated by

standards-of-decency concerns about the execution of those judge-sentenced

defendants. In support of his argument that the reason for Arizona’s moratorium

is irrelevant, Creech cites Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. 701 (2014), in which the

Supreme Court mentioned states that had entirely abolished or suspended their use

of the death penalty as part of its discussion of the evidence indicating society’s

“rejection of the strict 70 [IQ] cutoff” for claims of incapacity to be executed under

Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002). Hall, 572 U.S. at 716–18. Creech also

points to Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), in which the Court said, “a

State’s decision to bar the death penalty altogether of necessity demonstrates a

judgment that the death penalty is inappropriate for all offenders, including

juveniles.” Id. at 574.

                                           5
      Creech is correct that the Court has, at times, considered categorical death-

penalty bans in assessing evolving standards of decency with respect to particular

categories of death sentences. But even assuming the correctness of Creech’s

interpretation of the Supreme Court’s caselaw, his argument rests entirely on the

claim that Arizona’s moratorium is evidence of evolving standards of decency with

respect to judge-imposed death sentences. Even on that assumption, he has not

shown that his claim was unripe in the years immediately following Ring, when

judge-sentenced executions were practiced in only a small minority of

jurisdictions, and when the Supreme Court in Ring had rejected judicial factfinding

that exposes a capital defendant to death. Moreover, even assuming that

categorical execution moratoria can provide a basis for Creech’s Eighth

Amendment claim, several such bans had been imposed in the years before

Creech’s habeas proceedings ended in the district court. See, e.g., Hall, 572 U.S. at

716 (noting Oregon’s 2011 moratorium); Cooper v. Newsom, 13 F.4th 857, 861–62

(9th Cir. 2021) (discussing, inter alia, a moratorium on California executions

imposed in 2006); Commonwealth v. Williams, 129 A.3d 1199, 1202 (Pa. 2015)

(discussing Pennsylvania’s 2015 moratorium).

      We therefore conclude that Creech could have brought a ripe Eighth

Amendment claim during the pendency of his previous petition in district court.

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Once Creech’s claim became ripe, the passage of time and later events were

irrelevant to the ripeness determination. See Allen, 435 F.3d at 958 (“[T]hat the

passage of time makes [Allen’s] Lackey claim stronger is irrelevant to ripeness,

because the passage of time strengthens any Lackey claim.”).

      The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED. We DISMISS as moot

Creech’s motion to stay his execution while this appeal is pending.

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