Court Opinion

ID: 9492488
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:42:19.648996+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:19.774319
License: Public Domain

RYMER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I dissent because the rule announced in Menefield v. Borg, 881 F.2d 696 (9th Cir.1989), was not dictated by Supreme Court precedent. A federal writ of habeas corpus cannot issue to a state court based merely on Ninth Circuit case law not dictated by Supreme Court precedent. This violates fundamental principles of federalism. Thus, applying the Menefield rule in this case is barred by Teague and its progeny.
I
Teague held that “[ujnless they fall within an exception to the general rule, new constitutional rules of criminal procedure will not be applicable to those cases which have become final before the new rules are announced.” Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 310, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989). To determine, whether a case ap*1094plies a “new rule,” we are to engage in a three step analysis:
First, the court must ascertain the date on which the defendant’s conviction and sentence became final for Teague purposes. Second, the court must “[s]urve[y] the legal landscape as it then existed,” Graham v. Collins, supra, 506 U.S. at 468, 113 S.Ct. 892, and “determine whether a state court considering [the defendant’s] claim at the time his conviction became final would have felt compelled by existing precedent to conclude that the rule [he] seeks was required by the Constitution,” Saffle v. Parks, 494 U.S. 484, 488, 110 S.Ct. 1257, 108 L.Ed.2d 415 (1990). Finally, even if the court determines that the defendant seeks the benefit of a new rule, the court must decide whether that rule falls within one of the two narrow exceptions to the nonretroactivity principle. See Gilmore v. Taylor, 508 U.S. 333, 345, 113 S.Ct. 2112, 124 L.Ed.2d 306 (1993).
Caspari v. Bohlen, 510 U.S. 383, 390, 114 S.Ct. 948, 127 L.Ed.2d 236 (1994). In surveying the legal landscape, we must determine whether the rule applied by the district court was “dictated by precedent existing at the time the defendant’s conviction became final.” Teague, 489 U.S. at 301, 109 S.Ct. 1060; see also Gilmore, 508 U.S. at 335, 113 S.Ct. 2112 (holding that rule was not “dictated by prior precedent”).
The State contends that for purposes of Teague analysis, “dictated by prior precedent” means “dictated by then existing Supreme Court precedent.” I agree. But if this is correct, the district court’s application of existing Ninth Circuit precedent does not end the analysis. We must then examine whether the Ninth Circuit rule applied by the district court in this case was dictated by Supreme Court precedent; in effect, we must examine whether our prior Ninth Circuit decision was dictated by existing Supreme Court precedent. If it were not, as I believe, the district court has applied a “new rule” as defined by Teague.
II
That a habeas court may only issue a writ based upon Supreme Court precedent is a result of our concurrent judicial system. As I noted in my concurrence in Bates v. Jones, 131 F.3d 843, 856 (9th Cir.1997), the rule outside of the habeas context is that
[n]o federal court except for the United States Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over final decisions of the California Supreme Court. As the United States Supreme Court made clear in Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 44 S.Ct. 149, 68 L.Ed. 362 (1923), when a state court decides a federal constitutional question that actually arose in the cause before it, its decision is open to reversal or modification by the United States Supreme Court. Unless and until that happens, however, it is an effective and conclusive adjudication.
This, of course, is merely a manifestation of “Our Federalism.” Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37, 44, 91 S.Ct. 760, 27 L.Ed.2d 669 (1971).
Habeas jurisdiction, however, allows the lower federal courts to review the constitutional decisions of state supreme courts in limited circumstances. As the Supreme Court has explained:
It has long been established, as to those constitutional issues which may properly be raised under § 2254, that even a single federal judge may overturn the judgment of the highest court of a State insofar as it deals with the application of the United States Constitution or laws to the facts in question. As might be imagined, this result was not easily arrived at under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, the predecessor to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. But the present doctrine, adumbrated in the Court’s opinion in Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86, 43 S.Ct. 265, 67 L.Ed. 543 (1923), and culminating in this Court’s opinion in Fay v. Noia, 372 U.S. 391, 83 S.Ct. 822, 9 *1095L.Ed.2d 837 (1963), is that the Act of 1867 allows such collateral attack.
Sumner v. Mata, 449 U.S. 539, 543-44, 101 S.Ct. 764, 66 L.Ed.2d 722 (1981).
As the leading treatise on habeas review, after a thorough historical examination, concludes, “when Supreme Court review as of right on writ of error has been unavailable or has provided insufficient protection of federal law against state court resistance, Congress has authorized the federal courts to employ habeas corpus ... as [a] surrogate[ ] for the Court’s direct review as of right.” 1 JAMES S. LIEBMAN & RANDY HERTZ, FEDERAL HABEAS CORPUS PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE § 2.4e, at 80 (3d ed.1998); see also Paul J. Mishkin, Forward: The High Court, the Great Writ, and the Due Process of Time and Law, 79 Harv. L.Rev. 56, 86-87 (1965). It is because of this delegation that, while “[s]tate courts are coequal parts of our national judicial system and give serious attention to their responsibilities for enforcing the commands of the Constitution,” Sawyer v. Smith, 497 U.S. 227, 241, 110 S.Ct. 2822, 111 L.Ed.2d 193 (1990), when sitting as a habeas court, the lower federal courts may overturn the decisions of state supreme courts.
The principle that the inferior federal courts sitting in habeas jurisdiction act as surrogates for the Supreme Court is one of the normative underpinnings of Teague. See Tung Yin, A Better Mousetrap: Procedural Default as a Retroactivity Alternative to Teague v. Lane and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, 25 Am. J.Crim. L. 203, 240 (1998). And from this comes the principal that habeas courts must only apply those rules that are dictated by Supreme Court precedent. After all, had the state prisoner appeared on a petition for writ of error before the Supreme Court itself, as “sufficed for all [state] prisoners from 1789 until 1815 and 1833,” LIEBMAN & HERTZ, supra, at 81, the Court would look to its own precedent. Teague effectively recognizes that the inferior federal courts, though sitting as surrogates for the Supreme Court, cannot act as the Supreme Court in announcing “new rules”; the inferior courts, as delegates, must apply only those rules dictated by the Court’s precedent.
This conclusion is not undermined by either Gilmore or Parke. In Gilmore, the Supreme Court held that the application of a post-conviction Seventh Circuit decision was barred because that decision, Falconer v. Lane, 905 F.2d 1129 (7th Cir.1990), was not “foreordained” by “our [the Supreme Court’s] precedent.” 508 U.S. at 344, 113 S.Ct. 2112. The fact that Falconer was circuit court precedent was not the issue. The issue was whether Falconer was “dictated by prior precedent.” Id., 508 U.S. at 335, 113 S.Ct. 2112.
Similarly, Parke v. Raley, 506 U.S. 20, 113 S.Ct. 517, 121 L.Ed.2d 391 (1992), does not subvert this analysis because Parke does not reach the Teague issue. Id., 506 U.S. at 25-26, 113 S.Ct. 517. While the Sixth Circuit relied on a post-conviction Sixth Circuit decision in that case, the state did not argue that Teague applied. Id. The Court merely recognized that the state failed to do so. It made no comment as to the propriety of or standard for relying on circuit precedent.
Nor does this conclusion conflict with our recent decision in Ortega v. Roe, 160 F.3d 534 (9th Cir.1998), cert. granted, — U.S. -, 119 S.Ct. 1574, 143 L.Ed.2d 669 (1999). In Ortega, we held that United States v. Stearns, 68 F.3d 328 (9th Cir.1995), decided post-conviction, did not announce a Teague “new rule” because* it was merely an application of a previous circuit decision, Lozada v. Deeds, 964 F.2d 956 (9th Cir.1992). We did not examine whether the pre-conviction decision, Loza-da, was dictated by Supreme Court precedent. But this absence does not imply that the analysis is foreclosed.
In sum, the principles of federalism and comity, combined with a proper conception of habeas jurisdiction, lead me to conclude that a habeas court may only overturn a state supreme court’s decision based on *1096then existing Supreme Court precedent. This being the case, we must scrutinize the rule announced in Menefield to determine whether it was dictated by Supreme Court precedent.
III
The fact that Menefield was decided before Bell’s conviction does not matter. Nor does the fact that we relied exclusively on Supreme Court precedent mean that our decision was dictated by it. All circuit court constitutional decisions are ostensibly a mere extension of Supreme Court precedent. “But the fact that a court says that its decision is .within the ‘logical compass’ of an earlier decision, or indeed that it is ‘controlled’ by a prior decision, is not conclusive for purposes of deciding whether the Current decision is a ‘new rule’ under Teague.” Butler v. McKellar, 494 U.S. 407, 415, 110 S.Ct. 1212, 108 L.Ed.2d 347 (1990). Teague and its progeny, therefore, make a distinction between those decisions that announce a rule dictated by Supreme Court case law and those that do not.
Given this, the fact that Menefield was decided before Bell’s conviction is without consequence.' The question is whether the rule applied by the district court, post-conviction, was “new” in the Teague sense. Merely because the district court relied upon existing circuit court precedent does not, per se, mean that the rule applied was dictated by Supreme Court precedent.
IV
It is apparent that the rule announced by Menefield and applied by the district court was a “new rule” for Teague purposes. This comes from an analysis of Menefield itself, and the legal landscape as it existed at the time of the state court decision.
In Menefield we recognized that “this circuit ha[d] never settled the question of whether a motion for a new trial is a critical stage of the prosecution.” 881 F.2d at 698. Instead of turning immediately to a Supreme Court precedent, we “consider[ed] the factors enumerated by the Supreme Court.” Id. (emphasis added). We examined whether a motion for a new trial involved substantive rights, whether skilled counsel would be useful, and whether the proceeding tests the merits of the case. Id. at 698-99. We concluded that a motion for a new trial involves substantive rights and tests the merits of the case not by looking to Supreme Court precedent, but rather by interpreting California law. Id. at 699. Similarly we did not cite a single Supreme Court case when we held that the waiver of the right to counsel at trial did not prevent a defendant from invoking the right on a motion for a new trial. Id. at 700-01.
The legal landscape at the time of Bell’s conviction indicates that Menefield was not dictated by Supreme Court precedent. As the First Circuit recognized in United States v. Tajeddini, 945 F.2d 458 (1st Cir.1991) (per curiam) (joined by Breyer, J.), the First Circuit, Second Circuit, and District of Columbia Circuit have held that the Sixth Amendment does not require the appointment of counsel on a motion for a new trial. Id. at 470. What is more, the California Court of Appeal implied that the California courts would hold that the appointment of counsel for a motion for a new trial would be discretionary, and rejected Menefield’s per se reversal rule. See People v. Ngaue, 229 Cal.App.3d 1115, 280 Cal.Rptr. 757, 761-63 (1991).
“[RJeasonable contrary conclusions reached by other courts” is an indicator that the rule was not dictated by Supreme Court precedent. Butler, 494 U.S. at 415, 110 S.Ct. 1212. Where there is a circuit split, it is difficult to see why a state court would have “felt compelled by existing precedent to conclude that the rule [sought by Bell] was required by the Constitution.” Caspari, 510 U.S. at 390, 114 S.Ct. 948. The only justification for so holding would be an assertion that state courts are bound by the precedent of the circuit in whose *1097territory the State happens to fall, they aren’t. But
V
Based on core principles of federalism, comity and the history of habeas jurisdiction, I would hold that a district court applies a new, rule when it applies pre-conviction circuit court precedent that is not dictated by Supreme Court precedent. In this case the rule applied by the district court, as announced in Menefield, was not dictated by Supreme Court precedent that pre-dates Bell’s conviction. Therefore, I would reverse.