Court Opinion

ID: 9494277
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:33:49.171166+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:18.829083
License: Public Domain

BOGGS, Circuit Judge, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I concur in the judgment of the court and in most of the analysis in its opinion. I write separately because the majority *622addresses one issue I believe we need not and offers obiter dictum on an issue Lott has not pressed. I do not join Parts III.B and III.D.2.b of the majority opinion.
The heart of my disagreement with the majority lies in its analysis of whether Lott’s jurisdiction argument presents a federal question, which analysis appears in footnote 6. Lott’s claim here is based entirely on a state-law problem, as the majority’s review of developing Ohio law reveals. Footnote 6 states that Lott’s “jurisdiction claim, although predicated on state law, directly implicates the federal question of whether Lott’s trial, in the absence of a jury, violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial and his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.”
Although Lott’s brief cites Lowery v. Estelle, 696 F.2d 333, 337 (5th Cir.1983), for a similar proposition concerning state-law claims brought before federal habeas courts, the material at that location is actually the petitioner’s argument, which the court specifically declined to address because the petitioner failed to exhaust his state-law argument in state court, see id. at 337-38. Fifth Circuit precedent on which Lowery relies, some of which Lott also cites in his brief, states the rule that federal habeas courts may not review an asserted state-law error in an indictment unless “the indictment is so fatally defective as to deprive the convicting court of jurisdiction.” Murphy v. Beto, 416 F.2d 98, 100 (5th Cir.1969); see also Underwood v. Bomar, 335 F.2d 783, 788 (6th Cir.1964). This rule appears to be based on old case-law holding that a complete lack of jurisdiction in the sentencing court may provide grounds for federal habeas relief. See Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309, 327, 35 S.Ct. 582, 59 L.Ed. 969 (1915) (“... the writ of habeas corpus will lie only in case the judgment under which the prisoner is detained is shown to be absolutely void for want of jurisdiction in the court that pronounced it, either because such jurisdiction was absent at the beginning, or because it was lost in the course of the proceedings.”); Keizo v. Henry, 211 U.S. 146, 148, 29 S.Ct. 41, 53 L.Ed. 125 (1908); Ex parte Siebold, 100 U.S. 371, 375, 25 L.Ed. 717 (1879).
Lott; of course, claims no such fatal error in his indictments. And he does not claim that the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas entirely lacked jurisdiction to try his case. To the extent his claim may fit into this language, he argues that a three-judge panel of that court lacked jurisdiction to try him due to a clerical oversight, such that a single judge and jury of that same court should have tried him. This is not the sort of complete lack of jurisdiction discussed in Frank, Keizo, and Siebold.
In actuality, Lott claims that he “never executed a valid knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver of his constitutional right to be tried by a jury.” Yet his argument, based in state law, addresses solely the state-law validity of the waiver, rather than the federal standard that waiver of federal constitutional rights must be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. It may be true that, under Ohio law, the three-judge panel lacked jurisdiction because Ohio’s procedures for protecting his state-law right to a jury trial are extraordinarily strict and the clerical oversight resulted in an incomplete waiver. See O.R.C. § 2945.05; State v. Pless, 74 Ohio St.3d 333, 658 N.E.2d 766, 770 (Ohio 1996). But this has no bearing on whether his waiver of his right to trial by jury (which would have succeeded under Ohio law if the court clerk had time-stamped it, filed it, and made it part of the record) was effective to waive his federal constitutional right by being knowing, intelligent, and voluntary.
*623As the transcript of Lott’s jury-waiver hearing demonstrates, JA at 754-57, Lott was well aware of the implications of Ms request to be tried before a three-judge panel. The record clearly shows that Lott’s waiver of his right to trial by jury was knowing, intelligent, and voluntary, and therefore effective under the federal constitution. I do not consider it “a close question whether a court’s failure to comply with each of § 2945.05’s requirements is sufficient to invalidate an otherwise effective waiver....” A state court’s entirely internal mistakes cannot vitiate a constitutionally valid waiver, for those after-the-fact processes have no relation at all to the defendant’s knowledge of his rights, his information regarding the implications of waiving them, or whether any improper forces made his decision to waive involuntary.
To say that a state law error may provide a basis for habeas relief when the error also violates federal constitutional rights states the obvious, but does not apply here. As Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U.S. 62, 67-68, 112 S.Ct. 475, 116 L.Ed.2d 385 (1991), attempted to make clear, “ ‘federal habeas corpus relief does not lie for errors of state law.’ ” Ibid. (quoting Lewis v. Jeffers, 497 U.S. 764, 780, 110 S.Ct. 3092, 111 L.Ed.2d 606 (1990)). The proper inquiry is whether federal constitutional rights were violated. We can, of course, look to compliance with prophylactic state procedures designed to safeguard parallel state rights (Ohio’s statute and jurisprudence nowhere mention the federal right to trial by jury), to inform our resolution of the federal question. While Lott’s state-law jurisdictional argument could be said to “implicate” a federal question, the record evidence conclusively demonstrates that his federal rights were not violated. Indeed, Lott has advanced no meaningful argument that his waiver was not knowing, intelligent, and voluntary.
The majority’s citation to Norris v. Schotten, 146 F.3d 314, 329 (6th Cir.1998), and its discussion of substantive due process further confuse the issue before us. Norris explained that a state-law error in pre-trial proceedings can deny federal substantive due process when the error renders the defendant’s trial fundamentally unfair. See ibid. (rejecting such a claim with respect to alleged denial of state statutory right to speedy trial because it “ha[d] nothing whatsoever to do with the fairness of the trial itself but rather [went] to the fairness of the petitioner’s extended pretrial detention”). Not only does the alleged error of state law Lott raises “ha[ve] nothing whatsoever to do with the fairness of the trial itself,” it has nothing to do with the fairness of anything. It relates only to an internal regulation of Ohio’s courts.
Additionally, determining whether the alleged state-law error so deprived Lott of federal substantive due process does not “necessarily require[ ] our consideration of the merits of his claim.” Even if he were correct and his state-law claim meritorious, any such error could not possibly have resulted in the denial of a fundamentally fair proceeding. This court need not address the merits of Lott’s state-law claim because any such error did not result in the denial of a federal right.
Finally, I do not join the, majority’s analysis of Lott’s miscamage-of-justi.ce/actual innocence claim, in Part III.D.2.b. The majority needlessly analyzes a point “the parties have not argued,” by discussing certain evidence that it is not even sure may be properly considered in evaluating an actual innocence claim. The majority reserves judgment on the matter in part because “it may now be pending in state court.” Such a discourse has little or no value. To the extent that it is an opinion at all, it may be an advisory opinion be*624yond the limits of our Article III jurisdiction to decide cases or controversies. See Williams v. Zbaraz, 448 U.S. 358, 367, 100 S.Ct. 2694, 65 L.Ed.2d 831 (1980) (district court lacked jurisdiction to consider the constitutionality of a statute when none of the parties challenged its validity).
I concur in the court’s judgment and, excepting these two points, in its opinion.