Court Opinion

ID: 9496405
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:25:40.849144+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:33.371400
License: Public Domain

TALLMAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Despite repeated admonishment by the United States Supreme Court of this court’s habeas jurisprudence, once again my colleagues persist in ignoring the AEDPA standard of review in order to invalidate a reasonable state court determination of guilt in a 1985 murder case. One would think after reading the court’s opinion that the record clearly established the following two facts:
• that the expert testimony regarding erasures on the notes at the state court collateral proceeding buttressed Lee’s claim that he had changed all the questions on the notes after Hall provided answers, see Maj. Op. at 978, 979-980, 980, 982; and
• that Hall’s confession to homicide detectives was so “suspect,” id. at 978, “contradictory,” id. at 979, “curious and largely uncorroborated,” id. at 984, and full of “multiple inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” id., that it was of little or no probative value and should have been discredited by the jury.
Conspicuous by its absence from the majority’s view of the case is the evidence that:
• While the experts testified that some of the questions on the notes had been altered to a small extent (a letter here and there), the experts also testified that there were no alterations to some of the most incriminating portions of the questions and that none of the questions had been erased in their entirety, as Lee claimed; and
• Hall confessed that he forced the victim to orally copulate him, stabbed the victim twice on the right arm, knew the location and the position the body was left in, and knew that the victim suffered stab wounds on her chest, all of which was corroborated by physical evidence from the crime scene and autopsy results, and could only have been known by the victim’s murderers.
Because these overlooked facts sufficiently corroborate Hall’s confession of guilt and render the state appellate court determination objectively reasonable, I respectfully dissent.
I
We cannot grant habeas relief in this case unless the state court’s determination was “based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(2). In Torres v. Prunty, 223 F.3d 1103, 1108 (9th Cir.2000), we found that the standards governing the *986“unreasonable determination” clause of § 2254(d)(2) were equivalent to the standards governing the “unreasonable application” clause of § 2254(d)(1). At the time, our case law improperly instructed that an “unreasonable application” of Supreme Court precedent meant that the state court’s application was clearly erroneous. See Van Tran v. Lindsey, 212 F.3d 1143, 1153-54 (9th Cir.2000).
That standard was subsequently corrected. Our “unreasonable application” formulation was not deferential enough to state courts under AEDPA. Instead, the Supreme Court told us that “unreasonable application” means more than just a “clear error,” but instead means a decision that is “objectively unreasonable.” Lockyer v. Andrade, — U.S. ——, -, 123 S.Ct. 1166, 1175, 155 L.Ed.2d 144 (2003). We are not to “conflat[e] error (even clear error) with unreasonableness,” for the former “fails to give proper deference to state courts.” Id.
Yet, the rule in Torres remains unblemished: the standards governing unreasonableness for § 2254(d)(2) are the same standards for unreasonableness under § 2254(d)(1). Thus, the “objectively unreasonable” standard reaffirmed by Lock-yer for § 2254(d)(1) applies with equal force to the question presented today and governed by § 2254(d)(2).
Moreover, under AEDPA, state court factual findings are presumed correct. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e)(1). Only if a petitioner presents “clear and convincing evidence” of an erroneous factual determination may we overrule a state court factual finding. Id.
II
A
The majority’s description of the state court collateral proceeding implies that Lee, troubled by his conscience, finally came clean and testified truthfully at the state court collateral trial, and that his testimony was bolstered by scientific evidence affirming that he had erased all the incriminating questions. The record paints a different picture.
Lee testified at the preliminary hearing before Hall’s criminal trial. Lee confirmed that he had written the questions on the notes to Hall while they were on “informant’s row” in the Los Angeles County jail. Although the notes were admitted during the trial, the prosecution decided not to call Lee as a witnesses.
Then, at the state court collateral proceedings, Lee flipped. He there claimed that he had erased all the questions after Hall had answered them. Lee asserted that he had lied at the preliminary hearing because two homicide detectives threatened to kill his mother. He also insisted that at least two deputy district attorneys had instructed him to lie.
The hearing judge, understandably, found Lee to be less than credible:
Cornelius Lee has testified in this case. If Cornelius Lee were to tell me what time it was, I would still want to look at the clock.
I do not believe much of what he said. He is plainly a liar. I almost wanted to have the bailiff clean the witness stand after he left.
(E.R.244-45.) Only one conclusion can be reached from this credibility assessment: that nothing Lee testified to, whether at the preliminary hearing or at the collateral proceedings, should be believed without corroborating evidence.
The state court, therefore, was left with only the scientific evidence presented at the collateral hearing. The state’s expert, Manuel Montilla, testified that:
(1) he was “certain” that none of the questions on the notes had been totally erased;
*987(2) the erasures that took place were around phrases and letters, not total lines;
(3) no erasures were found in the phrase “Listing you are going to have to stop tell people that you killed that gril”;
(4) the only erasures in the question “Okay when you guys put her in alley, who seen her” was the “y” and “u” in “you” and the “a” and “y” in “alley”;
(5) the only erasures in the question “After you guys killed the gril, did you and V-Dog kill her brother two” were the “1” in “gril,” the “g” in “V-Dog” and the “k” in “MU”;
(6) the only erasures in the phrase “Hey, home boy the police want you and V-Dog” was the “g” in “V-Dog”; and
(7) the phrase “bad for kUling” had some erasures.
Hall’s expert, Kurt Kuhn, testified that:
(1) no erasures were conclusively found in the question “After you guys Mlled the gril, did you and V-Dog kill her brother two,” and the only even possible erasure was the “1” in “gril”;
(2) no erasures were found in the question “Did you Mlling that gril on 49th and Vermout, and why did you tell the ploice they know you did it”; and
(3) some “partial” erasures were found in the phrases “okay befor you guys Mlled” and “Mlled that gril, okay when you.”
Faced with this testimony, the superior court judge concluded: “We have scientific evidence that establishes that the letters, the correspondence between [Lee] and [Hah] includes some erasures. What those erasures erased, what replaced those erasures, how extensive the erasure were are all subject to debate and possible evi-dentiary conflict.” (E.R.245.) The judge went on to find that because there were some alterations on the original note pages and because Lee never testified at trial, the state petition for a writ of habeas corpus should be granted.
The California State Court of Appeal reversed, finding that the notes were not false. The court explained that the lower court never expressly found that the notes were “false.” The appellate court held that the scientific evidence established that the notes were not changed as substantially as Lee claimed. The court reasoned that the erasures that did take place are consistent with someone struggling with spelling, not someone erasing entire questions. See In Re: Hall, No. B09432 (Cal. Ct.App. July 23, 1996).
The majority takes issue with the state appeUate court decision that the notes were not “false.” The majority states that the “California Court of Appeal ... proceeded from an incorrect premise, ‘agreeing’ with the trial court that the notes were not false evidence, instead of acknowledging the trial court’s implicit finding that they were.” Maj. Op. at 13165. The majority is playing semantic games in order to gloss over the assumptions it makes that are unsupported by the record.
It is true that the trial court found the notes possibly erased in part. It is equally true that the trial court never, implicitly or explicitly, found that the notes were false in total as Lee testified. Indeed, doing so would have repudiated the expert testimony and credited Lee — something the trial court expressly refused to do: “The Court finds that[Lee’s] testimony is not credible except to the extent that it is supported by scientific evidence.” (Emphasis added). Based on the trial court’s suspicion about the notes in part, it granted the petition. The only conclusion possible regarding falsity1 from this record is *988to say that the trial court equated the partial alterations with complete falsity.
But the state appellate court accepted the fact that the notes were altered in part. What the appellate court reasonably took issue with is the implicit conclusion — if indeed there was one at all — that this rendered the notes “false.” In other words, there was no “unreasonable determination of the facts ” as the majority claims, but instead a conclusion about the significance of agreed-upon facts.
And this conclusion by the California Court of Appeal was objectively reasonable when one considers the standards that it must apply to state habeas proceedings. Under California law, Hall had the burden to prove that the notes were false by a preponderance of the evidence. See In re Sassounian, 9 Cal.4th 535, 37 Cal.Rptr.2d 446, 887 P.2d 527, 534 (1995). Based on this burden of proof, California courts reject claims of “falsity” when it is unclear whether evidence introduced at trial was completely false or not. See, e.g., In re Roberts, 29 Cal.4th 726, 128 Cal.Rptr.2d 762, 60 P.3d 165, 174 (2003) (refusing to label trial testimony that was later recanted as “false” because it was not clear whether the trial testimony, or the recantation, was actually the truth); see also United States v. Croft, 124 F.3d 1109, 1119 (9th Cir.1997) (holding that trial testimony is not “false” simply because it contradicts prior testimony).
But here, the trial court — if one accepts the majority’s premise — found the evidence was false while also finding that Lee could not be believed and that the amount and significance of the erasures was in dispute. With these factual determinations established, the appellate court simply corrected the trial court’s legal error and held that this evidence, under California law, did not meet Hall’s burden to establish falsity in order to justify habeas relief.
This conclusion was not only reasonable, it was correct. The majority’s holding today ignores the proper role the appellate court played in correcting the trial court’s legal error. Even if one were to assume that the trial court did find that the notes were completely erased, based on the record the appellate court rightly stepped in and corrected the trial court’s erroneous factual determination. To believe that the notes are completely false is to believe Cornelius Lee and disbelieve the scientific evidence, something the record will not allow. The scientific evidence merely shows minor erasures, and that none of the questions were erased in their entirety.
However one examines the California Court of Appeal’s decision, it was well-within the contours of objective reasonableness. To conclude otherwise is to say that “unreasonable” really means “we disagree” — a proposition the Supreme Court *989has expressly condemned. See Lockyer, — U.S. at-, 123 S.Ct. at 1175.
B
The majority, after quickly plowing through the “falsity” analysis, compounds its error in discussing materiality by substituting its judgment for the state appellate court, which is also impermissible.2 The California Court of Appeal concluded:
In any event, independent of the notes, there was overwhelming evidence of Hall’s guilt. He confessed to the police that he forced Duncan to have intercourse, stabbed her twice in the arm, held her down while others stabbed her in the chest, and drove her body to the alley where it was discovered. He described the unique position in which Duncan’s body was found. No more was required to support his conviction. ...
In Re: Hall, at 11. The majority holds that this conclusion was unreasonable.
Instead of employing the majority’s rhetorical strategy of characterizing Hall’s confession with disparaging adjectives and generalities, I’ll simply report what Hall confessed to.
Hall’s signed confession states that Duncan was forced to orally copulate Hall. Lab tests showed that Duncan’s mouth contained semen.
Hall confessed that he stabbed her twice in the right arm. Investigators noted Duncan had two stab wounds on her right wrist. Evidence adduced at trial indicates that one would not have been able to see Duncan’s wrist unless they were standing directly over the body.
Hall confessed that he held Duncan down while she was stabbed in the chest by others. Investigators noted Duncan suffered repeated stab wounds on her chest.
Hall confessed that Duncan’s body was positioned on the ground in a unique position. His description exactly matched how the body was actually found.
Were there inconsistencies in Hall’s version of events? Yes. But does that make Hall’s confession worthless? Of course not, especially when one considers the precise details Hall knew that only someone who participated in the murder could have known. The majority’s gross generalization that some of this information was “public knowledge” is simply incorrect and unsupported anywhere in the record. A bystander seeing Duncan’s body from the street could not have determined that Duncan was raped or that she was stabbed twice on the wrist.
Were Hall’s criminal case originally tried in federal court and before us now. on direct review, the question of whether the notes — assuming they were false — were material might, in theory, be a close one. But was it objectively unreasonable for the California Court of Appeal to conclude that the notes were not material when Hall confessed to the murder and physical evidence corroborated the confession? To ask the question is to answer it.
Ill
Too often, in violation of both the letter of AEDPA and the spirit of comity AED-PA embraces, this court strains mightily to grant a state court petitioner habeas corpus relief. See, e.g., Early v. Packer, 537 U.S. 3, 123 S.Ct. 362, 154 L.Ed.2d 263 (2002); Woodford v. Visciotti, 537 U.S. 19, 123 S.Ct. 357, 154 L.Ed.2d 279 (2002). *990The decision we announce today is a continuation of that improper modus operandi.
Be it sound public policy or not, the people have spoken through Congress. Under AEDPA, Congress has severely circumscribed the power of federal courts to overturn state court convictions. Under these strict standards, we cannot substitute our judgment for the state court’s judgment. Instead, in a case like this challenging state court factual findings, ours is a more passive and academic inquiry: is the state court determination objectively reasonable? This case, as the district court found, surely falls within the category of cases that meet this standard. The majority’s conclusion to the contrary is nothing short of a return to the application of pre-AEDPA standards — at best. This is no longer the law. I respectfully dissent.

. Another possible, and even likely, conclusion from the record is that the trial court simply misunderstood the standards governing state habeas relief for a conviction based on false evidence. Critical to the trial court was the fact that Lee never testified at trial:
*988“So I grant this petition not because I think [Hall] is innocent ... but only because there is a player in the middle of all this, an obviously sleezy [sic] liar by the name of Cornelius Lee, and I think that the only way we can have justice here is for [Lee] and all of his sleeze [sic] to parade before a jury of our fellow citizens and let them decide what happened here.... Since this new information about material items of evidence that could well have affected the outcome of the trial, and since [Lee] was not called by either side as a witness at the [criminal] trial, the Court grants the Petition....” (E.R.246.)
But whether Lee would or would not testify, and whether that would serve justice in a new trial, has nothing to do with whether the notes that were admitted were false. Thus, contrary to the majority's reasoning, it is not necessary to infer that the trial court found the notes to be false. Instead, another perfectly reasonable inference is that the trial court simply erred as a matter of law in applying the standards for habeas relief and was subsequently corrected on review.

. The majority assumes that materiality is a question of fact governed by § 2254(d)(2). Whether properly examined under subpart (2) or subpart (1) of § 2254(d), the state court decision is objectively reasonable.