Court Opinion

ID: 9487243
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:11:41.049794+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:09.964893
License: Public Domain

BRUNETTI, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority relies on this court’s decision in Tamapua v. Shimoda, 796 F.2d 261 (9th Cir.1986), to find that Henry satisfied the exhaustion requirement. While it is not for this panel to call Tamapua itself into question, I believe that the majority’s interpretation of Tamapua as controlling the outcome here brings Tamapua into conflict with the Supreme Court’s decision in Anderson v. Harless, 459 U.S. 4, 103 S.Ct. 276, 74 L.Ed.2d 3 (1982).
My review of the state court record compels me to conclude that, contrary to the requirement of Anderson, Henry did not provide the California courts with a fair opportunity to apply the legal principles controlling his federal due process claim. As a result, Henry failed to exhaust his state court remedies and the majority errs in reaching the merits of his petition.
I
Our review of Henry’s state court proceedings must be governed by the Supreme Court decision in Anderson. Anderson refined the standard declared in Picard v. Connor, 404 U.S. 270, 92 S.Ct. 509, 30 L.Ed.2d 438 (1971), that “the substance of a federal habeas corpus claim must first be presented to the state courts,” id. at 278, 92 S.Ct. at 513, and set forth this guiding principle: “28 U.S.C. § 2254 requires a federal habeas petitioner to provide the state courts with a fair opportunity to apply controlling legal principles to the facts bearing upon his constitutional claim.... [T]he habeas petitioner must have fairly presented to the state courts the substance of his federal habeas corpus claim.” 459 U.S. at 6, 103 S.Ct. at 277 (citations and internal quotations omitted).
In Anderson, the Court reversed the Sixth Circuit’s affirmance of a federal district court’s conditional grant of Harless’s application for a writ. The challenge to Harless’s state trial involved a jury instruction on whether malice should be implied from the defendant’s use of a weapon. In Michigan state court, Harless had presented the operative facts upon which his federal claim would be based, argued that the instruction was reversible error, and cited a Michigan decision grounded in state law only. Harless’s federal Sandstrom claim1 addressed the same instruction and also argued that its use *1044represented error. The Supreme Court held that Harless had not exhausted this claim in state court, in that exhaustion required more than presentation to the state courts of all facts necessary to support the federal claim, and more than that a “somewhat similar state-law claim was made.” Id. (emphasis added). Anderson thus demands a close examination of the record.
The majority opinion here turns instead on Tamapua’s gloss on Anderson, which seems to allow a finding of exhaustion if Henry’s state court claim of miscarriage of justice was “essentially the same argument,” Tamar pua, 796 F.2d at 262, as a claim of denial of federal due process. Unfortunately, reliance on this Tamapua phrase is improvident and misleading, for it directs us away from the real basis of Anderson.
In Tamapua, this court said that a claim is fairly presented if the petitioner has described the operative facts and legal theory upon which his claim is based, even if he subsequently reformulates his claims somewhat. The decision equated “operative facts and legal theory” to the “substance” of the claim. 796 F.2d at 262 (emphasis added).
Tamapua had persistently argued in state court that the indictment and evidence were insufficient, and that the act for which he had been convicted was not a crime. We stated that Tamapua’s argument before this court was “essentially the same,” although it now carried a federal due process label. The court concluded that Tamapua’s state court claims had satisfied the fair presentation requirement because Tamapua’s primary contention in state court proceedings was that he had been convicted with insufficient evidence, and that sufficiency of the evidence used to convict is a fundamental concern of the due process clause. 796 F.2d at 262-63 (citing In re Winship, 397 U.S. 368, 364, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1072-73, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970)). Moreover, the Tamapua court observed that:
In Tamapua’s reply brief to the state supreme court, he correctly cited State v. Lima, 64 Haw. 470, 474, 643 P.2d 536, 539 (1982), for the proposition that “it is well established as a precept of constitutional as well as statutory law that an accused in a criminal ease can only be convicted upon proof by the prosecution of every element of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Id. at 263. Declaring that exhaustion did not mean that Tamapua must have “invoke[d] the talismanic phrase ‘due process of law1 in the state proceedings to gain access to the federal courts,” the court decided that “the Hawaii Supreme Court had a full and fair opportunity to address the substance of Ta-mapua’s claims.” Id.
The crux of Tamapua was this judgment that the Hawaii Supreme Court had had a full and fair opportunity to address the substance of Tamapua’s federal claim. Contrary to the assertion of the majority here, Tama-pua did not set up a new exhaustion test based upon whether “essentially the same” arguments were made in state and federal courts. I can discern no such standard from Anderson and Picard, and I believe the majority now erroneously creates such a test by employing the Tamapua language in contravention of Anderson’s teaching. Tamapua is necessarily only an application of Anderson and Picard, not a novel legal precedent.
I thus disagree with the majority’s use of Tamapua here. Anderson requires that the specific federal constitutional argument must be presented to or considered by the state court. Anderson, 459 U.S. at 7, 103 S.Ct. at 277. The Supreme Court there rejected the Sixth Circuit’s conclusions that “the due process ramifications” of Harless’s argument to the Michigan court were “self-evident” and that reliance on a state-court ease was sufficient to present the state court with the substance of his due process challenge to the malice instruction. Henry’s state challenge had the same defect.
The majority’s reading of Tamapua is unnecessary; it is also wrong because it permits outcomes that contradict the specific requirements and holding of Anderson.
II
As Anderson requires, let us compare the claim Henry actually made in state court to the substance of his federal claim in habeas, and then consider whether the state courts had a fair opportunity to apply the control*1045ling federal legal principles to the facts bearing on Henry’s constitutional claim. Anderson, 459 U.S. at 6-7, 103 S.Ct. at 277-78; Tamapua, 796 F.2d at 263. In both cases, Henry argued that admission of the Hackett testimony was reversible error, but the similarity largely ends there.
The state law claim was that: (1) admission of the testimony was error under the California Evidence Code; and (2) the error required reversal because it had resulted in a “miscarriage of justice” under Article VI, § % (now § 13) of the California Constitution. Given the elaboration of this standard in People v. Watson, 46 Cal.2d 818, 836, 299 P.2d 243 (1956), cert. denied, 355 U.S. 846, 78 S.Ct. 70, 2 L.Ed.2d 55 (1957), a California reviewing court could not reverse Henry’s conviction on the basis of this claim unless Henry could demonstrate that it was reasonably probable that a result more favorable to him would have been reached absent admission of the Hackett testimony.2
In his federal habeas petition, Henry contended that he had been denied due process at trial because evidence of an uncharged crime was erroneously admitted (the Hackett testimony) and was then coupled with a jury instruction emphasizing that same evidence. Had Henry presented this federal claim to the state courts, he would have argued that the error had “so fatally infected the proceedings as to render them fundamentally unfair,” Jammal v. Van de Kamp, 926 F.2d 918, 919 (9th Cir.1991), such that it acquired federal due process dimensions and should be analyzed under the prejudice standard of Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 87 S.Ct. 824, 17 L.Ed.2d 705 (1967). Chapman would then have mandated reversal unless the state showed that the constitutional error was “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id. at 24, 87 S.Ct. at 828. Henry did not present, nor did the California courts of their own volition consider, such a federal claim.
The California courts would thus have applied a markedly different prejudice standard to Henry’s claim had they considered it as a federal due process challenge. Instead of the state-law Watson reasoning the California courts actually used, they would have applied the federal Chapman standard (not Brecht v. Abrahamson, — U.S. -, 113 S.Ct. 1710, 123 L.Ed.2d 353 (1993), as the majority asserts3), and the state and not Henry would have carried the burden regarding a prejudice showing. The Chapman analysis would have been more favorable to Henry, thus giving the state a greater opportunity to correct its own mistake.
Under Anderson, the exhaustion requirement mandates that the substance of a federal claim be asserted with particularity in the state court. Anderson, 459 U.S. at 7, 103 S.Ct. at 277-78. Henry’s citing of a state court decision predicated on state law (e.g., Watson) does not apprise the state reviewing court of a potential federal claim. Id. at 7 n. 3, 103 S.Ct. at 277-78 n. 3. While this case is at least as close as Anderson, under these principles the difference between the Watson and Chapman standards dictates the conclusion that Henry failed to exhaust his federal claim in state court, even if one accepts the majority’s equation of “miscarriage of justice” with “fundamental[ ] unfair[ness].” To the extent the majority employs the Ta-mapua standard of “essentially the same argument” to find exhaustion, it distorts the required analysis into a semantic exercise, allowing federal courts to construe and consider federal claims that were never fairly presented to or considered by — and thus never exhausted in — the state courts. Pi-card, 404 U.S. at 276, 92 S.Ct. at 512-13. Anderson, 459 U.S. at 7, 103 S.Ct. at 278.
*1046A review of the record confirms that the California courts were not apprised of Henry’s federal claim.
Ill
I have examined the entire state-court record available to us in this case. Henry’s written materials cited only provisions of the California Constitution, California statutes, and California state case law. At trial, his counsel did not mention other sources of authority.
Henry never suggested that the trial court’s admission of the testimony at issue violated due process or any other federal right. Henry’s only invocations of due process and “constitutional” rights (which may or may not have signaled a federal, as opposed to state, constitutional claim) occurred in relation to a different alleged defect of the trial having to do with the specificity of the charge upon which Henry was convicted, a matter which he has not pursued on appeal.
A. The State Trial Court. The trial court based its decision to admit the testimony upon California state-law eases interpreting the California Evidence Code that held admissible, in a trial on a given charge, evidence of the defendant’s similar prior explanations regarding similar previous allegations against him. The trial court additionally considered Cal.Evid.Code § 352 (inadmissibility because of prejudicial effect requires excess of prejudice over probative value) and found the testimony admissible. The limiting instruction came from the same cases as well as California model instructions.
Henry’s counterarguments focused on rebutting the state’s use of the California state-law cases and asserted that other California state-law cases precluded the evidence. He reargued the same ground during the court’s consideration of his motion for a new trial.
Thus, at no time during proceedings in the state trial court did Henry argue that admission of the Hackett testimony was anything more than an error under the California Evidence Code and California cases interpreting state law.
B. Appellate Proceedings. Henry’s Opening Brief for the California Court of Appeal made “essentially similar” arguments with respect to this aspect of the trial. He argued that the testimony was inadmissible as both hearsay and propensity act evidence. Henry continued to challenge the authority of the state-law cases upon which the trial court had relied, and contended that the prejudicial effect of the testimony had outweighed the probative value. Further, Henry claimed that the state had improperly withheld the evidence until the end of the case, citing various state-law cases holding that such conduct could render the evidence inadmissible.
Henry’s. brief concluded that the alleged error had been highly prejudicial and that (as Art. VI, § 13 of the California Constitution required him to plead) the error had resulted in a “miscarriage of justice.” He cited People v. Watson for the test regarding prejudicial effect. Henry’s Reply Brief covered no new ground.
Although we have no transcript of the argument in the Court of Appeal, that court’s decision demonstrates that the court was unaware of any claims based upon federal law. The court found that the trial court had erred in admitting the testimony, but did not find prejudice to Henry: “we cannot say the result would probably have been different had the evidence not been adduced at the end of trial.” This standard comes from California’s own Watson test which, as we know, differs from the federal Chapman standard the court would properly have applied to an error of federal law. One judge dissented on the basis that the majority’s Watson assessment was simply wrong, but suggested no new sources of law. The opinion does demonstrate that the California courts actually decided a claim of miscarriage of justice.
C.Petition for Review in the California Supreme Court. Henry’s Petition for Review in the California Supreme Court returned to the miscarriage of justice argument with respect to the challenged testimony. Henry contended that admission of the Hackett testimony was “reversible error under Article VI, Section [13] of the Constitution and Evidence Code § 353(b).” He con*1047tested the Court of Appeal’s Watson analysis of prejudice, and asked the state Supreme Court to clarify the Watson standard, but Henry did not suggest that use of Watson was in any sense a federal constitutional error.
I have also reviewed each of the California decisions Henry cited, and none of them refers to federal constitutional provisions, federal statutes, or federal decisions in any manner which should have apprised the state courts of Henry’s federal claim.
Conclusion
In sum, Henry never indicated to the California courts any federal basis for his claim of error with respect to the testimony at issue, and he certainly did not argue for application of standards that were more than “somewhat similar” to the controlling federal legal principles. Each and every one of his arguments depended upon California sources of law and challenged the method of application, but never the underlying exclusive applicability, of those sources.
I conclude that Henry did not exhaust his state remedies and that this court should not have considered Henry’s federal due process claim on the merits.

. See Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U.S. 510, 99 S.Ct. 2450, 61 L.Ed.2d 39 (1979).

. Parenthetically, there is nothing in Watson to suggest that its mention of "the constitutional requirements of a fair trial and due process” was anything other than a reference to the state constitution's guarantees. Watson, 46 Cal.2d at 835, 299 P.2d 243. See Cal. Const. Art. I, § 15 (fair trial and due process guarantees in criminal cases). The California Supreme Court in Watson cited only its own precedents in support of this reference. 46 Cal.2d at 835-36, 299 P.2d 243.

. The majority attempts, without visible support, to skate over this defect in its analysis. It is irrelevant that if Henry had exhausted his federal claim in state court a federal habeas court might have employed the Brecht standard in evaluating the collateral attack.