Court Opinion

ID: 9493932
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:23:43.978376+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:06.977048
License: Public Domain

JACOBS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
As to all but one point, I concur in the majority opinion. Thus I agree that Noble’s habeas petition was timely (Part I), that it is not necessary to determine whether AEDPA applies (Part II.A), that, under Taylor v. Illinois, 484 U.S. 400, 108 S.Ct. 646, 98 L.Ed.2d 798 (1988), the state court erred in failing to determine whether defense counsel’s non-compliance with § 250.20 was willful (Part II.B), and that this failure was not harmless (Part II.D).
I respectfully dissent from Part II.C (“Remedy”) only. Rather than affirm the grant of the writ, I would remand to the district court for a hearing to determine whether defense counsel’s conduct was willful, because if it was, the exclusion of the testimony was not constitutional error.
The majority opinion sees “strong support in the record” for ascribing counsel’s non-compliance with § 250.20 to “his misinterpretation of the governing discovery rules,” and further posits that “the state’s proffer of what it would prove on remand has little bearing on the issue of willfulness.” Maj. Op. at 100-101.
I read the record differently. Noble’s counsel was an experienced criminal defense lawyer and can be presumed to understand who is an alibi witness. At the same time, counsel had good reason to believe that Yamagata’s testimony was of a kind that would be effective only if the government was surprised and lacked an opportunity to prepare for it. And Noble’s counsel had the means to engineer this surprise: Noble’s counsel was also counsel to Yamagata, and Yamagata and Noble were friends from prison days. One could find that counsel withheld Yamagata’s name until such time as Yamagata could no longer be interviewed by the government (as Yamagata’s lawyer, Noble’s counsel could see to that), or fully investigated. In any case, I think that the circumstances are sufficiently ambiguous to justify fact-finding. See Escalera v. Coombe, 852 F.2d 45, 48-49 (2d Cir.1988) (remanding habeas petition involving exclusion of alibi witness testimony, holding that “in the absence of other error requiring state court proceedings, it [is] appropriate for the district court to hold its own evidentiary hearing.”). Cf. Taylor v. Illinois, 484 U.S. 400, 412 n. 17, 108 S.Ct. 646, 98 L.Ed.2d 798 (1988) (noting “the ease with which an alibi *103can be fabricated” (quoting Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 81, 90 S.Ct. 1893, 26 L.Ed.2d 446 (1970))).
Before a new trial is mandated, we should assure that there has in fact been constitutional error. A remand for fact-finding may avoid unnecessary involvement of the federal judiciary in state criminal proceedings.