Court Opinion

ID: 9491409
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:13:20.120646+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:43.390089
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Lewis Ashker’s petition is forcefully presented, but it encounters the numerous barriers set by the Supreme Court of the United States to reduce the review of convictions in the state courts by the federal judiciary. The petition also runs into the normal limitations on appellate review of a trial. We have not heard or seen the witnesses. We look at the evidence from a viewpoint favorable to the conclusion reached by the jury that did hear and see them. From that perspective that Ashker and Kurt Novaock had taken Ashker’s truck the afternoon of June 13, 1985, and that Novaock and an unidentified man and the truck should have been seen in Delmont, South Dakota, 128 miles from home on the evening of the same day are strange and unaccountable circumstances unless the men had a powerful motive drawing them to make the trip. That Novaock had the knowledge to make the taking of Jerry Plihal’s guns a temptation and that the guns should have disappeared that evening are circumstances suggesting the motive. That Ashker was the unidentified man follows from the truck being his. The falsity of Ashker’s alibis makes it likely that he was concealing guilty conduct. To conclude from these facts that Ashker actually took part in Plihal’s murder is a large step, but it is hard to say that it was beyond reason for a jury to draw this inference and even to draw it beyond a reasonable doubt.
The prosecutor’s tactic of putting on the deposition of Novaock’s wife Sharon only to introduce the hearsay testimony of Lisa Jensen to discredit Sharon caused the federal district court to grant Ashker’s first federal petition for habeas. We held that the issue *877should not have been reached. Ashker v. Leapley, 5 F.3d 1178, 1179-80 (8th Cir.1993). We cannot pass judgment on it now. The jury was told to consider the hearsay only as a challenge to Sharon’s credibility. But to find Sharon incredible, the jury had to find Lisa credible and therefore to believe that Lisa had heard Sharon speak of the bloody telltale signs on Novaock. It would have been an unusual jury which did not let the thought of these bloody telltale signs on his companion enter into the weighing of the evidence against Ashker. In this close case the unpurgeable residue of the hearsay could scarcely not have played a part. No federal remedy now exists to alter the result.