Court Opinion

ID: 9498714
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:26:05.412688+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:01.580705
License: Public Domain

RYMER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I part company because in my view, the state courts did not make an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the record before them when they found that John Meyers, Edwards’s counsel at his first trial, made a tactical decision in asking Edwards questions on the stand that waived the marital communications privilege. Nor did the state courts apply Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), unreasonably in concluding that this was not an unreasonable strategy for Meyers to pursue, given the substantial amount of circumstantial evidence implicating Edwards that had already been presented, an implicit confession by Edwards to the victim’s cousin that he was the murderer, Edwards’s unexplained flight with his wife two days after the murder, and Meyers’s reasonable belief, in light of the state of California law at the time, that he could elicit testimony from Edwards about his conversations with his wife on the night after the murder without opening the door to his wife’s version of their conversation on the night of the murder. Therefore, I disagree with the decision of the district court granting Edwards’s habeas petition, and dissent from the majority’s contrary disposition.
At the outset, the district court reviewed the state courts’ finding that Meyers made a tactical decision, not a mistake, under the “clear and convincing evidence” standard of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e)(1) rather than, as we have since clarified in Taylor v. Maddox, 366 F.3d 992, 999-1000 (9th Cir. 2004), for whether that determination was unreasonable under § 2254(d)(2).1 The district court held that Meyers’s declaration, his stipulated testimony that he had made a mistake during the first trial, his statements to the trial judge at sidebar during the first trial, and his apparent ignorance of the nature and scope of the marital communications privilege, amounted to clear and convincing evidence that the state courts’ finding was incorrect. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e)(1). However, the state courts’ finding should not have been reviewed under § 2254(e)(1) because Edwards introduced no new evidence in the district court. Instead, as we explained in Taylor, when a federal habeas petitioner introduces no new evidence and relies solely on the state court record in challenging a state court factual determination, the proper inquiry is whether the state court made “an unreasonable determination of *518the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(2). Only if a state court factual determination survives this intrinsic review and the petitioner presents new evidence in district court that was not in the state court record may the district court proceed to the extrinsic review contemplated by § 2254(e)(1) and ask whether the new evidence clearly and convincingly shows that the state court factual determination was incorrect. Edwards presented no new evidence in the district court that was not in the state court record, and did not seek an evidentiary hearing in the district court to elicit any such evidence; accordingly, the proper question is whether the California Court of Appeal’s determination that Meyers was not ineffective was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence before it.
Here, two state trial judges and three state appellate judges found that Meyers’s decisions were tactical. While this is a close call and we mayor may not have made the same judgment ourselves, that is not the question. The question is whether the state courts’ determination was unreasonable. I can’t say that it was.
Unlike the situation in People v. Dorsey, 46 Cal.App.3d 706, 120 Cal.Rptr. 508 (1975), in which the defendant’s trial counsel failed to raise the marital communications privilege at all, Meyers clearly knew about the privilege and timely raised it before trial began. Edwards argues that Meyers was ineffective because he was ignorant about the operation and scope of the privilege and of how waiver operates under California law. However, the state courts concluded that Meyers took a calculated risk.2 It appears from the record that Meyers believed that he could question Edwards about his conversation with his wife on July 18, the night after the murder, without waiving the privilege as to Edwards’s different conversation with her on July 17, the night of the murder. The confession occurred during the conversation on July 17. Meyers withdrew an earlier question about Edwards’s July 17 conversation with his wife regarding the reason Edwards was washing his hands, and thereby avoided opening the door to Edwards’s wife’s testimony about Edwards’s confession to her during that same conversation. The question Meyers did pursue with Edwards was about the telephone call he received the next evening and what he told his wife about it, which elicited from Edwards evidence that both he and his wife had been threatened.3 *519At the point when Meyers asked this question, he was faced with a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence of Edwards’s guilt, an implicit confession related by the victim’s cousin — who testified that Edwards told him “And I’ll fuck you up too ” — and Edwards’s flight with his wife two days after the murder for no apparent reason other than consciousness of guilt. The only way Meyers could combat the inevitable inferences to be drawn from this evidence was to defuse the flight issue by making it look like Edwards and his wife fled because they had been threatened, not because he was guilty or because his wife was scared of him instead of a threat by a third party.
Meyers also argued in state court that eliciting evidence from Edwards about a different conversation with his wife that occurred on a different day about a different topic — threats to Edwards and his wife — did not waive the privilege as to all conversations between Edwards and his wife that took place after the murder. Meyers’s position on this point was far from unreasonable. When the trial judge directed the prosecutor’s and Meyers’s attention to People v. Worthington, 38 Cal.App.3d 359, 113 Cal.Rptr. 322 (1974), Meyers argued that Worthington was distinguishable because the dueling versions of a communication between a husband and wife in that case all had to do with a single conversation. Meyers was quite correct on this point, and was not unreasonable in maintaining that Worthington could not possibly stand for the proposition that a waiver of the marital communications privilege as to one conversation on one day about one subject opens the door to admission of confidential marital communications that occurred during a different conversation on a different day about a completely different subject. That Meyers turned out to be wrong in his position because the trial judge disagreed with him about the scope of the waiver does not make the calculated risk he took unreasonable given that, had he succeeded, he would have been able to explain Edwards’s flight and maybe create reasonable doubt by suggesting that the person who made the threat was the murderer instead of Edwards.
Finally, Edwards was not convicted on the first-degree murder charge in the first trial. The jury may have hung due to unrelated racial tension among the jurors, as Edwards contends, or it may have hung because of reasonable doubt about whether Edwards was the murderer. The point is that no one knows why Edwards was not convicted in the first trial, but that he was not is at least some indication that Meyers’s tactical decision may have worked.
I would reverse, and part company with my colleagues, because I cannot conclude that the state courts applied Strickland in an objectively unreasonable manner or made an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the state court record in deciding that Meyers made a reasonable tactical decision that resulted in waiver of the marital communications privilege.

. As the majority notes, the Supreme Court in Miller-El v. Dretke, - U.S. -, 125 S.Ct. 2317, 2325, 162 L.Ed.2d 196 (2005), intimates that the standards under §§ 2254(d)(2) and (e)(1) may merge. However, the Court’s passing recitation of the AEDPA standard does not undermine Taylor, which is binding on us.

. Our review of the state courts' decisions should not be influenced by the fact that Meyers fell on his sword' during the first trial. After the trial judge ruled that his questions had opened the door, Meyers immediately asserted “that's inadequate representation of counsel.” If anything is tactical, that claim surely is, and it demonstrates how quickly Meyers could think on his feet.

. In fact, the question Meyers asked Edwards did not call for Edwards to reveal any confidential communications he had with his wife. Meyers asked Edwards:
Q: Where was Kemet [Edwards's wife] at that time [the night after the murder]?
A: She started hollering, "What’s going on? What's going on? What’s happening? What's wrong? What's going on?”
Q: Did you tell her anything?
A: I told her, “Somebody killed Don and they think I had something to do with it, and they just threatened to come and kill us.”
(RT 545-46.) As this excerpt demonstrates, Edwards's answers were not responsive to Meyers's questions. Meyers's questions did not seek to elicit any confidential communications Edwards had with his wife. Thus, nothing Meyers asked Edwards on the stand indicates that he expected Edwards to waive the privilege through his responses, and it is not clear how Meyers acted unreasonably in asking the questions that he did. The question
*519“Did you tell her anything?” calls for a "yes” or "no” answer, which is not a privileged communication. The fact that Edwards spontaneously waived the privilege by- giving non-responsive answers to Meyers's questions does not mean that Meyers was unreasonable in asking those questions.