Court Opinion

ID: 9900412
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-11-18 22:12:32.957473+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:21:05.264121
License: Public Domain

No. 348                July 6, 2023                  807

          IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE
                  STATE OF OREGON

               DONALD LEE MANDELL,
                  Petitioner-Appellant,
                            v.
                    Jamie MILLER,
                    Superintendent,
           Snake River Correctional Institution,
                 Defendant-Respondent.
              Malheur County Circuit Court
                  20CV31010; A177645

  J. Burdette Pratt, Senior Judge.
  Submitted March 10, 2023.
   Jedediah Peterson and O’Connor Weber LLC filed the
briefs for appellant.
   Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, Benjamin Gutman,
Solicitor General, and Erin K. Galli, Assistant Attorney
General, filed the briefs for respondent.
  Before Lagesen, Chief Judge, and Kamins, Judge, and
Armstrong, Senior Judge.
  KAMINS, J.
  Affirmed.
808                                                    Mandell v. Miller

           KAMINS, J.
          Petitioner appeals from a judgment denying his
petition for post-conviction relief (PCR), raising three
assignments of error, each of which relates to the fact that,
as permitted by the law at the time, the jury that convicted
petitioner was instructed that only 10 jurors needed to
agree on his guilt. The record does not indicate, however,
whether the jury in fact reached unanimity, because neither
defense counsel nor the prosecutor requested that the jurors
be polled. Because we conclude that petitioner is not entitled
to relief in those circumstances, we affirm.
         We accept the post-conviction court’s supported
implicit and explicit factual findings and review for legal
error. Green v. Franke, 357 Or 301, 312, 350 P3d 188 (2015).
Petitioner was convicted in 2016 of two counts of sexual
abuse in the first degree, and the judgment of conviction
became final the following year. In 2018, petitioner initi-
ated a post-conviction proceeding on allegations unrelated
to this case, which was subsequently denied.1 See Mandell
v. Cain, 315 Or App 471, 500 P3d 762 (2021), rev den, 369
Or 507 (2022) (affirming that denial). Petitioner filed the
instant petition in 2020, after the United States Supreme
Court held that the Sixth Amendment to the United States
Constitution requires that a jury reach a unanimous verdict
to convict someone of a felony. Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 US
___, 140 S Ct 1390, 206 L Ed 2d 583 (2020).
         Petitioner raised three claims for relief, which
correspond to his three assignments of error on appeal.
The first claim contended that his trial counsel rendered
inadequate and ineffective assistance of counsel, in viola-
tion of his rights under Article I, section 11, of the Oregon
Constitution and the Sixth Amendment to the United States
Constitution, by not objecting to the nonunanimous jury
instruction and not requesting that the jury be polled. That
claim is foreclosed by our decision in Smith v. Kelly, where
we held that trial counsel do not perform deficiently by fail-
ing to raise the unanimity issue before Ramos was litigated.
318 Or App 567, 569, 508 P3d 77 (2022), rev den, 370 Or 822
    1
      In this appeal, the superintendent does not rely on any of the procedural
defenses in the Post-Conviction Hearings Act.
Cite as 326 Or App 807 (2023)                             809

(2023); see also Aaron v. Kelly, 325 Or App 262, 266, 528
P3d 1215 (2023) (concluding that trial counsel’s pre-Ramos
decision not to challenge the nonunanimous jury instruction
and not to request a jury poll was reasonable).
          Petitioner’s remaining assignments of error chal-
lenge the PCR court’s denial of standalone claims that his
convictions were obtained in violation of the unanimity rule
announced in Ramos. We begin our discussion with a brief
overview of the pertinent law. As relevant here, the Post-
Conviction Hearings Act provides that to obtain relief, peti-
tioners must establish that there was a “substantial denial”
of their constitutional rights in the proceedings that resulted
in their conviction. ORS 138.530(1)(a). The Supreme Court
has recently interpreted that phrase to mean that the denial
of a constitutional right must have been “(1) consequential
in the criminal justice proceeding; and (2) offensive to our
judicial sense of fairness.” Watkins v. Ackley, 370 Or 604,
630, 523 P3d 86 (2022) (internal quotation marks omitted).
The court then applied that interpretation to conclude that
petitioners who were convicted by nonunanimous jury ver-
dicts are entitled to post-conviction relief because such con-
victions “violate[ ] our sense of what is fundamentally fair in
a criminal proceeding.” Id. at 633.
         The court did not address, however, whether peti-
tioners are likewise entitled to relief when the underlying
jury verdict may, or may not, have been unanimous. In
Watkins, the erroneous jury instruction was clearly “con-
sequential in the criminal justice proceeding,” since with-
out it, the petitioner would not have been convicted. Id. at
608 (noting that all four of the petitioner’s convictions were
based on nonunanimous verdicts). The question for us, then,
is whether the same is true in this case, where the record
is silent on whether the jury’s verdicts were, in fact, unan-
imous. Because petitioner seeks PCR, he bears the burden
to prove that the instruction was consequential to his case.
ORS 138.620(2) (“The burden of proof of facts alleged in the
petition shall be upon the petitioner to establish such facts
by a preponderance of the evidence.”).
        Turning to the parties’ arguments, petitioner offers
evidence presented by the state in a different case that
810                                        Mandell v. Miller

approximately two thirds of jury trials from 2001 to 2018
included at least one nonunanimous conviction. In petition-
er’s view, that shows that it is more likely than not that one
or both of his convictions were based on a nonunanimous
verdict. The superintendent responds that such general sta-
tistics do not indicate that either—let alone both—of the ver-
dicts in petitioner’s trial were actually nonunanimous. The
superintendent further points out that accepting petitioner’s
argument would mean presuming prejudice with respect to
every conviction in every case where the jury was not polled,
thereby relieving petitioners of their burden of proof.
         We agree with the superintendent. General statisti-
cal information about the criminal justice system as a whole
does not establish what happened in petitioner’s particular
case. See McDonnell v. Premo, 309 Or App 173, 187, 483 P3d
640 (2021), rev den, 369 Or 507 (2022) (“[A]ctual prejudice
must be shown.” (Emphasis in original.)); Id. at 192 (pre-
suming prejudice “is not permissible in the post-conviction
context under Oregon law”). Because there is nothing in this
record to suggest that the verdicts in petitioner’s case were
actually nonunanimous, we conclude that petitioner has
not met his burden to prove that the nonunanimous jury
instruction was consequential to his conviction.
         We are guided in that conclusion by the Supreme
Court’s decisions applying Ramos to criminal cases on direct
review. In that posture, the court will correct the giving of
an instruction allowing for the jury to return a nonunani-
mous guilty verdict only when the record indicates that the
verdict was, in fact, nonunanimous. Compare State v. Ulery,
366 Or 500, 502, 464 P3d 1123 (2020) (reversing as plain
error where the verdicts were nonunanimous), with State v.
Flores Ramos, 367 Or 292, 333, 478 P3d 515 (2020) (affirm-
ing convictions where the verdicts were unanimous because
the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt).
        In State v. Dilallo, the Supreme Court considered an
unpreserved challenge to a nonunanimous jury instruction
when there was no evidence as to whether the verdict was
unanimous or not. 367 Or 340, 346, 478 P3d 509 (2020). The
court declined to exercise its discretion to correct the error
because, had the defendant objected or requested a jury poll,
Cite as 326 Or App 807 (2023)                              811

the result of that poll “would not only be important, it would
likely be dispositive.” Id. at 347. The court further reasoned
that reversing the defendant’s conviction would lead to an
“anomaly” in that “many defendants in cases where the
jury was polled will have their convictions affirmed if the
poll revealed that the verdicts were unanimous,” but defen-
dants with unpolled juries “would be guaranteed a reversal,
regardless of whether the jury reached a unanimous ver-
dict, because of a deficiency in the record that could have
been avoided if [they] had objected.” Id. at 348.
          The flaw in the record in Dilallo is equally pres-
ent here, and a reversal would create that same anomaly.
Without a jury poll, petitioner does not have the “disposi-
tive” evidence to meet his burden of proof. Id. at 347. Were
we to conclude otherwise, petitioners who were convicted by
unpolled juries would be entitled to collateral relief even if
the verdict was unanimous, while petitioners whose juries
were polled and revealed to be unanimous would, in effect,
be in a worse position than if they had not raised the issue
at all. The contrary result would effectively relieve petition-
ers of their burden of proof altogether, since it would require
relief for every unpolled jury verdict.
         For those reasons, we conclude that post-conviction
petitioners cannot prove that a Ramos violation was con-
sequential in their case when the record does not indicate
whether the jury that convicted them was, in fact, nonunan-
imous, and are therefore not entitled to relief.
        Affirmed.