Habeas Corpus Blog

Habeas Corpus - Thoughts on Skinner

I wanted to say a little something about Skinner, the DNA case, from the other day.  Right off the bat, I'll say that I am happy with the result for the sake of the criminal defendant.  From a practical point of view, he seemed to put forth compelling reasons for getting the evidence in his case tested.

Unfortunately, as other people have pointed out in many other places, Skinner really is a limited decision.  The decision does not find that Skinner can get the DNA testing.  It only says that he can argue in a 1983 case that he should get it. 

In fact, the decision really focuses on a pretty technical subject matter jurisdication question.  And, as I kind of said in my prior post* about the case, that question seemed to be dictated by the Court's decision in Wilkinson v. Dotson.

*Okay, it's more like I kind of kind of phrased it that way.  I wrote in the prior post that Skinner had the better argument and I noted that Wilkinson was a favorable case.  I know that you need to take my word for this, but I believe that I was actually thinking at the time that Skinner really should win if the Court honestly followed Wilkinson.  But I got all timid and whatnot and tempered the language of the post.  I forgot one of the cardinal rules of blogging: be bold.

And since Osbourne foreclosed a substantive due process claim to DNA testing, Skinner can only claim a procedural due process error.  I don't know the likelihood of success on that.  Actually, I am not sure what that type of claim looks like here.  Is it that the procedures were inadequate?  (Is that more of a substantive due process claim?) Or is it that they were not properly followed?  As both the majority and the dissent points out, the complaint was not artfully drafted, so that document does not provide much guidance as to the contours of the claim.  Either way, Skinner now has the liberty to litigate in a 1983 case in federal court that his procedural due process rights were violated.

Habeas Corpus - Supreme Court Opinions Today

The Supreme Court issued its opinion in the habeas case of Wall v. Kholi today.  The opinion, written by Alito, can be found here.

It's a habeas win for petitioner.  The Court affirms the lower court's decision that a post-judgment motion to reduce the sentence qualifies as a request for "collateral review" that tolls the one-year statute of limitations. 

It's not a surprising result based on what we saw at the argument (see my post here about it). 

The opinion was almost unanimous.  Scalia concurred and joined the whole opinion except for a footnote.  In that footnote, Alito pointed out that an argument could be made that a Rule 35 motion actually could be considered part of the direct appeal since it was the main avenue for challenging a sentence in Rhode Island.  Alito said that it didn't need to decide the issue as the result would be the same either way.  Scalia essentially stated that the footnote was unnecessary.  I think he's got a point, but it kind of seems unnecessary to make an issue out of it.

The Court also issued its opinion in the "1983 case with habeas implications" case of Skinner v. Switzer today.  The opinion, written by Ginsburg, can be found here.  The majority ruled that a criminal defendant can seek DNA testing through a 1983 action.  It was a 6-3 decision, with Thomas writing a dissent, joined by Kennedy and Alito. 

I haven't looked too closely at either the majority or dissent.  If I get a chance, I'll read them and offer some thoughts.

Habeas Corpus - NY Times Article

Another article today in the New York Times about an inmate freed after serving a long jail sentence (27 years).  This one is of the more familiar "DNA tests leads to exoneration" situation. 

Not really any habeas angles to the article, other than I would assume that he brought a federal habeas petition at some point and lost. 

Nevertheless, it's worth linking to since, no matter how many times we sit, it's still amazing stuff. 

Habeas Corpus - Supreme Court Stuff

On Monday, the Supreme Court granted cert. in a case called Skinner v. Switzer.  It's not quite a habeas case, but it's closely related.  The issue in the case was something that was left open in the Osbourne DNA case from last term.  More specifically, the issue is whether a defendant who has exhausted state court procedures for seeking DNA testing of evidence may pursue that claim in a 1983 suit in federal court, or must this claim be raised in a habeas petition? 

Should be very interesting.  Obviously, this case will be heard in the next term,  probably in October or, at the latest, November.

I also wanted to point out that, as we head in to June, there are still three habeas cases that have not yet been decided:  Magwood v. Patterson, Holland v. Florida, and Berghuis v. Thompkins.

I am most curious about what happens in Magwood.  I had predicted it would be close, but the argument did not indicate that it would be close.    

Habeas Corpus - Far From The Worst Result

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in the habeas case of McDaniel v. Brown.  The opinion is available here.  I have previously discussed the case here and here.

Apparently, the case was never argued.  It had been calendared but then removed from the calendar.  I think I remember reading that it was adjourned due to the death of a family member of one of the attorneys who was to argue the case.  I guess that they adjourned it and then never recalendared it.

In my previous post, I had described McDaniel as a "mere curiousity," mainly because the petitioner had abandoned the argument on which he had obtained relief from the Ninth Circuit, namely a legal insufficiency claim.  

That ended up being determinative here.  Just as in Beard (an earlier habeas opinion from this term), the Court basically says that everybody agrees that the decision below was in error on the point on which cert. was granted and that settles that.

However, the decision is far from the worst that it could have been.  The main issue in this case had to do with inaccurate testimony about the probabilities of a defendant's DNA matching the DNA that had been recovered.  The inaccuracies were pointed out in a report, known as the Mueller report, created 11 years after the trial.  The Court stated that everyone agrees that the report was irrelevant to the legal insufficiency analysis since the focus of that analysis is restricted to the evidence admitted at trial.

But the Court had also granted cert. on an additional question:  can a federal habeas court expand the record to discredit evidence presented at trial?  This was a much broader question that could have had a deleterious effect on habeas petitioners. 

In the end, the Court did not address this question.  But there were some indications that the Court did not find the report inappropriate for a habeas case.  For example, the Court engages in a lengthy discussion about the report and relies upon it to explain why certain evidence at trial was inaccurate.  The Court even engages in a hypothetical discussion about the report during the legal insufficiency discussion saying that, even if the lower court could have considered the report, there still was legally sufficient evidence.

The report itself was also relevant to petitioner's secondary claim -- that there had been a due process violation based on the admission of unreliable DNA evidence.  The Court does not address this claim saying that it had been forfeited.  This means that the Court did not foreclose the possibility that something like the Mueller Report could be used on habeas review in a separate context, such as a claim that evidence admitted at trial was not reliable.

And Scalia and Thomas did not overlook the Court's discussion of the Mueller report.  In a brief concurrence, they said that the Court should not have discussed the Mueller Report at all since it was not relevant to the Jackson claim. 

Reading between the lines a little, could they have been afraid that, by considering the Mueller Report at all, the Court was suggesting that this kind of report could be relevant on habeas review with respect to a different type of claim?  Maybe. 

In the end, as predicted, the case was a mere curiosity with little effect on habeas law.  And far from the worst result.

Habeas Corpus - URMP DNA re: McD v. B

I am a little late to the party on this one, but law professor David Kaye at PSU authored an article in the Mich. L. Rev. concerning the problems with the DNA evidence in McDaniels v. Brown, the habeas case to be heard by the Supreme Court on October 13.  I previously discussed the case here. 

In my prior post, I expressed a little dismay that I was having a hard time with the math, despite my mathematical background.  Kaye's article does a pretty good job of explaining the math.  At least, the lights began to click on for me after reading it.  I don't think I can do a better job of explaining it.  It's not a particularly long article, so I recommend taking a few minutes to read it.  One thing it did remind me about when working with mathematics: it's all archaic symbols and abbreviations.  It made my head spin in college and I couldn't wait to graduate and move on to law school where at least I would be working in a language that actually had words.

Getting back to the article, Kaye's legal thesis is basically that, yes, the expert in McDanial got the probabilities of a match wrong in a couple of different ways, but that the errors were not particularly big and should not have been considered to be of constitutional magnitude.  He points out, though, that the Supreme Court won't be reviewing the problems with the DNA evidence, or even whether the Ninth Circuit got it correct when it found that the errors with the DNA evidence established a constitutional violation.  Rather, the questions in McDaniel are procedural -- whether the Ninth Circuit properly applied the sufficiency of the evidence standard and whether the federal court's properly considered expert evidence never presented to the state courts. 

Kaye does not go too far in depth with these questions, but I do like his answer to the second question: courts should be allowed to consider the expert testimony in this case since the expert was doing nothing more than math that the federal courts were allowed to do on their own.  A kind of judicial notice, if you will.  That's one thing I actually did love about math -- there were right, indisputable answers.  If an expert does some math wrong, why can't a court, on its own, re-do the math correctly?  It's a universal language that will give you a definitive answer.  Of course, most math is outside the ken of the average juror, so evidentiary presentation as to the proper math would require an expert.  So should a court engage in universal mathematical analysis with the ostensible guidance of an expert even though the math was never calculated correctly by an expert before the jury?  As a math major, I say yes!  Aren't we just getting at a universal truth that is out there regardless of whether it was presented at trial?  Once again, I say yes!  But knowing the dreary prospects for most habeas petitioners, I would say that the Supreme Court probably wouldn't agree.

In any event, I don't see the court even reaching this question.  As I mentioned in my first post, I don't anticipate the court saying much in this case, other than criticizing the Ninth Circuit for its sufficiency analysis.

Habeas Corpus - No Constitutional Right to DNA Testing

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in District Attorney's Office for the Third Judicial District v. Osborne.  The 5-4 opinion is available here.

The decision definitely lends itself to splashly headlines -- "Supreme Court Rules that There is No Constitutional Right to DNA Testing."  It seems like a really big deal.

In some ways, it is.  But in most ways, it isn't.  As the majority discusses ad nauseum in its opinion, almost every state has laws or court decisions that grant access to DNA testing for convicted defendants.  New York was the first state to pass a law that allowed post-conviction DNA testing back in 1994.  The states that don't have these rules, such as Alaska (the state from which the Osborne case originated) are allegedly in the process of creating these rules.  So the impact of this case will probably not be so great overall, particularly in New York.

But it some ways it will be.  Even for the states that have DNA testing laws, the laws are restrictive and don't allow testing in a great number of cases.  In New York, a defendant needs to make a claim that there was evidence in the case that could be tested and that, if the results had been available at trial, the outcome of the trial would have been different.  By the terms of the statute, it only allows testing in cases that went to trial. 

But what about plea cases?  I don't think it would be surprising to learn that not everybody who pleads guilty is actually guilty of the crime.  There have actually been exonerations in cases where the defendant pleads guilty.  What would motivate an innocent person to plead guilty?  Lots of things.  Evidence against a defendant can be strong, especially where there is an eyewitness identification, that does not necessarily mean that the evidence is accurate.  Nevertheless, it is the type of evidence that a jury would tend to believe.  So even an innocent defendant is given a really difficult choice.  Plea offers before trial are usually substantially less than what a defendant would receive after a trial.  Many defendants are forced to make the cost benefit analysis and accept a favorable plea.  There are other situations too -- a reversal on appeal after a conviction, a second or third trial after a jury can't reach a verdict -- where a defendant has already spent a considerable time in jail and plea could get them out immediately.

In New York, it's these defendants that a constitutional right to DNA testing would have helped.  How many of them are there?  Who knows.  I am sure that they exist.

In 2007, New York was in the process of granting defendants who pled guilty the right to seek DNA testing.  However, the law did not get changed and the proposed amendment seems to have died a legislative death.  It's too bad.

So, what actually happened in the Supreme Court's decision?  More after the fold . . .