Robertson v. Warden
| Decision Date | 27 April 2000 |
| Docket Number | No. 98-4150,98-4150 |
| Citation | 227 F.3d 589 |
| Parties | (6th Cir. 2000) Denver Robertson, Petitioner-Appellant, v. John Morgan, Warden, Respondent-Appellee. Argued: |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland.
COUNSEL ARGUED: Mark D. McGraw, PERK & MILLER, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant.
Todd R. Marti, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, CORRECTIONS LITIGATION SECTION, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee.
Before: GUY, BOGGS, and SUHRHEINRICH, Circuit Judges.
Denver Robertson, Dante Pester, and Roscoe Woodberry attacked Daniel Finley in Cleveland, Ohio in the early morning of October 2, 1992. After exchanging a few words with Finley, who happened to be an off-duty corrections officer with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, Pester "sickled" him (struck his neck) with his forearm. According to the facts as found by the Ohio state courts, Robertson and Woodberry joined Pester in punching and kicking Finley until he lay unconscious on the ground. Robertson then took a pager, a marijuana joint, and a wallet containing about $60 from Finley's person. The three attackers fled into a nearby alley where they split the money three ways and smoked the joint. When Finley did not move, Pester and Robertson returned to where he lay while Woodberry went to change his shoes and call 911 before all three fled the scene.
Severe head injuries sustained in the attack kept Finley in a coma at the hospital's trauma center for 10 or 11 days. Even after emerging from the coma, Finley had abnormal eye movements, abnormal reflexes, partial left-side paralysis, impaired speech, and poor balance. Finley checked out of the trauma center in mid-October, but he remained in the hospital's head injury rehabilitation unit until March 1993. Shortly after the attack on Finley, the police began receiving anonymous phone calls inquiring as to his condition. On suspicion that the calls were from Finley's attackers, police officers told one caller that Finley was going to die. The next day Woodberry called the police and confessed his involvement in the attack. The police arrested him shortly thereafter, along with Pester and Robertson. Woodberry and Pester pled guilty to felonious assault and received sentences of eight to fifteen and five to fifteen years, respectively.
Prosecutors filed a complaint against Robertson, who was 17 when he participated in the attack, in Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court on November 19, 1992, charging him with felonious assault. At a December 1 arraignment and hearing before Referee Novak, Robertson admitted having unlawfully and knowingly caused serious physical harm, and was adjudicated delinquent and sentenced to six months' probation. On December 23, the State of Ohio timely filed an objection to the referee's suggested disposition, and Judge Cotner vacated the sentence, leaving the adjudication of delinquency in place, but ordering the case to be reset before the referee for reconsideration of the disposition. For reasons not in the record, such reconsideration apparently never took place.
Instead, upon his release from the hospital in March 1993, Finley told police he was missing his pager as well as a gasoline credit card, silver dollar, and cash from his wallet as a result of the October attack. According to the prosecution, this additional information precipitated a new complaint dated March 16, 1993, charging Robertson in juvenile court with delinquency because of aggravated robbery. According to other testimony, Finley's sister had told Detective Mishic about the missing gasoline credit card shortly after the attack. Other family members had told Mishic that Finley's pager was missing. Mishic himself testified that he contacted British Petroleum for the credit card receipts and discussed the apparent theft with juvenile court prosecutors the previous fall, but that they elected not to pursue it.
On May 25, 1993, Judge Corrigan held an amenability hearing to decide whether Robertson would be referred for trial as an adult on the new complaint. Robertson's probation officer testified that he had been a good student, had no substantiated chemical dependency, had a supportive family environment, only exhibited violent behavior once while on probation (he hit Woodberry over the head with a bottle in a fight), and that he made a favorable impression on his teacher and detention home social worker. The officer further testified that Robertson expressed regret for the offense, adjusted well to probation, and that he thought there was a reasonable chance Robertson could be rehabilitated through the juvenile system. A Cleveland police detective testified that the police department had no prior file on Robertson, and that Robertson had come into the police station voluntarily to give his statement and was sorry for what had happened. Robertson's detention home social worker testified that he was a model inmate, received regular visits from his family, and would be amenable to juvenile rehabilitation. Corrigan nonetheless transferred the case for adult adjudication, noting that Robertson was nearly 18 when the crime was committed, that his performance in school was not stellar while on probation, and that the crime he was charged with committing was very violent.
The Cuyahoga County Grand Jury returned a one-count indictment against Robertson in July of 1993, charging him with aggravated robbery. A jury convicted him for that crime in June 1994. Having exhausted his state court appeals, Robertson seeks habeas relief. In his habeas petition, Robertson does not deny his participation in the criminal activity charged, but chiefly contests his dual adjudication as unconstitutional double jeopardy and his adjudication as an adult as a decision without sufficient record evidence to support it. We find no merit in either line of Robertson's argument, and we will therefore affirm the district court's judgment denying the habeas petition.
In the appeal of an habeas corpus decision, legal conclusions are reviewed de novo and findings of fact are reviewed for clear error. See DeLisle v. Rivers, 161 F.3d 370, 380 (6th Cir. 1998). Amenability to trial as an adult is a determination that involves the legal significance of facts and is reviewed de novo in this court. See Kent v. United States, 383 U.S. 541 (1966).
Robertson's first objection to his trial is that he was adjudicated as a juvenile and an adult for the same incident, which he claims is not a permissible outcome under Ohio state law. However, the case Robertson relies on to support this argument, In re Bolden, 306 N.E.2d 166 (Ohio Ct. App. 1973), does not apply to his circumstances. In that case, the juvenile court judge ordered separate and incompatible dispositions for a series of related assaults committed by one youth. On appeal, the state appellate court held that multiple acts of delinquency only "permit one disposition common to all the complaints and findings of delinquency." Id. at 168. The earlier disposition in Robertson's case was vacated, so no conflicting dispositions arose from this incident.
Still, Robertson's claim raises the question whether, once a delinquency determination has been made, a juvenile may be later deemed amenable for adult adjudication for a separate offense arising from the same incident. We hold that the Double Jeopardy Clause does not bar such a proceeding. Letting the prosecution try twice the issue of amenability for adult prosecution might (assuming jeopardy attaches to amenability determinations) violate the Double Jeopardy Clause's prohibition on relitigating, but that is not what we have here. Nor, as explained below, has Robertson been tried twice for the same offense. Therefore, these double jeopardy concerns do not taint Robertson's conviction.
Under Ohio law, an adult adjudication may follow juvenile proceedings for the same offense, so long as the prior juvenile proceedings are limited to determining the juvenile's amenability to transfer for adult adjudication and do not decide the juvenile's guilt. See Laswell v. Frey, 45 F.3d 1011 (6th Cir. 1995) (). Because Robertson was tried for different offenses at the juvenile and adult levels, the concern addressed in Laswell is not presented here.
Robertson further argues that adjudicating an individual as an adult on charges stemming from an incident for which the individual has already been adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court constitutes double jeopardy, even if ordinarily it would be possible to try a defendant for separate offenses. Formerly, Ohio law required a finding of delinquency based on a full investigation of the facts before transferring a juvenile for trial as an adult. This court struck down that procedure for violating the Double Jeopardy Clause. See Sims v. Engle, 619 F.2d 598 (6th Cir. 1980) (); see also Sellers v. Morris, 840 F.2d 352 (6th Cir. 1988) (). Here, although Robertson had been found delinquent on one offense, there was only an amenability hearing on the second offense before his adjudication as an adult. Thus, the Sims problem did not infect Robertson's trial.
As previous state courts in Ohio have found, jeopardy attaches to...
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