Williams v. Matesanz

Citation230 F.3d 421
Decision Date14 September 2000
Docket NumberNo. 00-1204,00-1204
Parties(1st Cir. 2000) REESE WILLIAMS, JR., A/K/A OMAR ABDUR RAHIM, PETITIONER, APPELLANT, V. JAMES MATESANZ, RESPONDENT, APPELLEE. Heard
CourtUnited States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

[Hon. Richard G. Stearns, U.S. District Judge]

[Copyrighted Material Omitted] Willie J. Davis, with whom Davis, Robinson & White, Llp, was on brief, for appellant.

Elizabeth Klein Frumkin, Assistant Attorney General, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with whom Thomas F. Reilly, Attorney General, was on brief, for appellee.

Before Selya, Circuit Judge, Bownes, Senior Circuit Judge, and Lipez, Circuit Judge.

Selya, Circuit Judge.

Asserting that a state trial judge's jury instructions incorrectly described the prosecution's burden of proof, petitioner-appellant Reese Williams, Jr., sought habeas corpus relief in the federal district court. He now appeals the district court's order of dismissal.

Because the petitioner filed his habeas application on September 10, 1997, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), Pub. L. No. 104-132, 110 Stat. 1214 (1996) (codified in scattered sections of 28 U.S.C.), governs his case. Bui v. DiPaolo, 170 F.3d 232, 235 (1st Cir. 1999) (holding that the AEDPA applies to habeas proceedings instituted on or after April 24, 1996). The neoteric standard of review imposed by the AEDPA "places a new constraint on the power of a federal habeas court to grant a state prisoner's application for a writ of habeas corpus with respect to claims adjudicated on the merits in state court." Williams v. Taylor, 120 S. Ct. 1495, 1523 (2000). Relying upon our formulation of this new constraint, O'Brien v. Dubois, 145 F.3d 16, 24-25 (1st Cir. 1998), the district court determined that the AEDPA precluded relief in this situation. Because O'Brien is congruent with the Supreme Court's subsequent holding in Taylor, we affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

In its present posture, this appeal does not require us to canvass the evidence leading to the petitioner's quarter-century-old conviction for first-degree murder. Accordingly, we turn directly to the travel of the case, referring the reader who hungers for a more detailed account of the underlying facts to the opinion of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) rejecting the petitioner's direct appeal. See Commonwealth v. Williams, 391 N.E.2d 1202, 1205 (Mass. 1979).

The Commonwealth charged the petitioner with participating in an armed robbery that resulted in the slaying of a shopkeeper. The petitioner unsuccessfully interposed an alibi defense and a claim of mistaken identity. Although the evidence depicted the petitioner's alleged confederate as the actual triggerman, a petit jury, instructed on the Massachusetts felony-murder rule, found the petitioner guilty of first-degree murder on May 16, 1973. The trial judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. The SJC affirmed the conviction. Id. at 1216.

Roughly sixteen years later, the petitioner sought post- conviction relief. He based his claim on newly-decided cases that appeared to call into serious question the trial judge's repeated references in his jury instructions to a "moral certainty" criterion. In the petitioner's view, these references reduced the prosecution's burden of proof below the constitutionally required standard.

A justice of the superior court - not the original trial justice, who had died during the intervening years - rejected this contention in a meticulously reasoned rescript. See Commonwealth v. Williams, Crim. No. 96965 (Mass. Super. Ct. Aug. 2, 1996) (St. Ct. Op.). The petitioner's attempts to secure further review in the Commonwealth's courts were unsuccessful.

Having exhausted his state remedies, the petitioner instituted a federal habeas proceeding. He again posited that the state trial court's extensive use of the phrase "moral certainty" had violated his right to due process and rendered his trial fundamentally unfair. The district court, accepting the report and recommendation of a magistrate judge, applied the AEDPA standard as elucidated in O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 24, and dismissed the application. The court did, however, grant a certificate of appealability. See 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c)(1). This appeal followed.

II. THE HABEAS STANDARD

The AEDPA directs federal courts to refuse a writ of habeas corpus at the behest of a state prisoner unless the underlying state adjudication

(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States . . . .

28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). In O'Brien, we determined that this statute requires a federal habeas court first to assess whether the state court acted contrary to a legal rule prescribed by the Supreme Court. 145 F.3d at 24. In the absence of a controlling rule (or if the state court correctly identified the controlling rule), the federal habeas court then proceeds to determine "whether the state court's use of (or failure to use) existing law in deciding the petitioner's claim involved an unreasonable application of Supreme Court precedent." Id.

We decided O'Brien without explicit guidance from the Supreme Court. Last term, however, the Court spoke to the same general set of questions and identified two classes of cases in which the AEDPA permitted federal courts to grant habeas relief to state prisoners. Taylor, 120 S. Ct. at 1519. This taxonomy is essentially the same as the two-step pavane limned in O'Brien: the first category embraces cases in which a state court decision directly contravenes Supreme Court precedent, and the second embraces cases in which a state court decision, although not "contrary to" relevant Supreme Court precedent, nonetheless constitutes an "unreasonable application" of relevant Supreme Court precedent. Given this parallelism, we conclude that O'Brien correctly anticipated Taylor, and thus remains good law.

Taylor and O'Brien, read together, shed some helpful light on how section 2254(d)(1) operates. For example, in discussing when a state court decision would be contrary to clearly established Supreme Court case law, the Taylor Court noted that "[a] state-court decision will certainly be contrary to our clearly established precedent if the state court applies a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth in our cases." 120 S. Ct. at 1519. The Court added that "[a] state- court decision will also be contrary to this Court's clearly established precedent if the state court confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of this Court and nevertheless arrives at a result different from our precedent." Id. at 1519-20. These statements dovetail with our earlier observation that the "contrary to" prong of section 2254(d)(1) imposes a burden on the petitioner to "show that Supreme Court precedent requires an outcome contrary to that reached by the relevant state court." O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 24-25 (emphasis supplied). Explicating what was meant by this requirement, we stated that "the key inquiry . . . is whether a Supreme Court rule - by virtue of its factual similarity (though not necessarily identicality) or its distillation of general federal law precepts into a channeled mode of analysis specifically intended for application to variant factual situations - can fairly be said to require a particular result in a particular case." Id. at 25.

Taylor and O'Brien also inform the second prong of the model established by section 2254(d)(1). They teach that federal habeas relief may lie in favor of a state prisoner when a state court correctly identifies the applicable federal rule but applies it in an unreasonable manner to the facts of a particular case. Taylor, 120 S. Ct. at 1520. "This reduces to a question of whether the state court's derivation of a case-specific rule from the Court's generally relevant jurisprudence appears objectively reasonable." O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 25; accord Taylor, 120 S. Ct. at 1521-22 (holding that the assessment of unreasonableness demands an objective analysis). Because this objective standard is broader than the "reasonable jurist" standard, Taylor, 120 S. Ct. at 1521-22; O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 25 n.7, the mere fact that some fair-minded judges might find a particular outcome unreasonable does not warrant relief. Nor does the existence of error, in and of itself: there is, for this purpose, an important distinction between unreasonable applications and incorrect applications. See Taylor, 120 S. Ct. at 1522 ("[A] federal habeas court may not issue the writ simply because that court concludes in its independent judgment that the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established federal law erroneously or incorrectly. Rather, that application must also be unreasonable."); O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 25 (recognizing that the "unreasonable application" clause does not allow a federal court to grant habeas relief simply because it disagrees with the state court's decision or because it would have reached an opposite conclusion). In the last analysis, a state court decision is objectively unreasonable only if it falls "outside the universe of plausible, credible outcomes." O'Brien, 145 F.3d at 25.

III. APPLICATION OF THE HABEAS STANDARD

We turn now from the general to the specific. The Constitution requires that the prosecution, in a criminal case, prove the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 364 (1970). Here, the petitioner claims that the state trial judge's repeated references to proof to a "moral certainty" left in the jurors' minds an indelible impression that the prosecution's burden of proof was something less than beyond a reasonable doubt. We examine this premise, subject to the stark limitations imposed by the AEDPA.

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