Lundy v. Campbell

• Citation: 888 F.2d 467
• Decision Date: 18 December 1989
• Docket Number: No. 88-6257,88-6257
• Parties: Noah H. LUNDY, Petitioner-Appellee, v. Donal CAMPBELL and Charles W. Burson, Respondents-Appellants.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (6th Circuit)

Page 467

888 F.2d 467

Noah H. LUNDY, Petitioner-Appellee, v. Donal CAMPBELL and Charles W. Burson, Respondents-Appellants.

No. 88-6257.

United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit.

Argued June 9, 1989.

Decided Nov. 1, 1989.

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied Dec. 18, 1989.

Noah Harrison Lundy, Turney Center Industrial Prison, Only, Tenn., pro se.

Donald E. Dawson, Searcy, Smith & Dawson, Nashville, Tenn., for petitioner-appellee.

Jerry Smith, Norma Crippen Ballard, Asst. Attys. Gen., Charles W. Burson, Atty. Gen., Nashville, Tenn., for respondents-appellants.

Before: GUY and RYAN, Circuit Judges; and DOWD, District Judge. ^*

RYAN, Circuit Judge.

In this case we review, de novo, the judgment of the district court granting a writ of habeas corpus upon its determination that the petitioner's state trial was fundamentally unfair in violation of his right to due process. We respectfully disagree, and reverse.

I.

Noah H. Lundy was convicted in a Tennessee state court in August 1973 of two felonies, rape and crime against nature. He was sentenced by the jury to confinement for 120 years for the rape offense and five to fifteen years for the crime against nature offense, the sentences to run consecutively. The case has been in litigation and in the appellate process, in both state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, continuously for sixteen years. Students of federal criminal procedure will recognize this case as the latest judicial episode of the famous Rose v. Lundy, 455 U.S. 509, 102 S.Ct. 1198, 71 L.Ed.2d 379 (1982), in which the Supreme Court announced the current rule concerning the exhaustion of state court remedies in so-called "mixed petitions" for habeas corpus relief. The case has been through every level of the Tennessee trial and appellate process three times, to the federal district court and this court twice, and to the United States Supreme Court once. The district court judgment we now review directs that petitioner be discharged from custody unless the state of Tennessee grants him a new trial to be conducted, if at all, almost seventeen years after the events in question. ¹

Manifestly, the case is a classic example of the criminal justice process gone awry. If the district court is correct in holding that Lundy's trial was devoid of the minimal fundamental fairness guaranteed by the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment, he is, without question, entitled to have his jury conviction vacated and the sentence set aside. If that is the constitutionally mandated result, it is a travesty of justice that Lundy has been required to serve sixteen years of prison confinement upon a constitutionally invalid conviction. In ordinary circumstances, that grave injustice would be ameliorated by the state's entitlement to reprosecute a defendant, and, if he is convicted, credit him with the time already served when a new sentence is imposed. Should the requirements of the Constitution mandate that Lundy's conviction be set aside and the case remanded to the state of Tennessee for a new trial, the reality of the matter is that if reprosecution is feasible at all, it will be undertaken seventeen years after the alleged offense was committed and, perforce, offer little likelihood that the truth determination process will operate in the fashion envisioned by the authors of the fourteenth amendment due process clause, in the name of which such new trial would be conducted. Neither Lundy, the state of Tennessee, the criminal justice system, nor the federal constitutional principles in support of which we undertake today's duty have been well served no matter what the outcome in this sixteen-year-old litigation.

It is not a matter of assigning blame for the unconscionable delay in finally resolving this case--certainly the district court below cannot be faulted for being revisited with a case it first decided nine years earlier. It is a matter of recognizing that the administration of justice requires efficient and expeditious case management, without duplication of judicial effort and function. Sadly, none of those goals were achieved in this case.

Notwithstanding all of this, we approach our review of the district court's judgment, guided solely by our duty to determine, as best we can, whether Lundy's trial was so devoid of fundamental fairness to be constitutionally invalid under the fourteenth amendment, and we do so without regard to the outcome to which that determination leads us.

II.

Before conducting such a review, however, we first make some preliminary observations concerning our standard of review and the deference we believe must be accorded the courts of Tennessee, which have passed upon all the assignments of error presented to us today and determined them not to amount to a denial of due process.

A.

The preliminary or threshold standard by which we review the district court's judgment is de novo, but with complete deference to evidence-supported state court findings of fact. Sumner v. Mata, 455 U.S. 591, 102 S.Ct. 1303, 71 L.Ed.2d 480 (1982); Blackburn v. Foltz, 828 F.2d 1177, 1181 (6th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 485 U.S. 970, 108 S.Ct. 1247, 99 L.Ed.2d 445 (1988). But the more substantive standard by which our de novo review is conducted is the determination whether the trial errors asserted by the petitioner resulted in a trial so devoid of fairness as to have amounted to a denial of the due process guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment. When federal courts sit in judgment of state court determinations whether fourteenth amendment due process guarantees have been provided to state-tried defendants--reviewing the same federal constitutional errors our state court colleagues have reviewed, we do so in accordance with the same criteria defining due process that guided the state courts. The principles of federalism that empower us to do what the state courts have already done surely cannot mean that federal judges may vacate state court judgments simply because we feel differently about how fair the state trial was, or ought to have been, than did the many state judges who reviewed the case. The courts of the state of Tennessee believed that the petitioner was not denied the fundamental fairness assured him under the fourteenth amendment due process clause. The district court, after examining the same assignments of error considered by the state courts, and evaluating them according to the same due process standards that bind all courts, concluded otherwise. Unquestionably, that judgment was the district court's conscientious, judicial assessment, issued from a firm, if ill-defined, conclusion that the accumulated errors it identified rendered the trial so unfair as to have denied the petitioner the process guaranteed him by the fourteenth amendment. The district court's conclusion that the trial denied the defendant due process is "ill-defined," and perhaps understandably so, because the district court has provided no explanation of its understanding of what process the defendant was due and was denied, except to observe, several times, that the trial errors it cited denied the defendant a "fair trial," and that, as a result of the cumulative effect of the errors, "the jury was too tainted and inflamed to be able to give the petitioner a fair trial." Perhaps the district court cannot be expected to be any more specific.

Tomes have been written about the meaning of due process under the fourteenth amendment. But we have searched in vain for any useful, authoritative statement by the Supreme Court, or by the countless other writers who have addressed the subject, defining the elements, the criteria, the immutable components of a fair trial within the meaning of the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. The accumulated precedent and scholarship on the subject instructs us that procedural due process is, in the last analysis, simply the court's notion of "fundamental fairness," Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 172, 72 S.Ct. 205, 209, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952), and compliance with the principles "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty." Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325, 58 S.Ct. 149, 151, 82 L.Ed. 288 (1938).

Given standards of that generality for determining whether a state criminal case defendant was accorded due process of law, it can hardly be said that a lower court has "erred" when a reviewing court, acting de novo, disagrees with it; rather, the best that can be said is that, to paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson, the reviewing court is not correct because it is "fairer"; it is correct only because it is the "reviewer." Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 540, 73 S.Ct. 397, 427, 97 L.Ed. 469 (1953) (Jackson, J., concurring).

Our duty then is to examine for ourselves the grounds for relief asserted by the petitioner, defer entirely to the Tennessee courts' evidence-supported findings of fact relating to each, determine for ourselves whether the "mistakes," as the district court characterized them, found to have been committed by the prosecutor and the trial court amounted to legal error, and then decide whether, as a result of these "mistakes," taken separately or in combination, "the jury was too tainted and inflamed to be able to give the petitioner [the] fair trial" contemplated by the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. ²

B.

There is another factor which bears upon our review today. Prior to 1953, federal courts could not issue writs of habeas corpus on the basis of a federal constitutional claim when the state courts had previously addressed the claim unless the petitioner could show that the state courts "had failed to provide adequate 'corrective process' for the full and fair litigation of federal claims...." Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 476, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 3043, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976) (quoting Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309, 333-36, 35 S.Ct. 582, 589-91, 59 L.Ed. 969 (1915)). With its decision in Brown v....