Hartford v. Haskell, s. 90-2017

Decision Date04 September 1991
Docket NumberNos. 90-2017,90-2122,s. 90-2017
Citation943 F.2d 51
PartiesNOTICE: Sixth Circuit Rule 24(c) states that citation of unpublished dispositions is disfavored except for establishing res judicata, estoppel, or the law of the case and requires service of copies of cited unpublished dispositions of the Sixth Circuit. Albert HARTFORD, Jr., Plaintiff-Appellant, v. David HASKELL, Defendant-Appellee.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

Before RALPH B. GUY, Jr. and RYAN, Circuit Judges, and KRUPANSKY, Senior Circuit Judge.

PER CURIAM.

Petitioner-appellant, Albert Hartford, Jr. (petitioner), appealed the district court's denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. Michigan prison warden David Haskell (the State) cross-appealed the district court's retroactive application of the Supreme Court's decision in Cruz v. New York, 481 U.S. 186, 107 S.Ct. 1714 (1987), to the adjudication of petitioner's constitutional claims.

Petitioner was indicted, tried, and convicted for the March 15, 1980 murder of one Darlene Ramsey (Ramsey), who on the night of her death was the cashier at Richardson's Farm Dairy Store in Clarkston, Michigan. At approximately 11:00 p.m. on the night in controversy, a masked gunman entered the store, confronted Ramsey who, seeing that the individual was armed, fled into the rear of the premises for safety, locked the door behind her, and alerted store manager Charmaine Klaus (Klaus)--who was seated at her desk--of the presence of the masked intruder. Before Klaus could summon the police on the phone, the gunman shot his way through the locked door, striking Ramsey with one of the bullets. Klaus abandoned her effort to call the police, took a .38 caliber revolver from her desk, and fired the weapon at the assailant.

The masked gunman, meanwhile, stood immediately over Ramsey, who was wounded and supine on the floor, placed his gun to her temple, and fired once from point-blank range. He then turned on Klaus, fired twice, and exited through the store's back door. Klaus was hit but was not fatally wounded; Ramsey was dead.

Physical evidence significant in both quantity and quality implicated petitioner as the individual who fired the shots that killed Ramsey. The fleeing gunman left a trail of blood that precisely matched petitioner's blood type. In the rear of the store, investigating police discovered a tooth that matched a tooth missing from petitioner's mouth at the time of his arrest. Shortly after the shooting, petitioner presented himself at a local hospital complaining of a gunshot wound to the mouth, which he claimed to have sustained as an innocent bystander to a robbery. From petitioner's mouth, physicians retrieved a bullet fragment, which they inadvertantly placed on a windowsill in petitioner's recovery room at the hospital. At petitioner's direction, his brother Michael Hartford slipped the bullet into his pocket when he (Michael) visited the convalescing patient. While driving home, Michael Hartford threw the bullet fragment from the window of his car, but later, in a remorseful moment, notified the police of the bullet's approximate location. The bullet was retrieved and ballistics analysis subsequently confirmed that it had been discharged from Klaus's revolver.

Another of petitioner's brothers, Charles Hartford, had accompanied petitioner and one other accomplice, Michael Gosciki, to the Richardson's Farm Store on the night in question. Charles Hartford, later charged with felony murder, subsequently confessed in a tape-recorded statement that he had driven with petitioner and Gosciki to Richardson's with the intention of committing the armed robbery, and remained in the car as petition...

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