Coleman v. Calderon
| Decision Date | 28 July 1998 |
| Docket Number | Nos. 97-99013,97-99014,s. 97-99013 |
| Parties | 98 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 5809, 98 Daily Journal D.A.R. 8078 Russell COLEMAN, Petitioner-Appellant-Cross-Appellee, v. Arthur CALDERON, Warden, Respondent-Appellee-Cross-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
Cliff Gardner and Robert Derham, Gardner & Derham, San Francisco, California, for petitioner-appellant.
Morris Beatus, Deputy Attorney General, San Francisco, California, for respondent-appellee.
Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California; Ronald M. Whyte, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-89-01906-RMW.
Before: SCHROEDER, BRUNETTI and THOMPSON, Circuit Judges.
Russell Coleman is a California prisoner under sentence of death. He filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. The district court denied relief from the conviction but granted relief from the sentence, because the state court jury instructions violated Hamilton v. Vasquez, 17 F.3d 1149 (9th Cir.1994). We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2253. We agree with the district court and we affirm.
On September 5, 1979, between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., Shirley Hill was raped, sodomized and strangled to death inside a small bungalow next to a football field within the grounds of a high school. In 1981, Coleman was tried and convicted of Hill's murder.
Three parts of the evidence against Coleman strongly support his conviction. These consist of fingerprints, serology tests, and a lie.
The police matched Coleman's palm print to a print left on a windowsill in the bungalow. They also matched his thumbprint to a print left on a chair near Hill's body. The thumbprint tested presumptively positive for blood. Hill's fingerprints were also found on the windowsill on either side of Coleman's palm print. It was not possible to determine whether Hill's fingerprints had been laid down at the same time as Coleman's palm print.
The serology evidence was presented through a forensic serologist, Edward Blake. Blake tested Hill's blood and the semen found in her vagina. Based on these tests, Blake placed Coleman in eight percent of the population that could have deposited the semen in Hill.
The lie occurred when Coleman was questioned by police. He denied ever having been in the bungalow. At trial, however, he changed his story and testified he had been in the bungalow a few days before the murder. This accounted for his palm and thumbprints at the scene of the crime.
The jury found Coleman guilty of first degree murder, with special circumstances of rape and sodomy. In the penalty phase of the trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. The trial court upheld that verdict.
The California Supreme Court rejected Coleman's direct appeal, with two judges dissenting. People v. Coleman, 46 Cal.3d 749, 759 P.2d 1260, 251 Cal.Rptr. 83 (1988). Coleman then filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the district court. Over the next several years, he exhausted in state court unexhausted claims included in his initial and various amended petitions which he filed in the district court. When he completed exhausting his claims in state court and amending his petition in federal court, the district court held an evidentiary hearing. In 1997, that court denied Coleman's petition as to his conviction, but granted the petition as to Coleman's death sentence. This appeal followed.
We turn first to the three parts of the evidence that became the centerpiece of Coleman's conviction: the fingerprints, the serology tests, and the lie.
Police Inspector Ihle canvassed the crime scene for fingerprints. He found Coleman's thumbprint on the back side of a chair, along with four unidentifiable smudged fingerprints on the front side of the chair. Because all of these prints appeared slightly discolored, Ihle performed a Hemastix test on them. A Hemastix test is used as a presumptive test to detect blood in urine. The test showed that the discolored material on the chair back The discovery of Coleman's thumbprint, presumptively in blood on the chair back, triggered other police procedures. Standard police practice required a notation on both the latent fingerprint card and on the object where the fingerprint was found. In this case, Ihle wrote the word "bloody" on the chair back to indicate a bloody print had been found, but failed to note "blood" on the latent print card. Ihle, however, told two police inspectors and the original prosecutor about the test results prior to Coleman's preliminary hearing. The police reports failed to mention either the thumbprint on the chair back or the results of the Hemastix test.
was presumptively blood. After the test was completed, there was not enough discolored material left on the chair back for further testing.
Charles Gush, Coleman's initial counsel, was shown the chair back. At the preliminary hearing, Gush asked Ihle if there were any bloody fingerprints. Ihle responded, "No, there were not." Gush left it at that and did not pursue the matter further.
Gush then resigned and the State appointed Public Defender Peter Keane to represent Coleman. Gush did not discuss discovery matters with Keane and did not tell Keane about the bloody print. After the preliminary hearing, the state court ordered the prosecution to produce "all physical evidence" and "all laboratory, technician's and other reports concerning the testing and examination of [the] physical evidence." Notwithstanding this court order, the prosecution did not produce the chair back or the results of the Hemastix test. Keane did not see the chair back before trial, and he knew nothing of the bloody print or the Hemastix test.
Keane first learned about the bloody print on the first day of trial, when the coroner said the prosecutor had told him about it. Keane first learned of the Hemastix test when Ihle began to testify. Keane moved to strike Ihle's Hemastix testimony. Keane argued there was no proper foundation for the test and that the prosecution had violated the court's discovery order by not disclosing the bloody print evidence or the Hemastix test results. The prosecution responded by arguing that Keane had sufficient notice of the bloody print because that fact was mentioned in a transcribed police interview with Coleman and because the notation "bloody" was on the chair back.
Although Keane had not seen the chair back, he had seen the transcribed police interview. He did not regard the mention of bloody prints in that interview as significant, however, because he believed the police had used the word "bloody" as hyperbole when questioning Coleman to get him to admit that he murdered Hill.
The trial judge allowed Keane to question Ihle on voir dire in the judge's chambers outside the presence of the jury. During that questioning, Ihle explained that he did not know the chemical processes that caused the Hemastix strip to change color. He said he had tried the test on a few other substances (semen, urine and catsup) and had found that only blood caused the strip to change color. Ihle explained that the test would not differentiate between human blood and other types of blood. At Keane's request, during the voir dire examination, Ihle conducted Hemastix tests on two discolored spots on the front of the chair back; he obtained a negative reaction for blood from both tests.
The trial court determined that Keane had received adequate notice based upon the notation "bloody prints" on the chair back and a report from the Department of Corrections (which made no mention of bloody prints). This was incorrect. Keane had no such notice. The trial court also found the Hemastix test reliable based upon Ihle's three years of experience with it.
Ihle then testified before the jury. He stated that the Hemastix test is a "presumptive test for blood," which does not distinguish human blood from animal blood. He did not, however, explain what it meant to label a test "presumptive." He admitted that he had no knowledge of the chemistry behind the test. (Later that day, forensic serologist Blake described the chemical reaction upon which the test is based.) Ihle also On cross-examination, Ihle admitted that he had tested only a few items with the Hemastix test: blood, urine, catsup, tomato sauce and coffee. He had not tested sweat, whiskey or coke. Ihle had performed the original test in the presence of a police officer, but no chemist checked the results. He also testified that when he tested the front of the chair back in the judge's chambers, the Hemastix test did not show the presence of blood.
explained that not enough blood was left to conduct further tests.
Ihle further testified that he did not know if fingerprint powder would cause the Hemastix strip to react. On redirect, however, he explained that the Hemastix test he had just performed in chambers showed that the Hemastix strip would not react to fingerprint powder.
The subject of the Hemastix test and the bloody print came up again during argument to the jury. In the prosecutor's opening argument, he explained that Ihle did not need to be a chemist to effectively use the Hemastix test. He characterized the Hemastix test as "selective for blood." He explained in detail how Coleman would have gotten blood on his hand if he had put his hand over Hill's mouth to silence her while he was strangling her. He ended his depiction of the crime by stating: "[Coleman] left his calling card in blood."
In Keane's jury argument, he emphasized that Ihle was not a chemist and that the blood might not have been human blood. Then, in the prosecutor's closing argument, the prosecutor returned to the bloody print. He told the jury: "Russell Coleman, Russell Coleman, whose fingerprints we have in blood; Russell Coleman, whose fingerprint in blood is on this chair."
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
People v. JONES
...“some reasonable lawyer” could have acted, in the circumstances, as defense counsel acted in the case at bar. ( Coleman v. Calderon (9th Cir.1998) 150 F.3d 1105, 1113, revd. on other grounds Calderon v. Coleman (1998) 525 U.S. 141, 145–147, 119 S.Ct. 500, 142 L.Ed.2d 521.) A defendant must ......
-
Sechrest v. Ignacio
...did. A jury sitting in a capital case must be given a clear choice between the death penalty and a life sentence. See Coleman v. Calderon, 150 F.3d 1105, 1118 (9th Cir.), rev'd on other grounds, 525 U.S. 141, 119 S.Ct. 500, 142 L.Ed.2d 521 (1998) (noting "the Supreme Court's emphasis on the......
-
Morales v. Scribner
...might wish. Delaware v. Fensterer, 474 U.S. 15, 20, 106 S.Ct. 292, 88 L.Ed.2d 15 (1985) (per curiam); see also Coleman v. Calderon, 150 F.3d 1105, 1112 (9th Cir. 1998) (holding that the Confrontation Clause does not require that the prosecutor disclose evidence that will help the defense ef......
-
People v. Bramit
...P.2d 683, we reaffirmed this view and declined to follow the Ninth Circuit's contrary authority in, among other cases, Coleman v. Calderon (9th Cir.1998) 150 F.3d 1105. (Hart, at pp. 654-657, 85 Cal.Rptr.2d 132, 976 P.2d The Coleman II court further held that the standard instruction in tha......