Davis v. Woodford, 01-99014.
| Decision Date | 24 June 2003 |
| Docket Number | No. 01-99014.,01-99014. |
| Citation | 333 F.3d 982 |
| Parties | Larry David DAVIS, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Jeanne S. WOODFORD, Warden, of California State Prison at San Quentin, Respondent-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
Tracy J. Dressner, La Crescenta, CA, and Terry J. Amdur, Pasadena, CA, for the petitioner-appellant.
Bill Lockyer, Attorney General of the State of California, Robert R. Anderson, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Pamela C. Hamanaka, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Carol F. Jorstad, Deputy Attorney General, Louis W. Karlin, Deputy Attorney General, and Shawn McGahey Webb, Deputy Attorney General, Los Angeles, CA, for the respondent-appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California; Dickran M. Tevrizian, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-96-02443-DT.
Before B. FLETCHER, KLEINFELD, and McKEOWN, Circuit Judges.
Larry David Davis was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. After exhausting his California state appeals, he filed an amended petition for habeas corpus in federal district court, raising multiple constitutional challenges to both the conviction and sentence. The district court denied the petition. Having reviewed the record, transcript, arguments, and prior decisions, including the extensive opinions of the California Supreme Court and the district court, we affirm.
Davis's conviction and sentence stem from two events that occurred close in time and proximity in the early hours of August 28, 1988: the attempted rape of Suzanne H. and the death by asphyxiation and apparent kidnaping and sodomy of Dawn Holman. According to Suzanne H.'s trial testimony, she met Davis in a bar on August 26, 1988, and invited him to meet her the next evening for her birthday. She and Davis went out the next night, along with one of her friends. At the end of the evening, Suzanne H. drove her friend home, and then agreed to take Davis to a party ostensibly being given by a friend of his. As they were driving, Davis directed her to a dead-end road, took the keys out of the ignition, and began groping her. She first tried to end his advances by telling him she was a lesbian, but that seemed only to excite him more. She was finally able to persuade him to stop by telling him that she would have sex with him in a motel in town. Davis gave her car keys back to allow her to drive to a motel, and she drove toward town, trying unsuccessfully to attract the attention of police.
Once in town, Suzanne H. told Davis that she needed to get gas before going to the motel. While Davis was pumping gas, she went to the cashier, told him that Davis had tried to rape her, and asked him to call the police. Davis came after her and tried to drag her away, but she elbowed him and screamed "Rape!" and he let her go. When the police arrived, Davis ran away, though not before removing the coil wire from Suzanne H.'s car. Suzanne H. gave a statement to the police, but said she did not wish to participate in a prosecution, saying that she was returning to New York within days. Later that night, one of the police officers who had interviewed Suzanne H. stopped Davis for urinating in public and loitering, but the officer did not connect Davis with the Suzanne H. incident. When asked what he was doing, Davis claimed to be friends with the occupants of a nearby house. The officer awakened the residents of the house, who denied knowing Davis, and the officer told Davis to leave.
After his run-in with the officer, Davis made his way to a nearby Safeway grocery store, and it was there that he met Dawn Holman. At about 3 a.m., he was standing on the side-walk in front of the store smoking marijuana when a man, later identified as Emanuel Manson, came over and asked for a hit. Davis agreed, and asked him for a ride to Ventura. Manson declined, and later saw Davis asking for a ride from a woman who had just pulled into the parking lot. That woman was Dawn Holman. She agreed to give Davis a ride, and they left alone in Holman's car.
Holman's body was found around 5 a.m. by a greenskeeper at a nearby golf course. Her car was partially in a ditch about 265 feet from her body; the front passenger door was heavily damaged, and appeared to have hit a nearby telephone pole. According to the medical examiner, Holman died from asphyxiation from strangulation, likely manual strangulation, but not before suffering extensive external and internal injuries as a result of having been seated in — or partially out of — the passenger seat when the car struck the telephone pole.
The medical examiner testified that Holman's body showed evidence of sexual assault: her body was found with her bra pulled down below her chest, she was strangled, and her anus was dilated and smeared with fecal matter. The medical examiner also found a large number of sperm in her anal canal and a smaller number in her vaginal canal, and noted that her skirt was heavily stained with semen and fecal material, suggesting that she had been sodomized. He speculated that the sodomy occurred after she suffered the car crash injuries, perhaps shortly after her death. Moreover, in his view, if the sex had occurred before her death, she would have been in too much pain from her other injuries to engage in consensual intercourse. He also testified that although the crash injuries were highly disabling and could have resulted in her death, the strangulation was in fact the cause of her death.
Serological testing of the stains on Holman's skirt revealed that Davis was within the 1% of the population that could have been the source of the semen. Davis's DNA matched the DNA found on some of the skirt stains. In addition, a breast swab taken from Holman indicated a high probability of saliva with the same basic blood type as Davis's, and two hairs found on Holman's body were consistent with Davis's hair. Finally, a small piece of glass found in the shirt Davis was wearing on the night of the incident was consistent with broken glass from Holman's car.
Several days after Holman's death, two Ventura County police officers questioned Davis. The questioning focused on the Suzanne H. incident, but at the end of the conversation the officers mentioned that they were looking into a homicide. Davis told the officers that after leaving Suzanne H., he was stopped for urinating in public, and was picked up by somebody and taken back to his truck, where he sat and drank. The officers arrested Davis for the assault on Suzanne H. and booked him into the Ventura County jail. Soon after, he was arrested and re-booked for Holman's murder. Criminal charges relating to both events were filed against Davis in December 1988.
Davis ultimately went to trial on six counts: (1) first-degree murder of Holman (Cal.Penal Code § 187(a)) with felony-based special circumstances for kidnaping (Cal.Penal Code §§ 207, 209, 190.2(a)(17)) and sodomy (Cal.Penal Code §§ 286, 190.2(a)(17)); (2) sodomy of Holman (Cal.Penal Code § 286(c)); (3) kidnaping of Holman (Cal.Penal Code § 207(a)); (4) sexual battery of Suzanne H. (Cal.Penal Code § 243.4); (5) assault of Holman with intent to commit sodomy (Cal.Penal Code §§ 261(a)(2), 286); and (6) assault of Suzanne H. with intent to commit rape or sodomy (Cal.Penal Code §§ 261(a)(2), 286).
At trial, Davis offered what can only be characterized as a convoluted story, in which he played only a supporting rather than a starring role in the events that led to Holman's death. He admitted that during his interview with the Ventura County police officers, he lied about his activities the night of the murder, and claimed that he had done so because his life and the lives of his family were "threatened." He offered a narrative of the evening involving three extra people, including a mysterious "white guy," an extra car, and Davis as the unlikely hero.
According to Davis, he and Holman left the Safeway in her car, while Manson followed in his. The three parked and smoked some more pot, and then Holman and Davis left together, smoked some more dope, and had consensual sex. They were discovered in the car by Holman's one-time boyfriend, Ashley Reid, who arrived with Manson and the anonymous white man. Angered by Holman's conduct with Davis, Reid got into Holman's car with her and the others got into Manson's car. The three men followed Reid and Holman to the golf course, witnessed them fighting in the car on the way, and then saw the car hit a telephone pole while Holman was partially hanging out of the passenger side of the car.
Davis testified that he jumped out of his car, ran to Holman, picked her up, and ran across the golf course with her, but that the "white guy" caught up and told him Reid wanted to speak with him. Davis left Holman where she lay and returned to the car to find Reid pointing a gun at him. Davis kicked the gun out of Reid's hand, ran away, apparently was hit by some sort of vehicle, and was slapped awake the next morning by a shabbily-dressed old man on the railroad tracks. Because he did not realize anybody had been killed, and because he received some veiled threats from an associate of Reid's, he did not report the incident to the police.
Both Reid and a man who was identified as potentially being the "white guy" provided alibis for the night in question. At trial, Manson refused to answer most of defense counsel's questions. The jury found Davis guilty on all counts as charged, with the exception of count 2, sodomy of Holman, on which the jury found Davis guilty of the lesser included offense of attempted sodomy. The jury began the penalty phase six weeks later. After hearing from a number of witnesses for both sides, the jury returned a death verdict. The California Supreme Court affirmed...
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