Fields v. White
| Decision Date | 22 December 2016 |
| Docket Number | Civil No. 15-38-ART |
| Parties | SAMUEL FIELDS, Petitioner, v. RANDY WHITE, Warden, Respondent. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Kentucky |
Samuel Fields sits on Kentucky's death row, convicted of murdering a woman named Bess Horton. For twenty years, he has fought that conviction in the state and federal courts. The fight has included a habeas petition stating numerous grounds for relief, all of which this Court denied. R. 68. Fields now submits three more briefs, asking the Court to (1) order the government to pay for his expert witnesses, R. 62, (2) allow him to assert a habeas claim that he has procedurally defaulted, R. 63, and (3) reconsider its previous decision denying his other habeas claims, R. 69. For the following reasons, none of his arguments have merit. These motions must therefore be denied.
These facts have been told before. See R. 68 at 2-11; Fields v. Commonwealth, 12 S.W.3d 275, 277-79 (Ky. 2000); Fields v. Commonwealth, 274 S.W.3d 375, 390-91 (Ky. 2008). The Court will give the CliffsNotes version here. On the afternoon of August 18, 1993, Fields and some friends were having a lively time: drinking beer, drinking whiskey, buying more beer, and taking horse tranquilizers. Among the revelers was Minnie Burton, with whom Fields had been in a relationship for a few days that August, and to whose niece he had once been married. The group ended up at a house owned by Fields's mother and brother, intending to stay the night. There the party turned wilder as Fields turned violent. He quarreled with Burton; threw food, furniture, and knives around the house; and then started to cry. Burton left because Fields was scaring her. After she left, Fields punched through the glass on the kitchen door, cutting up his right arm; grabbed more cans of beer; and then followed after Burton.
She lived in the neighborhood—and rent-free—in a duplex owned by Bess Horton. But relations between the women had soured. Now Horton was apparently trying to evict Burton by turning off the power and water in the duplex. And when she made it home that night, Burton found herself locked out. She sat down on the front porch.
The night had turned to fog. As she sat, Burton heard lots of hooting and hollering and a sound like someone hitting street signs. Through the fog came Fields, holding a knife. He said that he had killed his brother—which he had not—and gave her the knife to dispose of. She threw it in some bushes. He then became frantic, ripping screens off the windows. Burton fled again. Elmer Pritchard, the other resident of the duplex, was inside and called the police. Fields left the porch, too, apparently to find Burton, who, he would later testify, had said that she wanted to rob Horton.
Two officers arrived at the scene to investigate the potential break-in at the duplex. Searching the buildings in the area, they noticed that the garage door was open at Horton's house nearby. Sweeping around back, they saw lights on in the house. Funny, they thought: Horton never left her lights on that late. Then they saw Fields—he was inside the house.
One officer looped back around front. Seeing that a front window been removed, he climbed through. In the bedroom he found Fields rummaging through a drawer. Also in the room was Horton, lying on the bed, with her throat slashed and a knife protruding from her skull. Fields had blood on his clothes. His pockets were bulging with knives, other sharp objects, and jewelry. With the officer holding him at gunpoint and waiting for backup, Fields confessed to the murder on the spot. And then he confessed twice more: first after the other officer had arrived and read him his Miranda rights, and then, after being put under arrest, to an EMT on the way to the hospital.
Eventually Fields was indicted for burglary and the murder of Bess Horton. The state jury found him guilty of both and sentenced him to death. But the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned the conviction because jury had heard impermissible evidence and the trial judge had instructed them improperly. See Fields, 12 S.W.3d at 277.
Fields was tried again. At the second trial, his defense theory was that "Ms. Horton was dead before [he] ever entered that house." R. 30-13 at 1874. He built that defense on three main pillars. The first was about the blood. See R. 68 at 9. The bricks of that argument were all the evidence of where blood was at the crime scene and where it was not. The mortar was simple logic. Fields was leaving blood on the sidewalk, on the back steps, on the front-screen-porch handle—everywhere he went, really. Horton, of course, had let out a good amount of blood herself. Yet all that blood was not quite where one would think it should have been if Fields had killed Horton. Fields argued that the true culprit of such a gruesome murder would have had some of the victim's blood on him. And none of Horton's blood was found on Fields. Plus, Fields had cut himself earlier and dripped bloodeverywhere he went. And none of his blood was found on Horton. From the beginning of trial until the end, Fields's lawyer hammered away at this point: Where's the blood? See R. 30-23 at 3367.
His second pillar was that the alleged timeline simply does not work, an argument again made of hard evidence and simple logic. Triangulating from the police reports and witness testimony, Fields had fewer than fifty minutes to commit the murder: Pritchard had called the police around 1:57 a.m.; by 2:47 a.m., they had found Fields in Horton's house and were radioing the incident in. See R. 30-23 at 3373-74. In that time, the prosecution said, Fields had walked from the duplex to Horton's house, found a way inside, murdered Horton, and robbed her. And he did not just waltz through the front door, either: he took out a storm window. How? With a knife that had a bent tip and became affectionately known at trial as the "twisty knife." The jury got to check this knife out for themselves. See R. 30-13 at 1880 (). Apparently, Fields used this odd instrument to unscrew the seventeen screws holding the window in place—without making any sound to alert the officers already prowling the area. In the black of night, this is an arduous task even for the stone-cold sober. But Fields was drunk, boisterously so. He had spent the better part of the last day making noise, not suppressing it. Thus, Fields argued at trial, the chronology simply did not hold up: He could not have entered Horton's house when—and how—the government said. See R. 30-23 at 3380-82.
So who did kill Bess Horton? That is the last pillar: According to Fields, it was Minnie Burton. Burton, who had been drinking before the murder, too. Who had motive: Horton was trying to evict her from a cushy, rent-free living situation; indeed, Fields arguedshe had been "soliciting others to rob Ms. Horton." R. 30-13 at 1876. Who had knowledge: Burton knew where Horton lived and where she kept her valuables. Who had opportunity: She is largely unaccounted for in the couple hours before the murder, hours she apparently spent evading Fields. And who, Fields has argued, has told conflicting stories about that night ever since—including at both trials. See id. at 1876; R. 63 at 19. Testimony supported this pillar. Trial witnesses described Burton confessing to the murder, taking a shower and changing clothes after the event, and acting nervous the rest of the night. See R. 30-22 at 6926, 7529-60.
In sum, the defense argued that evidence recovered from the scene, the pictures taken of the scene, the forensic evidence—or, in the case of the blood, the gaps in that evidence—and the testimony all pointed away from Fields. But once again, the jury found Fields guilty and sentenced him to death. See R. 68 at 11. This time, the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed. Id. After the United States Supreme Court denied his petition for certiorari and the state court denied his motion for post-conviction relief, Fields came to this Court with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Id.
That petition contained thirty claims for relief. R. 6. The Court denied one claim (number eighteen) on procedural grounds. R. 58. In that claim, Fields argues that his trial and appellate lawyers were ineffective, but he has conceded that he failed to raise that claim in accordance with state rules. Id. at 3-4; R. 6 at 87. The Court therefore dismissed the claim, but it dismissed the ineffective-assistance-of-appellate-counsel (IAAC) part of it without prejudice. Fields had argued that the "actual-innocence exception" applies to thatclaim and asked for more time to prove why. Id. at 5-6. If Fields proves actual innocence, the law will allow him to reassert his procedurally defaulted IAAC claim.
In a separate one-hundred-and-eighteen-page opinion, the Court denied the rest of Fields's claims. R. 68.
"The quintessential miscarriage of justice is the execution of a person who is entirely innocent." Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298, 325 (1995). If an innocent man sits on death row because of a constitutional error in his trial, and cannot get off because he has defaulted his constitutional claim, the law provides a remedy: He may argue that he is actually innocent. And if he can prove that he is, then he may assert his defaulted claim. Thus, proving one's actual innocence does not itself entitle him to relief, but is "instead a gateway through which [he] must pass" before the Court can consider his barred constitutional claims on the merits. Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390, 404 (1993).
In practice, that gateway is not wide. This is because society has an interest in preserving the "finality" of court decisions, maintaining "comity" between the different courts that make those decisions, and conserving "scarce judicial resources." Schlup, 513 U.S. at 324. Moreover, experience teaches...
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