Garcia v. Andrews
| Decision Date | 17 May 2007 |
| Docket Number | No. 05-3856.,05-3856. |
| Citation | 488 F.3d 370 |
| Parties | Angela GARCIA, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Patricia ANDREWS, Warden, Respondent-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
David L. Doughten, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Elizabeth T. Scavo, Office of the Ohio Attorney, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee.
ON BRIEF:
David L. Doughten, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Stephen P. Carney, Gene Crawford, Office of the Attorney General, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee.
Before SILER and GILMAN, Circuit Judges; ZATKOFF, District Judge.*
Angela Garcia was convicted in an Ohio state court of aggravated murder, aggravated arson, and insurance fraud in connection with the deaths of her two young daughters as a result of a fire that she set in her home in order to collect insurance proceeds. She was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 20 years. After exhausting her direct appeals in state court, Garcia petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254, raising seven assignments of error. The district court denied the petition, but granted a Certificate of Appealability on the issue of whether the trial court's failure to investigate Garcia's allegations of juror misconduct warranted a new trial. For the reasons set forth below, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.
Garcia was convicted in the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County, Ohio on charges of (1) aggravated murder of a person under thirteen years old, in violation of Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2903.01(C); (2) aggravated murder, in violation of Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2903.01(A); (3) murder, in violation of Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2903.02; (4) aggravated arson, in violation of Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2909.02; and (5) insurance fraud, in violation of Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2913.47. After several of the counts were merged together for sentencing purposes, Garcia received a sentence of life imprisonment with eligibility for parole after 20 years. The Ohio Court of Appeals described the basic facts of the case as follows:
On the evening of November 20, 1999, Garcia and her two daughters, Nyeemah, three years old, and Nijah, aged two, were at their home located on Harvard Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio. Before night's end, the home was destroyed by fire, the two young girls dead from smoke inhalation, and Garcia the only survivor. Though the fire was initially ruled accidental by the Cleveland Fire Department, one month later that conclusion was changed to fire by arson after investigators conducted an indepth investigation as to its cause and origin. The fire occurred on a Saturday and the remaining parts of the house were razed by the city on Monday, two days after the fire. Photographs of the scene, inside and outside the house, were taken either immediately after the fire had been extinguished or the next day, Sunday.
In February 2000, Garcia was indicted for having intentionally set the fire in order to collect insurance proceeds and for causing the death of her children as part of that plan. At trial, Garcia maintained the fire was accidental and that she tried to save her girls, but could not because of the fire's intensity.
Garcia's first trial ended in a mistrial after the jury found her guilty on the insurance-fraud count but was unable to reach a verdict as to the remaining counts of the indictment. The Court of Common Pleas held Garcia's sentencing for the count of insurance fraud in abeyance until after her retrial. Garcia's second trial also ended in a mistrial because the jury could not reach a verdict on the murder and arson counts. Her third trial commenced in late May of 2001. Jury deliberations began on June 3, 2001. The next morning, the trial judge received the following note signed by jury foreman William McGary, with two other jurors listed as "concurring":
Your Honor, because I work in the immediate area of the burnt out home I feel grave concern for me and my family's personal safety. The family of the defendant owns property in the neighboring area and can easily identify me, especially since we are in the same business. The propensity for contact, (visual or physical,) is highly likely. It is my feeling as well as those of my fellow jurors, that I be removed from the jury.
Although the letter states that Juror McGary was in the same business as the defendant's family, the record is devoid of any evidence that McGary knew Garcia or her family personally. A second note was later delivered to the trial court in which the jurors requested a change in their foreman. After the trial court received the first note, it convened both the prosecution and defense counsel in chambers to give each side an opportunity to respond to the note. The defense argued that the foreman did not reveal during voir dire his knowledge of the defendant's family or that he was in the same business as the defendant's family. Arguing that the jury had been tainted, defense counsel asked for an immediate mistrial or, in the alternative, for the trial court to voir dire the jury immediately to determine the existence and extent of any taint.
The trial court denied the motion for a mistrial and the request for voir dire. Instead, it sent a note to the jury instructing them that they must continue to deliberate. Defense counsel then moved for the court to sequester the jury and conduct an immediate postverdict voir dire. The trial court denied the motion after concluding that a postverdict voir dire is precluded under Ohio law. A few minutes after the judge called counsel into chambers to announce the ruling on the postverdict voir dire motion, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on the murder and arson counts.
Garcia appealed her conviction, raising 11 assignments of error, including the one at issue. The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed Garcia's conviction. Garcia appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, which dismissed her appeal as not involving a substantial constitutional question. Having exhausted all of her direct appeals in state court, Garcia declined to pursue postconviction relief within the state system and instead filed a petition in the federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. She raised seven claims for relief in her petition.
The designated magistrate judge issued a Report and Recommendation in December of 2004, concluding that Garcia should be granted habeas relief on her fourth claim of error, which Garcia had described as follows:
During deliberations, [a] juror brought to the court's attention allegations of [a juror's] misconduct. The trial court refused to inquire as to the nature of the misconduct and the extent to which the deliberations might have been contaminated . . . . The failure of the trial court to dismiss the juror, or in the alternative, to hold an evidentiary hearing was in violation of the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
Disagreeing with the magistrate judge's Report and Recommendation, the district court denied Garcia's petition on all grounds. With respect to the juror-misconduct claim, the district court concluded that because there was no evidence of any extraneous influence on or contact with Juror McGary, the trial court's refusal to grant a mistrial or conduct a voir dire to investigate potential juror taint was not "contrary to clearly established federal law as established by the Supreme Court." The district court, however, issued a Certificate of Appealability as to this issue, and this court denied Garcia's motion to expand the Certificate. Garcia timely appealed.
We review the legal basis for a district court's dismissal of a habeas petition de novo. Davis v. Coyle, 475 F.3d 761, 766 (6th Cir. 2007). The factual findings underlying the district court's analysis will not be set aside unless those findings are clearly erroneous. Id. Because Garcia filed her petition for a writ of habeas corpus after the effective date of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), that statute governs our review of this case. A writ of habeas corpus may not be granted under AEDPA for any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in state court unless the adjudication of that claim
(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or
(2) resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.
28 U.S.C. §§ 2254(d)(1)-(2).
In applying AEDPA, we look to the last state-court decision on the merits, which in this case is the decision of the Ohio Court of Appeals. See Dyer v. Bowlen, 465 F.3d 280, 284 (6th Cir. 2006). The Dyer court further explained this court's scope of review under AEDPA:
A state-court decision is considered contrary to federal law if the state court arrives at a conclusion opposite to that reached by the Supreme Court on a question of law or if the state court decides a case differently than the Supreme Court has on a set of materially indistinguishable facts.
. . .
The application of federal law is unreasonable where the state court identifies the correct governing legal principle from the Supreme Court's decisions but unreasonably applies that principle to the facts of the prisoner's case. When assessing unreasonableness, a federal habeas court may not issue the writ simply because it concludes in its independent judgment that the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established federal law erroneously or incorrectly. Rather, that application must also be unreasonable. Factual findings made by the state court, moreover, are presumed correct in the absence of clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.
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