Jaynes v. Mitchell

• Decision Date: 02 June 2016
• Docket Number: No. 15-1342,15-1342
• Citation: 824 F.3d 187
• Parties: Charles Jaynes, Petitioner, Appellant, v. Lisa Mitchell, Respondent, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

824 F.3d 187

Charles Jaynes, Petitioner, Appellant

v.Lisa Mitchell, Respondent, Appellee.

No. 15-1342

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

June 2, 2016

Christine DeMaso, Assistant Federal Public Defender, with whom Federal Public Defender Office was on brief, for appellant.

Susanne Reardon, Assistant Attorney General, with whom Maura Healey, Attorney General of Massachusetts, was on brief, for appellee.

Before Lynch, Circuit Judge, Souter, Associate Justice,^* and Stahl, Circuit Judge.

SOUTER, Associate Justice.

Charles Jaynes appeals the district court's dismissal of his habeas corpus petition, filed under 28 U.S.C. § 2254

. None of Jaynes's five claims entitles him to habeas relief, and we affirm.

I

In the summer of 1997, Jaynes, an adult man, befriended Jeffrey Curley, a ten-year-old boy, whom Jaynes often saw in his Massachusetts neighborhood. Jaynes drove a Cadillac and several times took Curley for rides without his parents' knowledge. At one point, Jaynes bought a bicycle and promised to give it to Curley. Jaynes's object in gaining Curley's confidence was to engage him in sexual acts. If Curley refused, Jaynes told a friend, he would be taken care of.

On October 1, Jaynes, along with Salvatore Sicari, another adult, picked Curley up in the Cadillac as the boy was walking his dog. Later that day and evening, the men bought gasoline, duct tape, a large plastic container, lime, and concrete, and traveled to an apartment that Jaynes rented in Manchester, New Hampshire, where they spent the night. Early in the morning of October 2, the Cadillac was seen parked at the Great Works River Bridge in South Berwick, Maine, near the New Hampshire border.

That evening, Jaynes was arrested at a Massachusetts car dealership where he worked. While he was at the police station, the police impounded the Cadillac, which had been left parked on a public street near the dealership, and made an inventory search that yielded a driver's license with a picture of Jaynes (but a different name) and a Manchester address; two rolls of duct tape; and receipts for a bike, a plastic container, lime, and concrete.

Under police questioning, Jaynes admitted that he befriended Curley and drove him around without his parents' permission. He also said that on the evening of October 1 he and Sicari drove to New Hampshire. On October 3, following a confession by Sicari that implicated Jaynes, police conducted a warranted search of Jaynes's New Hampshire apartment and found lime, a label from the plastic container, and Curley's jersey smelling of gasoline. Jaynes's fingerprint appeared on a broken spoon that had been used to mix concrete.

A few days later, Curley's body, along with bits of concrete and lime, was discovered in the Great Works River, inside a plastic container sealed with duct tape. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was poisoning from inhaled gasoline, redness and swelling on the boy's face and upper body indicating that a gasoline-soaked rag had been held over his nose and mouth.

Jaynes was convicted by a Massachusetts jury of kidnapping and second-degree murder, and he brought a consolidated appeal from the convictions and the denial of a new-trial motion. He claimed among other things that the trial court erred in failing to instruct the jury that the murder charge required the Commonwealth to prove that harm preceding death (not just the separately charged abduction) occurred in Massachusetts, and in briefly closing the courtroom to the public, although not to Jaynes or his counsel, during parts of jury voir dire. The Massachusetts Appeals Court (MAC) affirmed, Commonwealth v. Jaynes (Jaynes I ), 55 Mass.App.Ct. 301, 770 N.E.2d 483 (2002)

, and the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) denied Jaynes's application for leave to obtain further appellate review (ALOFAR).

Jaynes later filed a second motion for a new trial, which the trial court also denied. On appeal, Jaynes argued that inflammatory evidence of his sexual preferences was improperly admitted, evidence from the searches of his car and apartment should have been excluded, his trial counsel was ineffective, and his appellate counsel was, too. Again, the MAC affirmed, Commonwealth v. Jaynes (Jaynes II ), 77 Mass.App.Ct. 1110, 929 N.E.2d 1001 (table), 2010 WL 2813572 (Mass. App. Ct. 2010)

, and again the SJC denied Jaynes's ALOFAR.

Jaynes then came to federal court with this petition for relief on habeas corpus raising the claims just mentioned. The district court dismissed the petition and granted a certificate of appealability.

II

“We review the district court's decision to deny habeas relief de novo .” Scott v. Gelb , 810 F.3d 94, 98 (1st Cir. 2016)

. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), habeas relief

shall not be granted with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication of the 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.

“If the relevant claim has not been adjudicated on the merits in state court, we review that claim de novo .” Kirwan v. Spencer , 631 F.3d 582, 586 (1st Cir. 2011)

.

A

Jaynes first claims a violation of his federal due process right recognized in In re Winship , 397 U.S. 358, 364, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970)

, to require a jury finding subject to the reasonable doubt standard on every element of the crime. He cites the trial court's failure to deliver what he calls a “jurisdiction instruction,” that the Commonwealth had to prove that Curley's death resulted from injury or violence that occurred in Massachusetts. This issue, however, is not properly before us, for Jaynes failed to exhaust his claim in the state courts.

Under AEDPA, with exceptions not at issue here, a habeas petitioner must “exhaust[ ] the remedies available in the courts of the State” before seeking relief on a given claim in federal court. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(1)(A)

; see also Sanchez v. Roden , 753 F.3d 279, 294 (1st Cir. 2014). This means that “a petitioner must have tendered his federal claim in such a way as to make it probable that a reasonable jurist would have been alerted to the existence of the federal question.” Sanchez , 753 F.3d at 294 (internal quotation marks omitted).

We have identified several ways in which a petitioner may satisfy this requirement, including reliance on a specific provision of the Constitution, substantive and conspicuous presentation of a federal constitutional claim, on-point citation to federal constitutional precedents, identification of a particular right specifically guaranteed by the Constitution, and assertion of a state-law claim that is functionally identical to a federal constitutional claim. In addition, citations to state court decisions which rely on federal law or articulation of a state claim that is, as a practical matter, indistinguishable from one arising under federal law may suffice to satisfy the exhaustion requirement. The exhaustion requirement is not satisfied, though, if a petitioner has simply recited the facts underlying a state claim, where those facts might support either a federal or state claim.

Id.

(citations, alterations, and internal quotation marks omitted).

Although Jaynes's first ALOFAR to the SJC claimed error in the trial court's failure to instruct the jury on causation by violence or injury in Massachusetts, it failed to raise a federal due process issue. The ALOFAR did not rely on a federal constitutional provision, conspicuously present a constitutional claim, cite constitutional precedents, or identify a constitutional right. Jaynes argues the contrary by noting that, at one point, the ALOFAR stated that an allegedly erroneous manslaughter instruction violated Jaynes's due process right, and at a subsequent point said that clarification of the jurisdictional issue was “[s]imilarly” necessary. The word “[s]imilarly,” Jaynes says, sufficiently indicated that he was raising a jurisdictional issue under the national Constitution. A look at his pleading, however, shows that the most patent problem with this argument is that the word “similarly” does not directly follow the ALOFAR's invocation of constitutional rights. Instead, it appears after a discussion of a different point on which Jaynes sought clarification of state law.

Nor did the ALOFAR assert even a state-law claim functionally identical to one under the federal Constitution, or cite state court decisions resting on federal law. Rather, the ALOFAR framed the issue as whether kidnapping by inveigling constituted the “inflict[ion]” of “violence or injury” for purposes of a Massachusetts venue statute, Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 277, § 62

. This is a straightforward question of state statutory construction, not a functional allusion to Fourteenth Amendment due process.

The answer is the same to Jaynes's fallback argument that the ALOFAR is at least ambiguous with respect to a constitutional assertion, so that we may consult “backdrop” materials filed in the lower courts that reveal a federal claim. As we have said before, however, the “backdrop” approach has itself become problematical after Baldwin v. Reese , 541 U.S. 27, 124 S.Ct. 1347, 158 L.Ed.2d 64 (2004)

, see e.g. , Janosky v. St. Amand , 594 F.3d 39, 51 n.4 (1st Cir. 2010), but here it is enough to point out that Jaynes's very premise in raising it is faulty. As we said, the ALOFAR is not, in fact, ambiguous about raising a constitutional claim. It unambiguously does not.¹

We add that the failure to exhaust does not appear to have cost Jaynes any relief on habeas even on his own theory that a jurisdictional issue should have gone to the jury in this case. The MAC took the following facts to have...