Logan v. Marshall, Civ. A. No. C81-1141A.
| Decision Date | 18 September 1981 |
| Docket Number | Civ. A. No. C81-1141A. |
| Citation | 540 F. Supp. 3 |
| Parties | Thomas A. LOGAN, Petitioner, v. R. C. MARSHALL, Supt., Respondent. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Ohio |
J. Dean Carro, Appellate Review Office, School of Law, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, for petitioner.
Dain Deveny, Asst. Atty. Gen., Columbus, Ohio, for respondent.
Petitioner, Thomas A. Logan, initiated this action pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254 for habeas corpus relief. This Court referred the instant action to the United States Magistrate for his report and recommended disposition thereof. The Magistrate filed same on August 27, 1981, and recommended that an evidentiary hearing was not necessary under the criteria of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) and that petitioner's application for habeas corpus should be denied.
Upon consideration of the Magistrate's Report and Recommendation and upon independent review of the trial transcript, the memorandums of law submitted by petitioner and respondent and petitioner's objections to the Magistrate's report, the Court concludes that an evidentiary hearing is unnecessary and that petitioner's application for habeas corpus should be denied.
Petitioner was found guilty of one count of rape, one count of kidnapping, one count of furnishing a controlled substance to a minor and one count of carrying a concealed weapon. With the exception of the charge of furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, all of the charges against the petitioner arose from a single transaction. Petitioner allegedly forced the victim to walk down an alley at knife-point and then raped her. This act occurred in broad day-light and the trial record reveals that the petitioner and the victim were acquaintances.
Upon conviction by the jury, the Court of Common Pleas, Summit County, sentenced the petitioner to consecutive terms of seven to twenty-five years for rape and five to ten years for kidnapping. The Common Pleas Court imposed concurrent sentences of five to fifteen years for furnishing drugs to a minor and three to ten years for carrying a concealed weapon.
The Summit County Court of Appeals, Ninth Judicial District, affirmed petitioner's conviction. State v. Logan, No. 8956 (9th Dist. 1978). The Supreme Court of Ohio reversed petitioner's conviction for kidnapping on the grounds that the rape and kidnapping constituted allied offenses. State v. Logan, 60 Ohio St.2d 126, 397 N.E.2d 1345 (1979).
Petitioner now seeks habeas corpus relief from this Court. It should be noted that the petitioner challenges only his conviction for rape in this proceeding. The petitioner sets forth the following grounds for relief:
That petitioner's rights to present a defense and to confront witnesses, as guaranteed by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, were violated by the exclusion of testimony concerning the presence of gonorrhea in the prosecuting witness, the alleged victim under authority of Ohio's rape shield statute O.R.C. § 2907.02(D).
The relevant section of Ohio's rape shield law, O.R.C. § 2907.02(D) provides as follows:
(D) Evidence of specific instances of the victim's sexual activity, opinion evidence of the victim's sexual activity, and reputation evidence of the victim's sexual activity shall not be admitted under this section unless it involves evidence of the origin of semen, pregnancy, or disease, or the victim's past sexual activity with the offender, and only to the extent that the court finds that the evidence is material to a fact at issue in the case and that its inflammatory or prejudicial nature does not outweigh its probative value.
Petitioner evidently does not challenge the constitutionality of the Ohio "rape shield" statute but rather its application in this case.
All that is involved in this action is an evidentiary ruling by a state trial court judge. It is not this Court's function to supervise the courts of the state of Ohio. It is a well-established rule that state court rulings on the admission or exclusion of evidence "... may not be questioned in a federal habeas corpus proceeding, unless they render the trial so fundamentally unfair as to constitute a denial of federal rights." Gillihan v. Rodriguez, 551 F.2d 1182, 1193 (10th Cir.) cert. denied 434 U.S. 845, 98 S.Ct. 148, 54 L.Ed.2d 111 (1977). See also Bell v. Arn, 536 F.2d 123 (6th Cir. 1976).
This Court's duty, therefore, is not to determine whether the exclusion of the evidence by the trial judge was correct or incorrect under state law, but rather whether such exclusion rendered petitioner's trial so fundamentally unfair as to constitute a denial of federal constitutional rights. Berard v. Stoneman, 428 F.Supp. 516, 522 (D.Vt.1977).
The petitioner's first constitutional claim is that he was prevented from presenting a defense by the exclusion of evidence of venereal disease. The defense which petitioner now alleges that he wished to present at trial is as follows:
Thus, petitioner contends that the evidence of venereal disease in the victim was relevant to his defense that he did not rape her.
However, it is clear that this defense was never presented to the trial court. At the pre-trial hearing held for the specific purpose of determining what evidence would be admissible under the "rape shield" statute, the petitioner's counsel never offered proof that the defendant did not have venereal disease or the statistical proof which they now rely on. They did seek to introduce evidence that the victim had venereal disease at the time of the attack but failed to state the relevance of such evidence. Petitioner now claims that the relevance of such evidence was clear from the record.
The transcript of the pre-trial conference on admissibility of evidence under the rape-shield statute indicates the line of cross-examination which the defense wished to take:
Trial transcript at 20-22.
The trial judge ruled questions relating to the origin of semen admissible and held the balance of the questions inadmissible after defense counsel failed to show materiality. The trial judge then specifically addressed the venereal disease question:
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