Lynch v. Sec'y, Fla. Dep't of Corr.

• Decision Date: 08 January 2015
• Docket Number: No. 12–15188.,12–15188.
• Parties: Richard E. LYNCH, Petitioner–Appellee, Cross Appellant, v. SECRETARY, FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, Florida Attorney General, Respondents–Appellants, Cross Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

776 F.3d 1209

Richard E. LYNCH, Petitioner–Appellee, Cross Appellant

v.SECRETARY, FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, Florida Attorney General, Respondents–Appellants, Cross Appellees.

No. 12–15188.

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

Jan. 8, 2015.

Marie–Louise Samuels Parmer, The Samuels Parmer Law Firm, PA, Tampa, FL, for Petitioner–Appellee, Cross Appellant.

Katherine Mcintire, Attorney General's Office, West Palm Beach, FL, Kenneth Sloan Nunnelley, Office of the State Attorney–Ninth Circuit, Orlando, FL, Mitchell David Bishop, Attorney General's Office, Daytona Beach, FL, for Respondents–Appellants, Cross Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. D.C. Docket No. 6:09–cv–00715–CEH–DAB.

Before ED CARNES, Chief Judge, TJOFLAT and JORDAN, Circuit Judges.

Opinion

ED CARNES, Chief Judge:

This is an appeal and cross-appeal from a judgment granting in part and denying in part the federal habeas petition of Florida death row inmate Richard Lynch.See 28 U.S.C. § 2254. He was sentenced to death in 2001 for the 1999 murder of thirty-year-old Roseanna Morgan and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Leah Caday. The State of Florida's appeal is from the part of the judgment granting Lynch habeas relief based on his claim that he was denied the effective assistance of counsel because his attorneys advised him, after he had entered a guilty plea, to waive his right to a jury in the sentence stage of his capital trial. Lynch cross-appeals the part of the judgment denying three of his other ineffective assistance claims that he raised in his habeas petition.

I.

Lynch murdered Morgan and Caday on March 5, 1999, because he could not accept Morgan's decision to end their extramarital affair. See Lynch v. State, 841 So.2d 362, 366 (Fla.2003). The affair had lasted from August 1998 until February 1999. Id. While it was underway, although Lynch was unemployed and relied on his wife for financial support, he obtained three credit cards that were used to make more than $6,000 worth of purchases for Morgan. See Lynch v. State, 2 So.3d 47, 66 (Fla.2008). She ended the affair on February 9, 1999 after her husband returned from Saudi Arabia where he had been working as a military contractor. See Lynch, 841 So.2d at 374. While Morgan moved on, Lynch did not. He began stalking Morgan, hanging around her apartment complex, showing up at her job, following her on her way home from work, and calling her apartment. Morgan's husband confronted Lynch several times and told him to leave her alone, but it did no good. Lynch persisted.

On March 3, 1999, about three weeks after Morgan had ended the affair, Lynch wrote a letter to his wife declaring his intention to kill Morgan and then himself. See id. at 366, 368. In that letter he asked his wife to send Morgan's parents copies of the letters and cards Morgan had written to him, as well as nude pictures of Morgan that he had taken. Id. at 366. He wrote that “I want them to have a sense of why it happened, some decent closure, a reason and understanding.... I want them to know what she did, the pain she caused, that it was not just a random act of violence.” Lynch, 2 So.3d at 64 (emphasis omitted). Lynch went on in the letter about the debts that had been run up on the credit cards, his fear that Morgan would not pay him back for any of the purchases, and the pain that she had caused him by ending their affair. After describing in explicit and unnecessary detail the various sexual acts he and Morgan had engaged in and how much he had enjoyed them, on the last page of the letter Lynch apologized to his wife “for all the pain, suffering, expense, embarrassment and hardship I will cause and give to you,” but concluded that Morgan “must pay the price.” Lynch left the letter in his garage.

Two days later, on March 5, he packed three pistols and ammunition into a black bag and drove to Morgan's apartment. See id. at 59. He parked his car down the street and around the corner from the apartment complex so that Morgan and her daughter Caday would not see it when they arrived at the complex. Id.; Lynch, 841 So.2d at 367 n. 3. Lynch grabbed the bag with the three pistols and ammunition from the trunk of his car, walked to the complex, and picked an inconspicuous spot to wait for Morgan to return. See Lynch, 2 So.3d at 76.

Caday got home first. See id. Lynch talked the thirteen-year-old into letting him inside by telling her that he wanted to speak with her mother. See id. at 62. Once inside the apartment, he pulled one of the pistols from the black bag and held Caday at gunpoint for thirty or forty minutes while waiting for Morgan to arrive.See Lynch, 841 So.2d at 366. All the while, the young girl was “terrified.” Id. She asked Lynch “why he was doing this to her.” Id.

When Morgan finally returned home, Lynch met her at the door with a pistol in his hand. See Lynch, 2 So.3d at 59. Sensing what Lynch was going to do, Morgan refused to come inside. They had a heated discussion, which ended when Lynch fired seven shots. See id. at 58, 70.

Three of the shots hit Morgan in the legs. See id. at 53, 69–70. One hit her eye and tore through her neck. See id. at 69–70. She fell to the floor in the hallway outside her apartment, bleeding and screaming for help. See Lynch, 841 So.2d at 366, 371. Lynch walked outside the apartment into the hallway where Morgan lay, and the door closed behind him. He dragged Morgan's bleeding body by her wrist back to the door, where he knocked and told Morgan's daughter to “Hurry up, open the door, your mom is hurt.” Id. at 367. When Caday opened the door, Lynch dragged her mother inside, closing the door behind him. Id.

Inside the apartment, Lynch pulled a second pistol from his bag, and several minutes after he had first shot Morgan he killed her in front of her daughter by firing a single, execution-style shot to her head. See id. at 370–73 ; Lynch, 2 So.3d at 69. He then called his wife at their home, Lynch, 841 So.2d at 366, and told her he was “sorry for what I'm going to do.” During that phone call, Lynch's wife could hear Caday screaming hysterically in the background. See id. at 369. After Lynch hung up, he killed the young girl by shooting her in the back. See id. at 366.

Lynch then called his wife again. Id. He told her that he had accidentally shot Caday and told her that he had left a letter in the garage. See id. When that call ended, Mrs. Lynch dialed 911. She told the operator about Lynch's phone calls and asked for the police to investigate. She then began to look for the letter. Her sister Juliette, whom Mrs. Lynch had paged after Lynch's first phone call, arrived at the home and joined in the search. Mrs. Lynch found the letter and started to read it but was interrupted when her husband called a third time. Both she and Juliette talked to him, begging him not to kill himself. See id. While Juliette was speaking with Lynch, Mrs. Lynch used her cell phone to call 911 again. She told the operator about the murder-suicide letter she had just found and that Lynch was willing to turn himself in. After that 911 call ended and Lynch had ended his call to Mrs. Lynch, she returned to reading the letter he had left. Before she could finish reading it, several police officers arrived at her home. See Lynch, 2 So.3d at 68. One officer, after confirming that she was Mrs. Lynch, asked her for the letter. See id. She did not want to hand it over until she had finished reading it, but the officer kept asking and she gave him the letter.

While Mrs. Lynch was talking with the officers, Lynch himself called 911. See Lynch, 841 So.2d at 370. He talked with the 911 operator for the next thirty or forty minutes. See Lynch, 2 So.3d at 57–58. By the time that call began, two officers were at Morgan's apartment responding to the neighbors' reports of shots fired. The officers attempted to enter the apartment, but quickly retreated when Lynch fired a shot at them. See Lynch, 841 So.2d at 366. Eventually, the SWAT team arrived, there were negotiations, and Lynch gave himself up. Before he did that, Lynch told the 911 operator that he had killed two people, that he had shot Morgan to “put her out of her misery,” and that he had fired at the two police officers who tried to enter the apartment. Id.

II.

A Florida grand jury issued a four-count indictment on March 23, 1999, charging Lynch with: (1) first-degree premeditated murder of Roseanna Morgan; (2) first-degree premeditated murder of Leah Caday; (3) armed burglary of a dwelling; and (4) kidnapping. See id. at 365–66. There was a mountain of evidence against Lynch, piled up stone by stone through the testimony of multiple witnesses, the presentation of documents, undisputed circumstances, and Lynch's own words. It was conclusively proven that: Lynch had barricaded himself inside Morgan's apartment, had fired from it at police officers, and when he emerged had left inside two dead bodies, one of which was riddled with five bullets. The prosecution also presented: the murder-suicide letter Lynch had written two days before the murders, the testimony of the neighbor across the hall who saw Lynch drag Morgan inside the apartment after she had been shot several times, the testimony of a second neighbor who described the five to seven minute pause between the two groups of gunshots, the testimony of Mrs. Lynch about his three phone calls to her, the recording of his own lengthy 911 call, the testimony of the police negotiator who talked Lynch out of the apartment, and a videotape of Lynch's post-arrest interview confessing to the killings. See Lynch, 841 So.2d at 366–67, 371.

Together, the evidence showed that: (1) two days before the murder Lynch wrote about his intent to kill Morgan; (2) he packed a bag with three loaded pistols and took them to her apartment; (3) he intentionally parked away from the apartment complex so that neither victim would see his vehicle and know he was there; (4) he held the...