Mataya v. Kingston

• Decision Date: 03 June 2004
• Docket Number: No. 02-2850.,02-2850.
• Parties: Randall K. MATAYA, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Phillip A. KINGSTON, Warden, Respondent-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

371 F.3d 353

Randall K. MATAYA, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Phillip A. KINGSTON, Warden, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 02-2850.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 13, 2004.

Decided June 3, 2004.

Robert J. Palmer, May, Oberfell & Lorber, South Bend, IN, for Petitioner-Appellant.

James M. Freimuth, Office of the Attorney General, Madison, WI, for Respondent-Appellee.

Before FLAUM, Chief Judge, and POSNER and KANNE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

After exhausting his state remedies, Wisconsin lifer Randall Mataya sought federal habeas corpus, claiming that he had been convicted in violation of the rule of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), which requires the prosecution to turn over to the defense evidence in its possession that would be helpful to the defendant, including evidence useful only for impeaching a prosecution witness. United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667, 676-77, 105 S.Ct. 3375, 87 L.Ed.2d 481 (1985).

Pamela Claflin, age 35 and a frequenter of bars, happened one evening to be in a bar named Ma's Place in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, when she was accosted by Mataya, whom apparently she hadn't met before. They left together, amidst indications that she was drunk and he amorous, and drove off in Mataya's car, Claflin leaving hers in the bar's parking lot. Later that night, at some distance from the bar, a man named Cole heard "a very loud, strange, almost terrifying type of a scream," unlike any animal sound he had ever heard; minutes later he saw a car driving at a high speed from the small park-like area at the dead end of his street. As it happens, Cole had been involved in auto racing for many years and had rebuilt car engines hundreds of times, so the police conducted a test in which six automobiles, one of them Mataya's (of course Cole was not told which), were driven past Cole's home one at a time, and he picked Mataya's and one other car as most like the one he'd seen and heard that night.

After midnight on the fatal night Mataya's stepson saw Mataya applying bleach to bloodstains on his white pants and the next morning he saw him cleaning the interior of his car with spot remover. Mataya told him to say nothing of these things to the police.

A week later, Claflin having been reported missing, the police found her corpse in the park at the end of Cole's street, near a pond. She was naked except for her socks, and her body had been shoved under bushes and was almost entirely covered by weeds, grass, and sticks. Her clothes were scattered nearby. Claflin had worked for a cleaning service and according to her employer had carried her customers' keys — 50 or more of them — in a large purse that she had with her the day she vanished. The purse was never found.

Claflin's skull had been fractured by a heavy object, probably a rock. She had also been strangled. There were bite marks on one of her breasts, and a dentist who has testified frequently as an expert witness, after studying Mataya's teeth, testified that the bite marks had probably been made by those teeth, which the dentist described as "remarkable" (and therefore distinctive). One tooth was rotated 30 degrees; another tooth was missing and its absence had caused other teeth to shift in his mouth.

Having been the last person seen with Claflin before her disappearance, Mataya was immediately suspected of being the murderer and was questioned by the police even before the body was found. At first he denied that Claflin had been in his car when he left Ma's Place, but later he admitted she had been but said he'd dropped her off at another bar — but no one at the other bar saw her there. Later still he said he had blacked out after he left Ma's Place and didn't remember anything that had happened afterwards. He told the police that his wife would say he was wearing white pants the day of the murder and didn't come home until midnight, but that these things were untrue. When his step-daughter asked him whether he had murdered Claflin, he said he didn't know.

The state's principal witness was Donald Hertel, and it is in connection with his testimony that the Brady issue arises. Hertel, who admitted on the stand that he had been convicted ten times and that in exchange for his "cooperation and testimony" he was to receive $1,000 plus a favorable letter to the parole authorities, had known Mataya for a decade. Shortly after the murder, Hertel had absconded from a halfway house in which he was supposed to be living and had gone on a burglary spree with Mataya during which Mataya had admitted having killed a woman named Pamela. He had told Hertel, Hertel testified, that "they were making out on the hood of his car and he was twisting her nipple between his teeth and biting on her breast, and she shoved him back and told him to stop it and take her home or she would turn him in for attempted rape. He got mad and shoved her against a tree, she fell down and hit herself, hit her head on a rock, and then — ah — he crawled on top of her and started beating her in the head, in the temple area. He got up off of her, and she was gasping for air, and making weird noises, so her pants around her neck and drugged, and then he knew she was dead after the body went limp.... He dragged her and he told me that he covered her up with twigs and leaves and grass, and took most of her clothes off of her because he wanted to make it look like a rape.... He said he threw her pants away from the body." Hertel further testified that Mataya had told him that the murder had taken place in a "a little wooded area with a pond next to it," that the woman had had a large purse, that Mataya had thrown the purse into the pond and watched it sink weighed down by "a large set of keys," and that he had tried to get the bloodstains out of his white pants by soaking the pants in bleach.

But what Hertel did not tell the jury, and the prosecution did not tell Mataya's lawyer, was that Hertel had made a deal with the prosecution under which four burglary charges against him would be dropped in exchange for his testifying truthfully at Mataya's trial. Had Hertel been prosecuted and convicted of those charges, he might have been sentenced to 40 years in prison. The implications for his freedom are unclear, but may have been great. He was in prison when he negotiated the deal, because his parole on one of his previous convictions had been revoked; we do not know how long he was likely to remain there. He was also under threat of having his parole on another of his convictions revoked; the letter from the prosecutor to the parole authorities was intended to ward off that revocation. Apparently he was not facing any other new charges besides the four burglaries. The dropping of those charges may not have made him a free man immediately, but almost certainly spared him many years of imprisonment.

Mataya's trial lawyer could have used the deal, had he known about it, to further impeach Hertel's testimony. The deal provided a greater inducement to Hertel to play ball with the prosecution than the $1,000 reward plus the supportive letter to the parole authorities. United States v. Williams, 81 F.3d 1434, 1439-41 (7th Cir.1996). Both those inducements were disclosed to the jury; the implication was that they were the only inducements that he'd been offered. Hertel also disclosed his ten convictions, which doubtless reduced his credibility in the eyes of the jurors; yet disclosure of the deal he had struck with the prosecutors over the burglaries would have impeached him even more because the deal had given him a palpable and very substantial incentive to lie if need be, as well as freeing him from any real threat of prosecution for perjury if he did lie.

Brady requires the disclosure to the defendant of evidence in the prosecution's possession that is "material" to the defense; and in the law of evidence "material" just means bearing on an issue in the case. 1 McCormick on Evidence § 185, pp. 637-38 (John W. Strong ed., 5th ed.1999). But the Brady line of cases uses the word in a more demanding sense. Brady evidence is material only if there is a reasonable probability that disclosure to the defense would have resulted in the jury's acquitting the defendant. Banks v. Dretke, 540 U.S. 668, ___, 124 S.Ct. 1256, 1276, 157 L.Ed.2d 1166 (2004); Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419, 434, 115 S.Ct. 1555, 131 L.Ed.2d 490 (1995); United States v. Boyd, 55 F.3d 239, 245 (7th Cir.1995).

Usually evidence that the prosecution's principal witness had been offered a strong inducement to testify against the defendant would satisfy the criterion of materiality. And there is no doubt that Hertel was the state's principal witness against Mataya. We are not impressed by the state's argument that the remaining evidence made his conviction a certainty regardless, though we'll note later in this opinion that the evidence of Mataya's guilt, even without his confession to Hertel, was considerable. Nor does the fact that Hertel began talking to the police before there was any agreement to drop the charges against him show, as the state also argues that the agreement didn't operate as an inducement for him to lie on the stand. A prospective witness might lie to the police in the hope of obtaining concessions yet be unwilling to repeat his lies on the stand unless he obtained very generous concessions in bargaining with the prosecution over the "price" of his cooperation. Indeed from the get-go Hertel demanded as part of the inducement for his testifying for the government that it drop the burglary charges against him. He could not negotiate the deal without revealing to the government at least some of what he would be willing to testify to if the deal went through. This didn't make the revelation independent of the deal — quite the contrary.

But what is unusual about this case, and decisive against the Brady claim, is that Hertel's evidence was...