Mejia v. Garcia

• Decision Date: 25 July 2008
• Docket Number: No. 06-16460.,06-16460.
• Citation: 534 F.3d 1036
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit
• Parties: Victorino Lemos MEJIA, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Silvia GARCIA; Darrel G. Adams; Jeanne S. Woodford, Respondents-Appellees.

534 F.3d 1036

Victorino Lemos MEJIA, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Silvia GARCIA; Darrel G. Adams; Jeanne S. Woodford, Respondents-Appellees.

No. 06-16460.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted April 14, 2008.

Filed July 25, 2008.

Suzanne A. Luban, Oakland, CA, for the petitioner-appellant.

Edmund G. Brown Jr., Attorney General of the State of California, Dane R. Gillette, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Michael P. Farrell, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Brian G. Smiley, Supervising Deputy Attorney General, and Justain P. Riley, Deputy Attorney General, Sacramento, CA, for the respondents-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California; Oliver W. Wanger, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-03-05489-OWW.

Before: RONALD M. GOULD, RICHARD R. CLIFTON, and N. RANDY SMITH, Circuit Judges.

GOULD, Circuit Judge:

Victorino Lemos Mejia ("Mejia") appeals the district court's denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus with respect to California state convictions for two counts of kidnapping, two counts of assault with a firearm, and one count of assault with a deadly weapon. We address: 1) whether the jury instructions read at Mejia's trial violated Mejia's due process rights under In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970), with respect to the kidnapping and assault convictions; and 2) whether the admission of evidence of prior uncharged sexual offenses against Mejia's daughter violated clearly established United States Supreme Court precedent. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 1291 and 2253, and we affirm. We conclude that the jury instructions did not violate Mejia's rights under Winship with respect to the kidnapping and assault convictions and that admission of the uncharged sexual offenses did not violate clearly established Supreme Court precedent.

I

The facts concerning the horrific conduct for which Mejia was convicted are not difficult to grasp. In June of 1999, a California jury convicted Mejia of five counts of rape by force of fear, two counts of kidnapping, two counts of assault with a firearm, and one count of assault with a deadly weapon.¹ The allegations that underpin these convictions are more than unpleasant: In the summer of 1989, at the age of 18, the sister of Mejia's wife came to the United States to work as a babysitter for the Mejia family. After Mejia made arrangements to smuggle the sister, Maria, across the United States border with Mexico, Mejia and two of his young children met Maria in Los Angeles. Together, they took a bus to the county in which the Mejias lived, where Mejia brought Maria and the children to a motel.

From here matters degenerated quickly for Maria. When the children were asleep, the first alleged sexual assaults took place: Mejia put a knife to Maria's neck and told Maria that he wanted to have sexual intercourse with her. Maria pushed, kicked and tried to defend herself, telling Mejia that she did not want to have intercourse. While still holding the knife, Mejia tore off Maria's clothing and forced her to have sexual intercourse with him twice. For the two incidents of intercourse, Mejia was later charged with counts 1 and 2, each for forcible rape with an accompanying special allegation that Mejia used a deadly weapon, namely, a knife, to commit the offense. For his use of the knife, Mejia was also charged with count 3, assault with a deadly weapon.

Mejia told Maria that there was nothing she could do about being raped because no one would help her. He warned Maria not to tell her sister and his wife, Soledad, about what had happened in the motel, and Maria at first obeyed, fearing Mejia, but eventually told Soledad about the assaults.

When Mejia discovered this, he forced both women to get into his truck at gunpoint and drove them to an orange grove. He ordered the women out of the truck and told them to walk to a field at gunpoint, threatening to kill them both. Mejia twice fired the gun at the women, once off to the side and once near their feet, and at some point put the gun to Soledad's head. He ordered Soledad to start walking so that he could shoot her in the back, and when Soledad complied, Mejia pointed the gun at Soledad and threatened to shoot her unless Maria agreed to have sexual intercourse with him. Maria agreed, afraid that Mejia might kill her sister. Mejia warned that he would kill Maria if she ever reported him to anyone. For his use of the firearm at the orange grove, Mejia was later charged with counts 4 and 5, assault with a firearm against Maria and Soledad, respectively. For the entire incident, Mejia was charged with counts 6 and 7, kidnapping Maria and Soledad, respectively, with a special allegation of the use of a firearm — a .25 caliber handgun.

After the three returned home, Mejia got on top of Maria and grabbed and touched her. Maria tried to push Mejia away, but she thought he had a gun, and he reminded her of her promise to have sex with him. Maria replied that she had made the promise to save Soledad's life. Mejia then forced Maria to have sexual intercourse with him, which later constituted count 8 against Mejia, with a special allegation that he used the .25 caliber handgun in committing the offense.

Later in the summer, after Maria unsuccessfully tried to lock herself in Mejia's car, Mejia raped her inside the family's empty residence. This would comprise count 11, forcible rape. Maria testified that over the three months that she lived at the house, Mejia came into the living room and raped her roughly twenty to thirty times. On one occasion, Soledad came into the living room and told Mejia to go back to his bedroom; this formed the basis for count 12. When Soledad and Mejia were back in their bedroom, Maria could hear Mejia beating Soledad.

Maria eventually escaped the house in October of 1989. Shortly thereafter, while staying with an acquaintance, Maria reported Mejia to the police, who began an investigation. On January 30, 1990, Mejia was charged in Tulare County Superior Court with the twelve counts for which he was ultimately prosecuted, but he was not caught until nearly a decade later.

While the Mejia family was in Oregon in the early 1990s, Mejia's teenaged daughter, Norma, who was aware that the police were looking for her father, telephoned her former high school counselor in California and gave the counselor Mejia's location in Oregon. The counselor called the police. When Soledad found out about the call, she told Mejia, who then moved the family to Mexico. Around this time, Norma told Soledad that Mejia had been sexually abusing her.

In February of 1999, law enforcement caught up with Mejia and brought him back to California. In a police interview, Soledad, who had denied wrongdoing by Mejia when the police first investigated in the early 1990s, now said that she was afraid of Mejia and feared for her family, that she had lied earlier when she had denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and that Mejia had abused Maria. When interviewed, Norma also confirmed that Maria had been abused.²

At trial Soledad supported Maria's allegations: Soledad testified that Maria had told her about two weeks after coming to live with them that Mejia was abusing her; she confirmed Maria's account of the orange grove incident and Mejia's threats to kill the two women; she said that she had heard Mejia in the living room with Maria on occasion and had heard Maria tell Mejia to get off of her; and she seconded Maria's account of running away. Soledad repeated that when police first came to question her, she had lied, denying that Mejia had ever raped Maria or assaulted either of them, although she had given the police officer Mejia's gun, which she had hidden in her purse, and had told them where Mejia might be located.

The trial court admitted evidence of Mejia's acts of alleged uncharged sexual misconduct against Norma over defense objection, pursuant to California Evidence Code §§ 1108 and 352, which allow such evidence to be introduced so long as its probative value is not substantially outweighed by resulting prejudice. The trial court determined that the evidence's probative value outweighed its prejudicial effects. Norma then testified about previous incidents in which she alleged that Mejia had sexually abused her.

Norma told the jury that when she was about 15 years old, an investigator came to the village where her family was staying in Mexico. Mejia, thinking the investigator was looking for him, fled with the children to another village and hid in a hole in the ground. Norma claimed that, while they were hiding in the hole, Mejia told Norma that she was "going to lend him [her] private parts," and began touching her genital area. Norma stated that when they left the hole and went to a house for the night, Mejia took out his gun, placed it under his head and raped her. He later told her that it was her punishment for having called the police. After that, she testified, he raped her almost every night and at some point beat her with ropes.

Norma said that she eventually told her grandmother about the assaults, after which Mejia raped Norma again, telling her that he was raping her because she had told her grandmother about him. Norma also said that Mejia told her that if she ever told the police, he would kill her and her mother and throw their bodies onto the train tracks. Norma stated that Mejia continued to rape her until she moved out of the house in 1994.

At his trial, Mejia denied all allegations against him. He admitted to a relationship with Maria but claimed that it was consensual and that he had never owned a handgun. He denied ever having molested Norma. Two of Mejia's children supported his version of events in their testimony.

The jury convicted Mejia of the five counts of rape by force of fear, the two counts of kidnapping, the two counts of assault with a firearm, and one...