Ouska v. Cahill-Masching
| Decision Date | 12 April 2001 |
| Docket Number | No. 99-2354,CAHILL-MASCHING,99-2354 |
| Parties | (7th Cir. 2001) PATRICIA OUSKA, Petitioner-Appellant, v. LYNN, <A HREF="#fr1-1" name="fn1-1">1 Respondent-Appellee |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 98 C 3363--William T. Hart, Judge. [Copyrighted Material Omitted]
Before COFFEY, RIPPLE and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.
Patricia Ouska was charged with the armed robbery and murder of Beeland Te on May 7, 1992, and was tried before an Illinois jury. Ms. Ouska was found guilty of those charges and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole by the trial court. The Appellate Court of Illinois affirmed Ms. Ouska's conviction, and the Illinois Supreme Court denied her leave to appeal. Ms. Ouska then filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the district court; she asserted that, during her trial, the prosecution (1) used her pre-arrest silence as substantive evidence of her guilt in violation of the Fifth Amendment and (2) used her post-arrest silence against her in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. She also claimed that her trial counsel's failure to object to these violations deprived her of the effective assistance of counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. The district court denied Ms. Ouska's petition in its entirety. For the reasons set forth in the following opinion, we affirm the judgment of the district court.
On May 7, 1992, between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m., Beeland "Rosa" Te was stabbed to death in the convenience store that she ran on West 18th Street in Chicago. Te sold a number of different items in the store, including toys, candy and lottery tickets. In order to help her customers more easily fill out their lottery slips, Te kept a number of small pencils available in the store for that purpose. She also kept a medal of Saint Benedict in her cash register, a gift from her sister that had been purchased in the Philippines. Te had experienced health problems in the past, and, due to a double mastectomy, she wore silicone gel implants in her prosthesis.
Ms. Ouska and her twenty-two-month-old child lived with Ms. Ouska's former foster mother, Ruby Fontenot, only a two or three minute walk from Te's store. Fontenot, who knew Te and often stopped in her store, testified that she discovered that Ms. Ouska had borrowed money from Te and had not yet repaid that loan. Fontenot prodded Ms. Ouska to find the money to repay this debt, and on the morning of the murder Ms. Ouska left Fontenot's home between 9:15 and 9:20 a.m. with her daughter in order to obtain those funds.
At some point before 10:00 a.m. that morning, Ms. Ouska rang the doorbell of Erma Gonzalez, who lives approximately two blocks away from the Fontenot home. Ms. Ouska was bleeding from her leg and told Gonzalez that a Mexican man had tried to rob her on the street and had stabbed her with a screwdriver. Gonzalez refused Ms. Ouska's request to allow her to clean her wound in Gonzalez's apartment, and so Ms. Ouska returned to the Fontenot home. When she arrived there, she encountered Patricia Rutledge, a babysitter working for Fontenot that morning. Rutledge noticed that Ms. Ouska kept her right hand in her pocket and that her leg was cut. While Ms. Ouska went to her room, Rutledge dialed 911, and paramedics soon arrived to take Ms. Ouska to the hospital.
At about the same time that morning, Te's body was discovered at her store; she had been stabbed forty-two times and had eight superficial cutting wounds. The cash register was open and contained no money. Additionally, there were no signs of forced entry to the door separating the customer area of the store from the store's rear portion, where Te's body was found.2 Te normally kept that door closed and locked. In that rear portion of the store was a bathroom, where investigators found a bloody rag in the sink.
Later that afternoon, Fontenot and her daughter Vickie found two blood-stained one-dollar bills on Ms. Ouska's dresser, along with a printout of winning lottery numbers from a previous date. The next morning, on May 8, 1992, while Ms. Ouska was still at Illinois Masonic Medical Center recovering from her stab wound, Rutledge was again babysitting Fontenot's grandchildren and Ms. Ouska's daughter at the Fontenot home. Suspicious about the events of the previous day, Rutledge entered Ms. Ouska's room and looked under her mattress, where she found a bloody knife. Fontenot later testified that she recognized that knife as one that Ms. Ouska had shown her while the two were in Ms. Ouska's room only a few weeks before.
During that same morning, Ms. Ouska made repeated phone calls from the hospital to a neighbor, Lenoir Sanchez. Ms. Ouska ultimately asked Sanchez to get something for her from under Ms. Ouska's mattress in the Fontenot home, which was located next door to Sanchez's apartment. Sanchez testified that Ms. Ouska was not specific as to the nature of the item that Sanchez was supposed to retrieve from under the mattress. Both Sanchez and Tommy Gonzalez, Sanchez's boyfriend and the brother of Ms. Ouska's boyfriend, each made separate attempts to retrieve this unknown item from the Fontenot home that morning. Each time, Rutledge, who had already found the knife under Ms. Ouska's mattress, would not allow them entry into the Fontenot home. Soon after, the knife was placed in a plastic bag, and the police were called to the scene.
When the police arrived and learned that the knife had been found in Ms. Ouska's room, Detective Michael Shields was dispatched to speak with her regarding the Te murder (Detective Shields and a partner had spoken with Ms. Ouska at the hospital on the previous morning about the details of Ms. Ouska's stabbing). When Detective Shields arrived at the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Ms. Ouska was about to be released, and she agreed to accompany the detective to the police station. Ms. Ouska was told that she was to look at possible mug shots of her assailant; instead, once at the station, Detective Shields began asking questions relating to Te's murder. At this point, Ms. Ouska immediately stated that she did not wish to speak to the detective any further, indicated that she wished to speak with her attorney and later left the police station. At no time during this questioning was Ms. Ouska placed under arrest, nor was she given Miranda warnings. Additionally, Ms. Ouska had a bag of clothing with her as she left the hospital that she brought with her to the police station. Upon leaving the station, she did not take this bag with her. Detective Shields, who had noticed blood on some of the clothing in the bag, inventoried the bag and its contents and sent it to a crime laboratory.3 Inside that bag, the police later found a blood-stained jacket and in its pockets found $87 in one- and five-dollar bills, a St. Benedict medal and a small green pencil.
Analysis later revealed that the blood on the knife was consistent with Te's blood and that the knife contained silicon and fibers matching that of Te's prosthesis and clothing, respectively. Testing of the blood found on the two one-dollar bills that Fontenot and her daughter discovered on Ms. Ouska's dresser showed that it was consistent with the protein and enzyme classifications of Te's blood. Additionally, tests on the blood from Ms. Ouska's jacket and from the money located in the jacket were consistent with the protein and enzyme classifications of Te's blood. Blood that had been found in the front room of Te's store was determined to be consistent with Ms. Ouska's blood type, and blood consistent with Ms. Ouska's blood enzyme and protein type was found on the rag recovered from the bathroom sink in the rear of the store. A warrant was then issued for Ms. Ouska's arrest. Six days later, on May 28, 1992, she appeared at a police station and was arrested.
During her jury trial, Ms. Ouska testified that she had entered Te's store on the morning of the murder and saw Fontenot's son-in-law, Salvador Martinez, repeatedly stabbing the victim. Ms. Ouska had, to this point, never told this story to the police or any judicial officer. She maintained that when she told Martinez to stop, he knocked her to the ground, stabbed her in the leg with the knife and threatened that if she told anyone about his crime, he would hurt Ms. Ouska and her child. Ms. Ouska also testified that the knife belonged to Martinez and not to her. After Martinez ran from the store, Ms. Ouska claimed that she quickly pulled the knife out of her leg and put it in the pocket of a sweatshirt that she was wearing. She also maintained that she never entered the rear portion of the store, the area where Te was killed.
Ms. Ouska also provided her version of a number of key points in the sequence of events after the murder. She testified that when she had arrived at Erma Gonzalez's house just after the stabbing, she told Gonzalez that she had been stabbed with a screwdriver because, until she returned to her home, she was unsure of the nature of the object that she had been stabbed with and believed that it could have been a screwdriver. She also explained that she had stated falsely that a Hispanic man had stabbed her on the street because she was afraid that, if she told the truth, Martinez would endanger her and her child. Lastly, Ms. Ouska maintained that when she called Lenoir Sanchez's apartment on the morning after the murder, she asked Sanchez to retrieve health insurance information from under her mattress, not the knife involved in the murder.
Prior to Ms. Ouska's testimony, the prosecution called Detective Shields to the stand in its case-in-chief. It elicited from him the fact that Ms. Ouska had remained silent when the detective had asked her questions regarding...
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