Reynoso v. Giurbino

• Decision Date: 06 September 2006
• Docket Number: No. 05-55695.,05-55695.
• Parties: Aaron REYNOSO, Petitioner-Appellee, v. George J. GIURBINO, Warden, Respondent-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

462 F.3d 1099

Aaron REYNOSO, Petitioner-Appellee, v. George J. GIURBINO, Warden, Respondent-Appellant.

No. 05-55695.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted June 9, 2006.

Filed September 6, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Bill Lockyer, Attorney General for the State of California; Robert R. Anderson, Chief Assistant Attorney General; Pamela C. Hamanaka, Senior Assistant Attorney General; Kenneth C. Byrne, Supervising Deputy Attorney General (on the briefs); Xiomara Costello, Deputy Attorney General, Los Angeles, CA (argued), for the respondent-appellant.

Maria E. Stratton, Federal Public Defender (on the briefs); Mark R. Drozdowski, Deputy Federal Public Defender, Los Angeles, CA (argued), for the petitioner-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California; Virginia A. Phillips, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-02-03854-VAP.

Before: REINHARDT, TROTT, and WARDLAW, Circuit Judges.

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge:

The State, through Warden Giurbino, appeals the district court's decision to grant Aaron Reynoso's petition for a writ of habeas corpus. It asserts that the claim on which relief was granted was unexhausted and that the state court's rejection of the claim was reasonable. We conclude that Reynoso's claim was properly exhausted and that, on the merits, he has demonstrated ineffective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). We agree with the district court that the state court's decision to the contrary constituted an unreasonable application of clearly established Supreme Court law. Accordingly, we affirm its grant of the writ of habeas corpus.

I.

On July 11, 1995, Jyotsna Prajapati was shot once in the head and died from her wounds shortly afterwards. At the time of the shooting, Prajapati was working alone behind the counter of the Top Produce Market, a convenience store that she and her husband owned.

After investigating Prajapati's murder for a week, the Los Angeles Police Department asked the Los Angeles City Council to approve a $25,000 reward "for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murder of Jyotsna Prajapati." On July 18, 1995, the City Council approved the reward for sixty days, during which time no witnesses responded. Two years later, on April 30, 1997, at the investigating officer's request, the City Council renewed the reward for another sixty days.

In July of 1997, after seeing advertisements about the reward on television, Luis Alberto Lopez contacted police and told them that he had heard Reynoso confess to involvement in the murder. In September of 1997, police questioned Luis Hinojosa, a fellow gang member of Reynoso's, about the murder. Hinojosa was questioned at Centinela State Prison where he was serving a sentence for burglary, possession for sale, and a probation violation. After first unsuccessfully attempting to implicate his cousins, Hinojosa implicated Reynoso, saying he had heard him admit his participation in the murder at a party two years earlier.

The detective leading the Prajapati murder investigation, David Escoto, believed that the case was "close," but that the evidence was not sufficient to support a successful charge against Reynoso. He believed that he needed "more information" and "witnesses to come forward" to make the case. Escoto asked the City Council to renew the reward once again, which it did on October 21, 1998. The reward was publicized both on television and in newspapers.

In November of 1998, Detective Escoto tracked down Robert Mendoza, a witness with whom police had spoken on the night of Prajapati's murder. In December of 1998, Javier Terrones, another witness, contacted the police. Each witness identified Reynoso as one of the two men that he claimed to have seen inside the convenience store moments before and moments after Prajapati's murder. Although the investigating officers were unable to find any physical evidence tying Reynoso to the murder, he was arrested and indicted almost three years after the shooting had occurred.

A. The Trial

At trial, in January 2000, only four witnesses were called to testify on the State's behalf: two were the eyewitnesses identified above, one of whom died before the evidentiary hearing in district court, and the other two were the witnesses who claimed to have heard admissions made by Reynoso, one of whom recanted his statement at trial.

i. Luis Alberto Lopez

Luis Alberto Lopez was the first of the four witnesses to contact police with incriminating evidence against Reynoso. In 1995, he had been incarcerated in juvenile hall with Reynoso, and he claimed to have heard Reynoso describe the Prajapati murder at that time. According to Lopez, Reynoso said that he and a few friends had gone to the Top Produce Market to do a "beer run" and, during the run, a woman was shot. Even though Reynoso never explicitly confessed to shooting Prajapati, Lopez testified, he physically acted out the shooting as if he were the shooter.¹

Even though Lopez purportedly heard Reynoso's account of the shooting in 1995, he testified at trial that he did not report this information to police until 1997 because it was not in his interest to do so before then. In June of 1997, he said, he experienced a religious conversion and decided to contact police because he believed it "would be the right thing to do." Also around that time, Lopez said, he saw a television broadcast that discussed the unsolved shooting of Prajapati, showed a composite of the robber, and included a description of the reward. Lopez said that he also saw an advertisement describing the reward and stating that police had not yet found the suspect. Lopez testified at trial that the broadcast had refreshed his memory and had motivated him to come forward. He also conceded that, in addition to his new-found religious convictions, the offer of a reward motivated him to report Reynoso's incriminating statements. Lopez could not remember whether he initially asked about the reward when he contacted the police, but his testimony suggested he had inquired about it before testifying.

At trial, Reynoso's defense counsel attempted to undermine Lopez's credibility by pointing out that he remembered few details about Reynoso or Reynoso's account of the shooting. Lopez acknowledged that he had seen television reports about the murder, and defense counsel suggested that Lopez had learned of the facts to which he testified by watching those reports. Defense counsel also questioned Lopez about the $25,000 reward; he responded that the reward had played a role in his decision to contact police, but that the money had not been his main concern.

At the evidentiary hearing held in federal court in 2003, Lopez explained that when he contacted the police, he wanted only to leave an anonymous tip, but that the officers forced him to provide answers to their questions: "[T]hese people pressured me into saying all this." He testified that the detectives had told him what he had to say regarding what Reynoso had said to him and that they had "pretty much walked [him] through the process of what to say and how to say it." Even so, he maintained that he had testified truthfully at Reynoso's trial. At the evidentiary hearing, Lopez stated that he did not remember whether he was told that he was guaranteed reward money if he testified, but he did vaguely remember being told that the reward would be distributed "after everything was over." Lopez repeatedly denied any interest in the reward, although he did admit that seeing the reward on television prompted him to come forward as a witness. He also testified at the evidentiary hearing that he was ultimately paid $10,000 for providing the information that helped convict Reynoso.

ii. Luis Hinojosa

Hinojosa spoke with the police in September of 1997, after the reward had been renewed and while he was in prison. Having been told that he was a suspect in the murder and fearing another conviction, he first tried, unsuccessfully, to incriminate his cousins, stating that they looked like him. Subsequently, he told police that he had been at a party approximately one week after the incident at which Reynoso was present. According to Hinojosa, Reynoso told him that he and another gang member went on a beer run and that when the victim tried to stop him, the gun slipped and shot her in the head. Specifically, Hinojosa told police, Reynoso was pistol-whipping Prajapati when the gun went off.

At trial, Hinojosa recanted his prior statements, testified that he did not know Reynoso, and that he had learned about the facts surrounding the murder through news reports on television. He also recanted his statement that he and his cousins looked alike, explaining that he feared being convicted for the murder himself. During direct examination, Hinojosa denied any knowledge about the reward being offered; defense counsel did not question him about the reward on cross-examination. Despite the recantation, the prosecutor urged the jury to credit Hinojosa's report of Reynoso's purported admissions.

iii. Javier Terrones

Javier Terrones was one of the two witnesses who placed Reynoso at the Top Produce Market moments before Prajapati's murder. Although aware of the shooting, Terrones did not contact police at the time and spent the next couple of years in Denver, Colorado. Upon his return to California in 1998, Prajapati's husband— who had known Terrones in the past, when he had frequented their store—showed him several articles regarding the apprehension of a suspect in his wife's murder, one of which had a picture identifying Reynoso as a suspect. Terrones testified at trial that he recognized the picture of Reynoso as the individual he saw at the store on the night of the murder. Instead of immediately contacting the police, however, Terrones left his...