Reyos v. Utah State Prison

• Decision Date: 28 March 2022
• Docket Number: 2:19-CV-517-HCN
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Utah
• Parties: FRANK PAUL REYOS, Petitioner, v. UTAH STATE PRISON, [1] Respondent.

FRANK PAUL REYOS, Petitioner,
v.
UTAH STATE PRISON, ^[1] Respondent.

No. 2:19-CV-517-HCN

United States District Court, D. Utah

March 28, 2022

MEMORANDUM DECISION AND ORDER DENYING HABEAS CORPUS PETITION

HOWARD C. NIELSON, JR. UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

This habeas action involves a pro se petitioner, inmate Frank Paul Reyos' attack on his state conviction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254.^[2]

Having carefully considered the Petition, the State's response, and Petitioner's Reply, the court concludes that Petitioner has procedurally defaulted all but two of his grounds for relief and is not entitled to relief on the two remaining grounds. The petition is therefore denied.

I.

Petitioner was sentenced “to life in prison without the possibility of parole for . . . aggravated murder and a consecutive term of one to fifteen years in prison for possession of a dangerous weapon.” State v. Reyos, 2017 UT App 132, ¶ 10. On direct appeal, he only pursued two issues: “whether the trial court erred in admitting evidence of [a witness's] police interview

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in violation of [Petitioner's] constitutional right to confrontation and whether the applicable sentencing scheme [was] constitutional.” Id. ¶ 11. Analyzing these issues on the merits, the Utah Court of Appeals affirmed Petitioner's convictions. Id. ¶ 49. The Utah Supreme Court then denied Petitioner's certiorari petition. State v. Reyos, 406 P.3d 249 (Utah 2017) (table).

Petitioner's state post-conviction petition also unsuccessfully attacked his conviction on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct. See Dkt. No. 9-6, at 2-3. He did not appeal the denial of his state petition.

II.

In his federal petition, Petitioner raises the following issues. First, whether his Confrontation Clause rights were violated when evidence of a witness's police interview was admitted, though the witness was “unavailable” for cross examination. See Dkt. No. 1 at 5. Second, whether, because witness Natasha Alvarado's testimony was “inherently unreliable, ” there was insufficient evidence to convict.^[3] Id. at 7. Third, whether he received unconstitutionally ineffective assistance of trial and appellate counsel.^[4] Id. at 8. And fourth, whether the statutory scheme under which Petitioner was sentenced was valid. Id. at 10. The second and third issues

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raised in the Petition were not raised before the Utah Court of Appeals or the Utah Supreme Court and are therefore procedurally defaulted under the below analysis.^[5]

III.

The United States Supreme Court has declared that when a petitioner has “‘failed to exhaust his state remedies and the court to which the petitioner would be required to present his claims in order to meet the exhaustion requirement would now find the claims procedurally barred' the claims are considered exhausted and procedurally defaulted for purposes of federal habeas relief.” Thomas v. Gibson, 218 F.3d 1213, 1221 (10th Cir. 2000) (quoting Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 735 n.1 (1991)).^[6] Under Utah's habeas statute, the Post-Conviction

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Remedies Act:

A person is not eligible for relief . . . upon any ground that:

(a) may still be raised on direct appeal or by a post-trial motion

(b) was raised or addressed at trial or on appeal;

(c) could have been but was not raised at trial or on appeal;

(d) was raised or addressed in any previous request for post-conviction relief or could have been, but was not, raised in a previous request for post-conviction relief; or

(e) is barred by the [one-year] limitation period established in Section 78B-9-107.

Utah Code Ann. § 78B-9-106(1).

The second and third issues that Petitioner raises here-insufficient evidence to convict and ineffective assistance of counsel, respectively-were raised or could have been raised either at trial, on appeal, or in a state post-conviction petition (PCP). Thus, under Utah law, Petitioner may not raise those arguments in future PCPs, and the state courts would determine them to be procedurally barred.

Petitioner apparently asserts cause and prejudice as an exception that rescues him from the effects of his procedural defaults. Specifically, he suggests that ineffective assistance of counsel during his state proceedings supplies cause and prejudice because his “[a]ppellate counsel determined not to raise [issues two and three] due to insufficient funding and restricted access to documentation.” Dkt. No. 1 at 9.

“[T]o satisfy the 'cause' standard, [a] Petitioner must show that ‘some objective factor external to the defense' impeded his compliance with Utah's procedural rules.” Dulin v. Cook, 957 F.2d 758, 760 (10th Cir. 1992) (citations omitted). To demonstrate prejudice, “‘[t]he habeas petitioner must show not merely that . . . errors . . . created a possibility of prejudice, but that they worked to his actual and substantial disadvantage.'” Butler v. Kansas, No. 02-3211, 2002 WL 31888316, at *3 (10th Cir. Dec. 30, 2002) (unpublished) (alteration in original) (quoting

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Murray v. Carrier, 477 U.S. 478, 494 (1986) (emphasis in original)).

“Attorney error that constitutes ineffective assistance of counsel is cause.” Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U.S. 722, 754 (1991); see also id. (explaining that such “error must be seen as an external factor”).

Here, the problem for Petitioner is that, on state post-conviction review, the trial court explicitly analyzed his ineffective assistance of counsel claim and did not find his counsel to be ineffective under the Strickland standard. See Dkt. No. 9-6 at 5-11. Petitioner did not appeal the trial court's decision. And an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim that has been rejected cannot establish cause to overcome procedural default. See Thompson v. Benzon, No. 2:18-CV-320-DAK, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 170485, at *13-14 (D. Utah Sept. 7, 2021). Further, any other ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim that Petitioner thinks may support a cause argument must itself be properly exhausted in state court before it can be validly used as cause; however, any such claims are now foreclosed in state court. See Id. at *14.

In sum, the court concludes that Petitioner's second and third grounds for federal post-conviction relief are procedurally defaulted, and that the procedural-default exceptions he advances are invalid. Habeas relief is thus denied on these issues.

IV.

The statute governing this habeas petition provides that

[a]n application for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication of the claim . . . resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States. . . .

28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1).

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The inquiry focuses on whether the Utah Court of Appeals' rejection of Petitioner's claims “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1).^[7] This is a “‘highly deferential standard.'” Cullen v. Pinholster, 131 S.Ct. 1388, 1398 (2011) (citations omitted); see also Littlejohn v. Trammell, 704 F.3d 817, 824 (10th Cir. 2013). It is “‘difficult to meet,' because the purpose of AEDPA is to ensure that federal habeas relief functions as a ‘guard against extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems,' and not as a means of error correction.” Greene v. Fisher, 132 S.Ct. 38, 43-44 (2011) (citations omitted).

Under Carey v. Musladin, 549 U.S. 70 (2006), the first step of the inquiry is determining whether any clearly established federal law exists that is relevant to a Petitioner's claims. See House v. Hatch, 527 F.3d 1010, 1017-18 (10th Cir. 2008); see also Littlejohn, 704 F.3d at 825.

Only after answering yes to that “threshold question” may the court go on to "ask whether the state court decision is either contrary to or an unreasonable application of such law.” Id. at 1018.

As the Tenth Circuit has explained:

[C]learly established [federal] law consists of Supreme Court holdings in cases where the facts are at least closely-related or similar to the case sub judice. Although the legal rule at issue need not have had its genesis in the closely-related or similar factual context, the Supreme Court must have expressly extended the legal rule to that context.

Id. at 1016.

Further, “in ascertaining the contours of clearly established law, [the court] must look to the ‘holdings as opposed to the dicta, of [the Supreme] Court's decisions as of the time of the

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relevant state-court decision.” Littlejohn, 704 F.3d at 825 (quoting Yarborough v. Alvarado, 541 U.S. 652, 660-61 (2004) (emphasis added) (citations omitted)). And, in deciding whether relevant clearly established federal law exists, this court is not restricted by the state court's analysis. See Bell v. Cone, 543 U.S. 447, 455 (2005) (“[F]ederal courts are not free to presume that a state court did not comply with constitutional dictates on the basis of nothing more than a lack of citation.”); Mitchell v. Esparza, 540 U.S. 12, 16 (2003) (“[A] state court need not even be aware of our precedents, ‘so long as neither the reasoning nor the result of the state-court decision contradicts them.'”) (citation omitted).

If this threshold is satisfied, this court may grant habeas relief only when the state court has “unreasonably applied the governing legal principle to the facts of the petitioner's case.” Walker v. Gibson, 228 F.3d 1217, 1225 (10th Cir. 2000) (citing Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 412-13 (2000)). “‘[A]n unreasonable application of federal law is different from an incorrect application of federal law.'” Harrington, 131 S.Ct. at 785 (emphasis in...