Smart v. State

• Citation: 146 P.3d 15
• Decision Date: 27 October 2006
• Docket Number: No. A-9025.,No. A-9037.,A-9025.,A-9037.
• Parties: Troy S. SMART, Appellant, v. STATE of Alaska, Appellee. Jayme Sobocienski, Appellant, v. State of Alaska, Appellee.
• Court: Alaska Court of Appeals

146 P.3d 15

Troy S. SMART, Appellant, v. STATE of Alaska, Appellee.

Jayme Sobocienski, Appellant, v. State of Alaska, Appellee.

No. A-9025.

No. A-9037.

Court of Appeals of Alaska.

October 27, 2006.

Quinlan Steiner (opening brief) and Linda K. Wilson (reply brief), Assistant Public Defenders, and Barbara K. Brink (opening brief) and Quinlan Steiner (reply brief), Public Defenders, Anchorage, for the Appellant in No. A-9025.

Joshua Fink, Public Advocate, Anchorage, as amicus curiae aligned with the Appellant. Timothy W. Terrell, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Special Prosecutions and Appeals, Anchorage, and David W. Márquez, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee in No. A-9025.

David W. Miner, Seattle, Washington, and Joshua Fink, Public Advocate, Anchorage, for the Appellant in No. A-9037.

Timothy W. Terrell, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Special Prosecutions and Appeals, Anchorage, and David W. Márquez, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee in No. A-9037.

Before: COATS, Chief Judge, and MANNHEIMER and STEWART, Judges.

OPINION

MANNHEIMER, Judge.

In Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296, 124 S.Ct. 2531, 159 L.Ed.2d 403 (2004), the United States Supreme Court held that, under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, a criminal defendant has the right to trial by jury—including the right to demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt—on any issue of fact (other than a prior conviction) that will increase the maximum penalty to which the defendant may be subjected.

The question presented to this Court is whether the right to jury trial recognized in Blakely v. Washington should be applied retroactively—that is, whether this Court should grant relief to a defendant whose sentence was imposed in violation of Blakely if the defendant's conviction was already final when Blakely was issued (June 24, 2004).

Our answer to this question has two parts.

First, we must identify the law that governs our inquiry—the legal test for assessing the retroactivity of a federal constitutional decision like Blakely.

The Alaska Supreme Court has adopted a retroactivity test modeled after the test endorsed by the United States Supreme Court in Linkletter v. Walker.¹ But in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989), the United States Supreme Court abandoned the Linkletter test in favor of a stricter test—i.e., one that grants retroactivity in fewer instances.

The State argues that, under the supremacy clause of the federal Constitution, we are now bound to apply the Teague test when assessing whether a federal constitutional decision should be applied retroactively in state criminal cases. We conclude that the State is wrong. For the reasons explained here, we conclude that the Teague test applies only to federal habeas corpus litigation, that it does not bind the states, and that this Court is therefore obliged to apply the retroactivity test adopted by the Alaska Supreme Court.

Having concluded that we must apply the Alaska retroactivity test, the next question is whether, under the Alaska test, Blakely should be applied retroactively. We conclude that one component of Blakely—its requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt—is essential to a fair and lawful determination of a defendant's sentence under Alaska's presumptive sentencing law. Accordingly, we hold that this component of Blakely must be applied retroactively.

Finally, given the central importance of the guarantee of jury trial in our criminal justice system, we conclude that if one or more aggravators in a case must be relitigated because of a Blakely error in the standard of proof, the defendant is entitled to have a jury decide the disputed aggravators.

Part I:

What Law Governs This Court's Decision?

Are state courts bound by the retroactivity test announced in Teague v. Lane when a state prisoner seeks the benefit of a new federal constitutional rule?

The Alaska Supreme Court has repeatedly addressed the question of whether, when a new rule is created or recognized by judicial decision, that rule should be applied retroactively—that is, applied to defendants whose convictions were already final before the rule was announced.²

(For purposes of this discussion, a criminal conviction is "final" if there is no further possibility of direct review or certiorari review of the conviction. See Beard v. Banks, 542 U.S. 406, 411, 124 S.Ct. 2504, 2510, 159 L.Ed.2d 494 (2004); Caspari v. Bohlen, 510 U.S. 383, 390, 114 S.Ct. 948, 953, 127 L.Ed.2d 236 (1994).)

The Alaska Supreme Court most recently summarized our state's retroactivity test in State v. Semancik.

We consider three factors when deciding whether to apply a new rule retroactively or prospectively: (1) the purpose to be served by the new rule; (2) the extent of reliance on the old rule; and (3) the effect on the administration of justice of a retroactive application of the new rule.

Semancik, 99 P.3d 538, 543 (Alaska 2004).

This test is modeled after the retroactivity test endorsed by the United States Supreme Court in Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U.S. 618, 636-38, 85 S.Ct. 1731, 1741-42, 14 L.Ed.2d 601 (1965). And, because this test has been adopted by our state supreme court, this Court is presumptively obliged to apply this test when deciding whether a new rule should be applied retroactively.

But the United States Supreme Court announced a new retroactivity test in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989). In the cases currently before us, the State argues that we (and all other state courts) are now obliged to follow the Teague retroactivity test whenever we decide the potential retroactive application of a new rule of federal law—such as the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial announced in Blakely.

We conclude that the State has misinterpreted Teague. Although the Teague decision deals with the issue of retroactivity, Teague was not intended to limit the authority of a state court to retroactively apply rules of constitutional law when reviewing its own state's criminal convictions. Rather, as we explain here, the Teague decision was intended to limit the authority of federal courts to overturn state criminal convictions in federal habeas corpus proceedings. The purpose of the Teague test is to minimize federal intrusion into state criminal proceedings—by greatly narrowing the instances in which a federal court is authorized to overturn a state criminal conviction based on a rule of law that did not come into existence until after the state criminal conviction became final.

(a) The background and the content of the Teague decision

In order to understand the Teague decision, one must understand the context in which it arose. The purpose of Teague was to ameliorate a problem created by the federal Habeas Corpus Act of 1867—an act which gave federal courts the authority to grant habeas corpus relief to prisoners convicted of crimes in state court if their federal rights had been violated.

As this Court explained in Grinols v. State,³ the United States Congress inaugurated modern post-conviction relief litigation when it passed the Habeas Corpus Act. Prior to the passage of this Act, there was essentially only one ground for seeking habeas corpus relief: the assertion that the court which entered the criminal judgement against the prisoner lacked jurisdiction to do so. But under the 1867 Act, a state prisoner could attack their criminal conviction in federal court by alleging a violation of any right guaranteed by federal law.⁴

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that significantly expanded the procedural rights guaranteed to state criminal defendants under the federal Constitution. As a result, state prisoners began to resort frequently to the federal courts, invoking the Habeas Corpus Act to challenge their state convictions.⁵

As detailed by the United States Supreme Court in Wainwright v. Sykes,⁶ the Supreme Court responded with various procedural rules to forestall this habeas corpus litigation, or at least to defer federal consideration of state prisoners' claims until those claims had been presented to the state courts. These rules were not jurisdictional limitations on the authority of the federal courts rather, these rules were equitable restrictions on the federal courts' exercise of their habeas corpus authority—restrictions designed to further the goals of federal-state comity and the fair and orderly litigation of state criminal cases.⁷

In Sykes itself, the Supreme Court held that a state prisoner normally could not ask the federal courts to adjudicate a claimed violation of the prisoner's federal rights if, because of a procedural default under state rules (e.g., failure to make a contemporaneous objection at trial, or failure to raise the issue on direct appeal), the prisoner was barred from litigating this claim in state court.⁸ The only exception to this rule of exclusion, the Supreme Court declared, was if the state prisoner could show good "cause" for failing to raise the issue properly in the state court, and resulting "prejudice" from the violation of the prisoner's federal rights.⁹

But although the Sykes "cause and prejudice" rule generally operated to restrict federal habeas corpus litigation, the rule encouraged habeas litigation in one respect. Under the Sykes rule, state prisoners remained free to challenge their state criminal convictions by invoking a new federal right that was recognized after the prisoner's conviction became final. This result followed from the fact that, if the federal right was truly "new" (in the sense that it was not merely a straightforward application of already recognized rights), then, by definition, the prisoner had good cause for not asserting this new federal right until it was announced.

This was the precise holding in Reed v. Ross, 468 U.S. 1, 104 S.Ct. 2901, 82 L.Ed.2d 1 (1984): the Supreme Court declared...