State ex rel. Watkins v. Creuzot

• Decision Date: 05 October 2011
• Docket Number: Nos. AP–76,594,AP–76,595.,s. AP–76,594
• Citation: 352 S.W.3d 493
• Parties: STATE of Texas ex rel. Craig WATKINS, Relator, v. The Honorable John CREUZOT, Respondent.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

352 S.W.3d 493

STATE of Texas ex rel. Craig WATKINS, Relator,

v.The Honorable John CREUZOT, Respondent.

Nos. AP–76,594

AP–76,595.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

July 27, 2011.Rehearing Denied Oct. 5, 2011.

Craig Watkins, Dist. Atty., for Appellant.

Christina O'Neil, Senior Staff Atty., Lisa C. McMinn, State's Atty., Austin, for State.

OPINION

COCHRAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which KELLER, P.J., and WOMACK, JOHNSON and ALCALA, JJ., joined.

The State of Texas, acting through Craig Watkins, the elected District Attorney of Dallas County, filed a petition for a writ of mandamus and prohibition to require the trial judge in this pending retrial of a capital murder to vacate his order precluding the State from seeking the death penalty. Jonathan Bruce Reed, the defendant and real party in interest, filed a “Motion to Preclude the Death Penalty Because the Delay Caused by the State's Misconduct has Made a Constitutionally Adequate Sentencing Investigation Impossible.” After several evidentiary hearings, the trial judge—the Respondent—granted that motion. Because we conclude that the trial judge does not have the legal authority to preclude the State from seeking the statutorily authorized punishment of death set out in Article 37.071 ¹ under these circumstances, we conditionally grant mandamus relief.

I.

A. The Trial1. Facts

In 1979, a jury convicted Reed of capital murder by intentionally killing Wanda Wadle during a robbery or aggravated rape. The trial judge sentenced him to death, but then granted Reed's motion for new trial without explanation. A second jury convicted him of capital murder in 1983, and once again he was sentenced to death.

The evidence from that second trial ² showed that Wanda Wadle shared a Dallas apartment with her sister and a friend, Kimberly Pursley. All three were flight attendants for Braniff. On November 1, 1978, Kimberly came home from a lunch with her father and noticed Wanda's suitcase near the front door and her purse lying on the sofa with its contents scattered about. She concluded that Wanda had returned home sooner than expected from her last flight. Kimberly then heard a male voice coming from behind a closed bedroom door: “Don't come in here. Stay out there.” Thinking that the man was a friend of Wanda's, she said, “Don't worry, I won't come in.”

Soon Reed opened the bedroom door. Kimberly saw him leaning through the doorway with one hand on the molding and snapping a knife sheath closed with the other. He said, “I'm with maintenance; I came to check and change the air conditioner filters,” and he pointed toward the bedroom ceiling. Kimberly looked into the bedroom and saw Wanda's nude body protruding spread-eagle from beneath the bed. As she turned toward Reed, he grabbed her by the throat with both hands and threw her to the living room floor on her stomach, saying “Don't move or I'll break your f ... ing neck.”

Kimberly heard Reed rummaging through the bedroom and then he returned and gagged her with a Braniff uniform sash, tied her hands with a leather belt, and covered her head with an apron. He then asked her, “Do you have any money?” She indicated that she did, so he took $20 from her purse and rummaged through the apartment some more. Reed then returned to Kimberly, straddled her with his legs, and began choking her with both his hands. She feigned unconsciousness. He finally stopped choking her and left.

Kimberly then ran screaming out of the apartment to find help. One neighbor found Wanda lying naked on her back with her legs spread apart. The neighbor pulled Wanda out from under the bed, removed a plastic bag and belt from around her neck, and began CPR, but Wanda died nine days later without regaining consciousness. Two neighbors had seen Reed in the complex shortly before the attack, and a maintenance man, who had seen him after the attack, identified Reed, as did Kimberly.

Reed testified at trial and presented an alibi defense. At the punishment phase, Reed presented four types of mitigating evidence: (1) his prior good conduct in prison in which he had earned a G.E.D. and completed twenty-two hours of college credits; (2) evidence of a history of non-violent prior crimes (including evidence that Reed was the leader and director of a “pack of juveniles” who committed a string of fifteen to twenty home burglaries in 1978) which, it was argued, demonstrated that he was unlikely to be violent in the future; (3) his turbulent family background (including evidence that he did not finish high school, that he went to the penitentiary at age nineteen, that his step-mother married his father when Reed was twenty-four, and that he had no permanent home at the time of the murder); and (4) psychiatric experts who said that, even if Reed had a “sexually deviant, anti-social personality disorder,” he would experience a violence “burnout” between the ages of thirty and forty.

2. Jury Selection

During the 1983 trial, Reed's counsel objected to the prosecutor exercising peremptory challenges against five African–Americans.³ When the prosecutor struck the very first venireperson, Ms. Osby, the defense wanted the prosecutor to state his reason for doing so, because he “believe[d] it was done strictly for discriminatory and racial reasons.” The trial judge told counsel that, in light of his understanding of the law, he could not order the State to do that because they were free to exercise their challenge for “any reason whatever.” ⁴ The prosecutor then responded, saying (1) the law did not require him to give any reason for exercising a peremptory challenge; (2) he “did not exercise a peremptory because of her being a black female”; and (3) the defendant was not black. The trial judge then asked defense counsel to provide him with caselaw from “Texas or some federal jurisdiction” that supported his position. Defense counsel did not provide any authority then or later during the trial. He objected to the State's peremptory challenges to four other black venirepersons as well.

B. The Appeals: 1983–2009

After Reed was convicted and sentenced to death, he appealed to this Court. During the pendency of that appeal, the United States Supreme Court decided Batson v. Kentucky,⁵ in which the Court held that the State may not use peremptory challenges solely on account of the juror's race or on the assumption that black jurors as a group will be unable to impartially consider the State's case against a black defendant.⁶ Thus, once the defendant made a prima facie showing of racial discrimination, the State was required to come forward with a race-neutral reason for that challenge.⁷ But Batson did not deal with Reed's situation because he was white and Batson, on its face, applied only to the exclusion of black jurors in a case against a black defendant. This Court did not address Reed's Batson claim until after the 1991 Supreme Court decision, Powers v. Ohio,⁸ ruling that a defendant had standing to object to raced-based peremptory challenges even when he was not of the same race as those jurors.⁹ Thus, white defendants could object to the discriminatory exclusion of black jurors, and black defendants could object to the discriminatory exclusion of white jurors. ¹⁰ Based on these two new decisions, this Court abated Reed's appeal in late 1992 and remanded it to the trial court to conduct a retroactive Batson hearing. By then—ten years after the trial—neither the prosecutor nor the trial judge had any independent memory of the voir dire or jury selection. ¹¹ Both the trial judge and the prosecutor read and referred to the voir-dire transcript for the five challenged venire persons.¹² For each of the five, the State gave race-neutral reasons for striking that juror, and the trial judge accepted those reasons as being both credible and racially neutral. When the case returned to this Court, we upheld the trial judge's ruling and rejected Reed's Batson claims, along with his other points of error.

After this Court affirmed Reed's conviction and sentence in 1995, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in 1996.¹³ Reed then filed an application for a post-conviction writ of habeas corpus in the convicting court, and we adopted the judge's findings of fact and denied relief in 1998. ¹⁴ In 1999, the United States Supreme Court again denied certiorari. ¹⁵

Later in 1999, Reed filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the federal district court. He included his Batson claim that the trial judge and this Court had previously rejected on direct appeal. The magistrate judge recommended that relief be denied and, on February 19, 2003, the district judge agreed. Reed filed a motion to disqualify the magistrate, which was granted, and the Fifth Circuit later abated the case for a new federal district judge to reconsider Reed's claims. That judge denied all of Reed's claims on July 26, 2005, but he granted a Certificate of Appealability on the Batson claim.

Three years later, the Fifth Circuit concluded that, based upon Miller–El v. Dretke,¹⁶ an intervening 2005 decision by the Supreme Court, Reed was entitled to relief on his Batson claim.¹⁷ Miller–El allowed the federal reviewing courts to use a comparative analysis of the voir dire of all of the prospective jurors in analyzing a state-court Batson claim even though the state trial judge had never been requested to do so and the state court had not done so on direct appeal.¹⁸ The Fifth Circuit noted that although “we do not relish adding a new chapter to this unfortunate story more than thirty years after the crime took place, we conclude that the Constitution affords Reed a right to relief.” ¹⁹ On January 12, 2009, the Fifth Circuit ordered that Reed be released or retried on the 1978 capital murder charges.

II.

In his pretrial motion, Reed complains that the State should not be allowed to seek the death penalty in the retrial because it was the State's fault that it took thirty years for the appellate orbit to...