Stermer v. Warren
| Decision Date | 15 May 2020 |
| Docket Number | No. 19-1075,19-1075 |
| Citation | 959 F.3d 704 |
| Parties | Linda STERMER, Petitioner-Appellee, v. Millicent WARREN, Warden, Respondent-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
Petitioner Linda Stermer was convicted of felony murder in the course of committing an arson and was sentenced to life in prison. The State of Michigan charged her with killing her husband by setting both him and their house on fire. At trial, the state used a fire expert to support its claim of arson, but Stermer's counsel never retained or consulted with an expert to rebut this evidence. In his closing arguments, the prosecutor repeatedly branded Stermer a liar, misrepresented her testimony, and disparaged her while bolstering other witnesses. Stermer's counsel did not object.
After a direct appeal and a motion for post-conviction relief in state court, Stermer filed a petition for habeas corpus in the Eastern District of Michigan pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. The district court, over the state's objection, held an evidentiary hearing. After that hearing, the court granted Stermer's petition based on her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective assistance of counsel. The state appealed.
While the district court improperly held an evidentiary hearing and applied an incorrect standard of review to Stermer's petition, that does not affect this Court's de novo review of her claims. Even with the significant deference afforded to state court decisions under habeas review, Stermer is entitled to relief on her prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective assistance claims. Accordingly, we affirm the district court's grant of a conditional writ of habeas corpus, meaning that Stermer is entitled to a new trial.
Linda and Todd Stermer were married for fourteen years. But this was not a happy marriage. On January 6, 2007, Todd discovered that Linda was having an affair with a co-worker named Chris Williams and told her that he wanted a divorce.
The next morning, according to Linda, she and Todd argued, this time about a financial matter. Linda then went to a gas station, filled her Chevy Blazer with fuel, and bought breakfast. The gas station attendant testified that the back window of Linda's truck was open, and at one point it appeared that Linda was pumping gas through the back side of the vehicle, and not into the gas tank. Linda had previously filled containers with gasoline at that station.
Back at the house, Linda told her sons they had to leave the house because she and Todd needed to discuss some things. ( ).) According to Linda, she later went into the basement to do some laundry. There she found a towel, placed there by Todd, that smelled like fuel. During this time, Linda said that Todd remained in the living room but was yelling at her from there.
At some point, Todd's yelling turned to painful screaming, and Linda ran upstairs. She found a fire spread across the house, and Todd himself was on fire. She ran outside and got into the family van to go get help.
At around this time, neighbors saw smoke and flames coming from the Stermers' house and drove over to help. When they arrived, the neighbors saw the Stermer's van backing down the driveway, but then stop and drive forward instead (away from them).
According to Linda, once she got in the van, she started to reverse down the driveway, but then saw Todd outside the house and covered in flames. Linda got out of the van and tried to get Todd to lie down, but realized she was unable to help him and needed to get outside aid. She got back in the van but was stuck in the mud and could not reverse, and so she drove forward instead to get unstuck. At some point, she saw Todd lying on the ground (no longer on fire) and got back out of the van to help him. Based on Todd's injuries and on blood later found on the front driver's side of the vehicle, Linda had struck Todd with the van.
At this point, Linda saw her neighbors heading toward them and screamed at them to call 911. When the neighbors found Todd, he was severely burned and largely naked, wearing only boots and a pair of sweatpants pulled down to his ankles. One of the neighbors grabbed clothes from his vehicle and draped them over Todd to keep him warm.
Emergency responders eventually arrived and provided aid to Todd, who was unresponsive. They moved Todd away from an oil tank near the house (in case that too caught fire), but soon after moving him, Todd stopped breathing. Although the first responders performed CPR, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Dr. Michael Markey later performed an autopsy of Todd Stermer and found the cause of death to be a combination of burns and smoke inhalation. Additionally, Dr. Markey found blunt-force injuries to Todd's head, but could not say if these injuries were caused by him being struck by an object multiple times, being struck by a vehicle, or both. While Todd's blood tested negative for controlled substances, the toxicology lab found hydrocodone
(the opioid in Vicodin ) in his urine. This suggests that the hydrocodone was ingested some hours or days before his death, since the drug had been cleared from his blood but remained in his urine.
On the day of the fire and again two days later, Linda Stermer was interviewed by a detective with the sheriff's department and conveyed her version of events. She was also interviewed by private investigators hired by the insurance company for her homeowner's policy, and these interviews were recorded and transcribed. When speaking to the insurance investigators, Stermer was asked if she had any opinions as to what could have started the fire. In response to this, she said, "I feel like maybe—Todd yelled at me once during the day and told me that nobody else would ever have me and I just—I think maybe that he meant for both of us to—I don't think I was supposed to be here." (Trial Tr. vol. 2, R. 24-8 at PageID #1069–70.)
Stermer also told the investigators that Todd had an oil lamp and candles burning in the house, and that he would often have to bleed fuel from the furnace, which could explain how it got on the towel in the laundry (and perhaps on Todd as well). The insurance investigators tested two towels from the home's washing machine: both tested positive for gasoline.
On June 5, 2009—over two years after the fire—Stermer was arrested and charged with premeditated murder and with felony murder in the course of committing arson (both first-degree murder under Michigan law). See Mich. Comp. Laws § 750.316(1)(a)–(b). According to the prosecution, Stermer either sedated Todd or knocked him unconscious before dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire. And when Todd escaped from the fire, Stermer ran him over with her truck. On the other hand, the defense argued that the fire was either an accident or was intentionally set by Todd, and that Stermer accidentally struck Todd with her vehicle.
At trial, the story of Todd's death was presented to the jury. While Stermer did not testify, her version of events was relayed through her interviews with the insurance investigators, which were admitted as trial exhibits and large portions of which were read into the record.
Aside from the witnesses discussed above, several others testified in support of either the prosecution or defense theories of the case. Most notably, the prosecution called a fire investigator as an expert witness:
Detective Sergeant Scott Leroy, who was employed by the Michigan State Police Fire Investigation Unit, testified for the prosecution as an expert in the field of determining cause and origin of fires. He investigated the Stermer house fire. Detective Leroy concluded that the fire originated in the first-floor living room and was intentionally set. Detective Leroy based these conclusions on the speed of the fire, a comparison of areas with the most damage versus areas with the least damage, the time of day, and the fact that two adults were at home. He could not determine whether accelerants were present on the living room floor because the floor was consumed by the fire. A canine search team found no ignitable liquid residue in the home.
Stermer v. Warren , 360 F. Supp. 3d 639, 649 (E.D. Mich. 2018).
Todd's clothing tested positive for gasoline, but Linda's clothing did not. The fire expert concluded that the fire had been intentionally set and that Todd was at the center of the fire. Stermer's trial counsel did not call his own fire expert to rebut these conclusions.
Beyond this expert testimony, the prosecution called Kate Fox, a former friend of Linda. According to Fox, at some point before the fire, Linda told her that Todd was "physically and emotionally abusive, and that she had contacted a divorce attorney." Id. Linda also said she had spent years thinking about "how to get rid of" Todd, including possibly running him over with a car. Id. Perhaps most damningly, Fox testified that after the fire, Linda had called her one night and asked her to borrow a flashlight, because she needed to get into her house and remove a coffee cup containing a sedative before the police found it.
On cross-examination, Fox admitted that her relationship with Stermer fell apart shortly after the fire when Stermer switched to a different work shift, meaning they could no longer carpool. Fox viewed this as a betrayal, since the plan was for them to both change shifts together. She also admitted that they argued about a $5,000 debt Fox claimed Stermer owed her, which ultimately led to Fox being charged with assaulting Stermer. Finally, Fox testified to having mental health problems.
The prosecution also called Chris Williams, who testified about his affair with Stermer...
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