Strawhacker v. State

• Decision Date: 16 June 2022
• Docket Number: CR-21-623
• Citation: 2022 Ark. 134,645 S.W.3d 326
• Parties: Lonnie Dolphus STRAWHACKER, Appellant v. STATE of Arkansas, Appellee
• Court: Arkansas Supreme Court

2022 Ark. 134

645 S.W.3d 326

Lonnie Dolphus STRAWHACKER, Appellant

v.STATE of Arkansas, Appellee

No. CR-21-623

Supreme Court of Arkansas.

Opinion Delivered: June 16, 2022

Rehearing Denied July 21, 2022

Jeff Rosenzweig, for appellant.

Leslie Rutledge, Att'y Gen., by: Christian Harris, Ass't Att'y Gen., for appellee.

JOHN DAN KEMP, Chief Justice

Appellant Lonnie Strawhacker appeals the Washington County Circuit Court's order denying his petition for writ of error coram nobis and his petition for writ of habeas corpus. For reversal, Strawhacker argues that this court should (1) adopt "the tentative expansion" of the writ of error coram nobis advanced in Strawhacker v. State , 2016 Ark. 348, 500 S.W.3d 716, and (2) hold that the circuit court abused its discretion in denying coram nobis relief. We affirm.

I. Facts

This court provided a lengthy recitation of the facts in Strawhacker's direct appeal, Strawhacker v. State , 304 Ark. 726, 804 S.W.2d 720 (1991), and in Strawhacker v. State , 2016 Ark. 348, 500 S.W.3d 716 (granting his petition to reinvest jurisdiction with the circuit court to consider whether to grant coram nobis relief). The relevant facts are as follows. In the late evening of August 11, 1989, the female victim had visited two nightclubs, was intoxicated, and attempted to find her car. She was struck from behind and pushed into a ditch. A man put his hand over her mouth, attempted to choke her, and struck her several times in her face, head, and abdomen. He asked her to take off her clothes, and when she could not, he continued beating her. She was bleeding from her mouth and her nose, and her eyes were beginning to swell shut. The victim was raped by her attacker, and she estimated that the attacker stayed with her in the ditch for approximately five hours. Because it was dark and her eyes were swollen shut, she could not see her attacker's face. She and the attacker went to the victim's mobile home in a trailer park. Because she was in considerable pain, she got into bed and drifted into and out of consciousness. The attacker got into bed with her and was gone the next morning. The victim went to a neighbor's house to seek help and was taken to a hospital. Subsequently, the police developed Strawhacker as a suspect and conducted a voice-identification lineup. During the voice lineup, the victim identified Strawhacker's voice as that of her assailant.

At trial, the State presented numerous witnesses, including the victim. Among the State's witnesses, FBI supervisory special agent Michael Malone was admitted as an expert in the field of hair and fibers. During his nineteen-year tenure at the FBI, Malone had received training in hair and fiber analysis, worked on over 3500 cases, and testified as an expert over 350 times. Malone testified that he had examined the pubic hairs recovered from Strawhacker's jeans and the victim's bed sheets. Malone testified that the pubic hair found on Strawhacker's jeans was "absolutely indistinguishable" from the victim's pubic-hair sample. Malone further testified that the pubic hair found on the victim's bed was "absolutely indistinguishable" and "consistent with [the hair sample] coming from Mr. Strawhacker." Malone claimed that it would be "highly unlikely" that the pubic hair came from anyone other than the victim and that the probability of a false identification was one in five thousand. Additionally, Malone was called as the defense's only witness and testified that he had not performed any testing on latent fingerprints or blood found on a hair sample. After deliberations, the jury convicted Strawhacker of rape and first-degree battery, and he received a life sentence for rape and thirty years’ imprisonment for first-degree battery.

Strawhacker appealed the jury's convictions and sentences and did not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence. We affirmed on direct appeal in Strawhacker , 304 Ark. 726, 804 S.W.2d 720 (acknowledging that the rape victim had testified at trial and affirming four points, including the admissibility of photographs of the victim's injuries and the victim's identification of Strawhacker in a voice lineup). Strawhacker filed a petition for postconviction relief pursuant to Arkansas Rule of Criminal Procedure 36.4 (1990), which the circuit court denied. We affirmed the circuit court's order in Strawhacker v. State , CR-00-1417, 2002 WL 99142 (Ark. Jan. 24, 2002) (unpublished per curiam).

In 1996, the Department of Justice established a task force to review the performance of its FBI laboratory examiners in cases involving microscopic hair-comparison analysis. In September 2014, the Department sent a letter informing the Washington County Prosecuting Attorney that Malone's "testimony regarding microscopic hair comparison analysis contain[ed] erroneous statements." The Department further stated that Malone had "exceeded the limits of science" by stating that "the evidentiary hair could be associated with a single person to the exclusion of all others," by "assign[ing] to the positive association a statistical weight or probability ... that the questioned hair originated from a particular source," and by citing his experience in the laboratory making positive hair identifications. The Department further stated that it "took no position regarding the materiality of the error in this case." In a letter dated October 17, 2014, the Department notified Strawhacker that Malone's testimony "may have failed to meet professional standards." The letter stated that "[t]he prosecutor ... has advised the Department of Justice that Michael Malone's work was material to your conviction[.]" Because of the Department's disclosure, Strawhacker filed in this court a pro se petition for leave to proceed in the circuit court with a petition for writ of error coram nobis. In Strawhacker , 2016 Ark. 348, at 5–6, 500 S.W.3d at 719, we granted his petition to reinvest jurisdiction with the circuit court.

On December 19, 2016, Strawhacker filed a petition for writ of error coram nobis in the circuit court. He also filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus and a motion for access to evidence for testing. After much delay, the hair evidence was retrieved and sent to the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, but the lab was not able to obtain a DNA profile. At a hearing on October 11, 2021, it was stipulated that the lab could not obtain a DNA profile. At the conclusion of the hearing, the circuit court made the following rulings from the bench:

The Court has considered the pleadings filed by both the State and the defense, argument[s] of counsel today, and the record from the original trial, as well as the other two stipulated documents, which consisted of letters – Stipulated 3 consisted of letters from the Department of Justice and some court testimony. And then Stipulated 2 was the Crime Lab results.

....

Now, again, you take out Mr. Malone's testimony. He was the only witness for the defense. As I know the lawyers know, in a rape case, the testimony alone of the victim, if believed by the jury, is sufficient to convict someone of rape. There was more than this in this case. She – while it's true she couldn't identify him by sight, it is because her assailant beat her so bad that her eyes were swollen shut and she could not see. So she did do an I'm-sure identification of the voice and identified that voice as Mr. Strawhacker. She gave details of going back to her trailer, and when she woke up the next morning, he was gone. Mr. Fairchild, the next morning, testifies he finds Mr. Strawhacker right there outside the trailer park, and he looked like heck. I won't go over the description again, but he asked him, What happened? He goes, Oh, I got in a fight, but I don't remember with who. So in any event, then you have, again, Mr. – now, Mr. Krogman [Strawhacker's co-worker] – I'm sorry – is the one who picked [Strawhacker] up and took him to Springdale. In any event, then you have Mr. Fairchild [nightclub assistant manager of security] and his time frame as to when Mr. Strawhacker was last seen in a clean set of clothes and not bloody and scratched up and grassy and things of that nature.

The Court finds taking out the testimony of Mr. Malone does not in any way affect the testimony that was put on by the State's witnesses. The State's witnesses were not impeached to any great degree. Mr. Malone or Agent Malone, on the other ha[n]d, was at least impeached. He had to admit that, well, [the hair evidence] is not as good as a fingerprint and I can't say for sure that this is his and that it couldn't be someone else's. So Agent Malone was probably impeached – in my opinion, he was impeached more than any other witness. So I find that if you take him totally out of it, that even with him in it, the jury had impeachment evidence to consider. If you take him totally out of it, there was nothing, not another witness or any type of impeachment of the State's case.

And so the Court finds that Mr. Strawhacker has failed to meet his burden of proof that there is a reasonable possibility that the result would have been different, in other words, that there would have been an acquittal if the FBI or the Department of Justice's repudiation that came out 24 years later had come out before the trial.

That will be the order of the Court.

On October 13, 2021, the circuit court memorialized its bench rulings in an order denying Strawhacker's petition for writ of error coram nobis. Strawhacker now appeals the circuit court's denial and concedes that the inability to obtain new scientific evidence from the hairs at issue moots his habeas petition.

II. Expansion of the Writ of Error Coram Nobis

For his first point on appeal, Strawhacker argues that this court tentatively adopted an expansion of the writ of error coram nobis in Strawhacker , 2016 Ark. 348, 500 S.W.3d 716. Specifically, Strawhacker contends that "as a threshold matter, this Court should formally recognize as a fifth ground for error coram...