Thomas v. Davis

• Decision Date: 28 September 1999
• Docket Number: CA-97-10,No. 98-6824,98-6824
• Citation: 192 F.3d 445
• Parties: Page 445 192 F.3d 445 (4th Cir. 1999) LEON E. THOMAS, Petitioner-Appellee, v. WILLIAM DAVIS, Warden of Lee Correctional Institution; CHARLES MOLONY CONDON, Attorney General of the State of South Carolina, Respondents-Appellants. (
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 445

192 F.3d 445 (4th Cir. 1999)

LEON E. THOMAS, Petitioner-Appellee v WILLIAM DAVIS, Warden of Lee Correctional Institution; CHARLES MOLONY CONDON, Attorney General of the State of South Carolina, Respondents-Appellants.

No. 98-6824 (CA-97-1011-2-23).

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS, FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT.

Argued: January 25, 1999.

Decided: September 28, 1999.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina, at Charleston.

Patrick Michael Duffy, District Judge.

[Copyrighted Material Omitted] COUNSEL ARGUED: William Edgar Salter, III, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Columbia, South Carolina, for Appellants. Keir Michael Weyble, Columbia, South Carolina, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Charles M. Condon, Attorney General, John W. McIntosh, Chief Deputy Attorney General, Donald J. Zelenka, Assistant Deputy Attorney General, Columbia, South Carolina, for Appellants. John H. Blume, Columbia, South Carolina, for Appellee.

Before ERVIN,^* NIEMEYER, and KING, Circuit Judges.

Reversed by published opinion. Judge King wrote the opinion, in which Judge Niemeyer joined.

OPINION

KING, Circuit Judge:

William Davis, the warden of Lee Correctional Institute in Bishopville, South Carolina, and Charles Condon, the Attorney General of South Carolina, appeal the final judgment of the district court granting, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254, a writ of habeas corpus to prisoner Leon E. Thomas. Davis and Condon also appeal the district court's subsequent denial of their motion to alter or amend the judgment.

The district court's grant of relief, if sustained, requires that Thomas be resentenced on his 1991 state conviction for marijuana trafficking, and that the term of imprisonment imposed thereon not exceed ten years. Thomas was initially committed to state custody to serve a mandatory prison term of twenty-five years on his trafficking conviction; he remains incarcerated.

We conclude that Thomas's sentence was not imposed in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States. We therefore reverse the judgment below.

I.

A.

Thomas was convicted by a South Carolina jury in 1991 of trafficking in slightly more than ten pounds of marijuana, in contravention of the state's Controlled Substances Act (the Act). Section 44-53370 of the Act provides, in pertinent part:

(e) Any person who knowingly sells . . . delivers. . . or who is knowingly in actual or constructive possession . . . of:

(1) ten pounds or more of marijuana is guilty of a felony which is known as "trafficking in marijuana" and, upon conviction, must be punished as follows if the quantity involved is:

(a) ten pounds or more, but less than one hundred pounds:

1. for a first offense, a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than ten years[;] . . .

3. for a third or subsequent offense, a mandatory term of imprisonment of twenty-five years[.]

S.C. Code Ann. § 44-53-370(e)(1)(a) (West 1998 Supp.). Those convicted of trafficking in marijuana are ineligible for probation, and no part of their sentence may be suspended. Id.

Prior to 1991, Thomas had twice been convicted in state court of marijuana-related offenses. In 1982, he was convicted of possessing two and one-half pounds of marijuana with the intent to distribute it, and, in 1985, he was convicted of distributing approximately one pound. Of significance to this appeal is another provision of the Act, which addresses generally the effect of previous convictions on sentencing for subsequent controlled substance offenses:

An offense is considered a second or subsequent offense, if, prior to his conviction of the offense, the offender has at any time been convicted under this article or under any State or Federal statute relating to . . . marihuana . . . .

S.C. Code Ann. § 44-53-470 (Law. Co-op. 1985).

The trial court treated Thomas's prior convictions as predicate offenses within the meaning of Section 44-53-470, invoking the mandatory sentence of twenty-five years' imprisonment under Section 4453-370(e)(1)(a)(3). The court sentenced Thomas accordingly.

B.

In 1993, Thomas filed an application for post-conviction relief in the Court of Common Pleas of Richland County, South Carolina (the PCR court). That court, on October 26, 1994, ruled in Thomas's favor, holding that the general provisions of Section 44-53-470 did not bear on the proper interpretation of Section 44-53-370, which the court found to be a self-contained scheme.

To be susceptible to imprisonment for twenty-five years, the court reasoned, a person would have to be convicted of trafficking in ten pounds or more of marijuana on three separate occasions. Inasmuch as Thomas had not been twice previously

convicted of trafficking in the threshold amount, the PCR court decided that he should be re-sentenced as a first offender.

The court also noted:

At best, the statute must be viewed as ambiguous on this matter. . . . [A] state criminal statute violates the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution if that statute is not "sufficiently explicit to inform those who are subject to it what conduct on their part will render them liable to its penalties." Connally v. General Const. Co. , [269 U.S. 385, 391 (1926)] . . . . [T]he statute does not clearly put a person on notice as to the penalty applicable to the crime, a fundamental requirement of the Due Process Clause.

The PCR court's grant of relief, therefore, rested on alternative grounds: (1) a straightforward statutory construction ground; and (2) a "fair notice" ground, derived from constitutional principles of due process and based on the supposed ambiguity in the Act.

The State appealed the adverse ruling to the Supreme Court of South Carolina. In its petition for certiorari, the State framed the question presented as:

Whether the lower court erred in finding that the Respondent is entitled to be resentenced as a first offender under the trafficking in marijuana statute where the Respondent had prior convictions for possession with intent to distribute marijuana and distribution of marijuana at the time of his conviction for trafficking in marijuana?

Thomas's response restated the issue:

Did the post-conviction relief judge properly rule that the trial judge erred in imposing an enhanced sentence upon the respondent for his trafficking in marijuana conviction?

The parties' briefs focused on their respective views of the proper construction of the Act; neither side addressed the PCR court's alternative holding that the very existence of conflicting plausible interpretations afforded an independent basis for relief.

The Supreme Court of South Carolina unanimously reversed. The high court rejected the PCR court's interpretation of the Act, stating that

both statutes are part of the same general law and can be read together without any conflict . . . . The legislature could not have intended second or subsequent offenses under § 44-53-370(e)(1) to include only the offense of marijuana trafficking when there is a specific statute which defines second or subsequent offenses as any drug offense.

Thomas v. State, 465 S.E.2d 350, 352 (S.C. 1995).

C.

Having ultimately lost in the state courts, Thomas petitioned the district court for habeas relief on April 14, 1997, alleging the fair-notice claim as the sole ground in support thereof. ¹ As the named respondents, the warden and the Attorney General moved for summary judgment, and the matter was referred to a magistrate judge.

On September 8, 1997, the magistrate judge issued a Report and Recommendation that the petition be denied on the ground that, in the judge's view, the Supreme Court of South Carolina had ruled the fair-notice aspect of Thomas's claim to have been abandoned, and thus procedurally barred from consideration. To the extent that the federal courts are bound to respect the prerogative of state tribunals to fashion and interpret their own rules of procedure, the magistrate judge concluded, the fair-notice claim had been defaulted on federal review.

The district court, upon considering Thomas's objections to the Report and Recommendation, disagreed with the magistrate judge. In a carefully reasoned and ably crafted opinion, the district court determined that the Supreme Court of South Carolina had not dismissed Thomas's fair-notice claim as the result of his failure to properly present it, but had instead implicitly denied it on the merits, thus preserving the issue for review in the federal courts.

With regard to the substance of the claim, the district court determined that South Carolina's sentencing scheme for marijuana trafficking impinged on Thomas's constitutional right to due process, holding that the Act did not provide fair notice of the applicable penalties for its violation. The court therefore denied the respondents' motion for summary judgment, and it entered an order and judgment on March 16, 1998, granting the writ of habeas corpus. From that final order, and from the district court's subsequent denial of their motion to alter or amend the judgment, the warden and the Attorney General appeal.

II.

The respondents -now appellants -attack the district court's threshold determination that Thomas's fair-notice claim was adjudicated on the merits in the state habeas proceedings, asserting that the Supreme Court of South Carolina instead declined to consider the claim on the ground that it had not been properly preserved in accordance with state procedure. If the appellants are correct, then merits review of the claim may likewise be foreclosed in the federal courts, but only if the rule of procedure relied upon is determined to be an adequate and independent state-law ground for decision. See Yeatts v. Angelone, 166 F.3d 255, 260 (4th Cir.) (citing Harris v. Reed, 489 U.S. 255, 262 (1989)), cert. denied, 119 S. Ct. 1517 (1999).

A state rule of procedure is "adequate" if it is consistently or regularly applied. See Johnson v. Mississippi, ...