U.S. ex rel. Mahaffey v. Peters, 95 C 6623.

• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois
• Citation: U.S. ex rel. Mahaffey v. Peters, 978 F.Supp. 762 (N.D. Ill. 1997)
• Decision Date: 05 September 1997
• Docket Number: No. 95 C 6623.,95 C 6623.
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Jerry MAHAFFEY, Plaintiff, v. Howard PETERS, III, Defendant.
• Writing for the Court: Zagel

Page 762

978 F.Supp. 762

UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Jerry MAHAFFEY, Plaintiff, v. Howard PETERS, III, Defendant.

No. 95 C 6623.

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division.

September 5, 1997.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Alan Michael Freedman, Freedman & Bornstein, Chicago, IL, Gary O. Prichard, U.S. E.P.A., Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.

Arleen C. Anderson, Illinois Attorney General's Office, Criminal Appeals Div., Chicago, IL, Sally Louise Dilgart, Judy L. Deangelis, Cook County State's Attorney, Chicago, IL, for Defendant.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

ZAGEL, District Judge.

Jerry Mahaffey and his brother, Reginald invaded the Pueschel home, murdered a husband and a wife and tried hard to murder their eleven-year-old son. This was found by a jury which also decided that he deserved to die for what he had done, and he was sentenced to death. After unsuccessful challenges to the sentence in state court, he seeks to overturn the judgment in federal court. With neither fact nor law to justify his federal claims, he cannot prevail. I deny his petition for a writ of habeas corpus and allow the law to proceed on its stem course.

The crimes were discovered by the father of Jo Ellen Pueschel who found her dead body and that of her husband, Dean Pueschel in their home. He first found his severely beaten grandson, Richard wandering near the alley by the home. The eleven-year-old Richard swore that in the night he awoke to find himself in a headlock, being told by two separate voices to "shut up and be cool." He could not remember whether he fell asleep or was knocked out, but he did later wake and, in a daze, walked into his kitchen, where he was told to stay on the floor next to his mother. He did so, and saw his mother being struck.

Missing from the home were a video recorder, videotapes, an Atari game console, seven game cartridges, several items of the Pueschel's jewelry, along with a .357 magnum revolver and a shot gun. Pueschel's red Camaro was missing as well.

The Pueschel's Camaro was recovered on August 30, 1983 in a parking lot at 2245 West Lake Street in the Henry Homer projects.

On September 2, Jerry Mahaffey's brother, Cedric apparently made contact with the police and made statements which led to the arrest of Jerry and Reginald Mahaffey and the recovery from Jerry's residence of the video recorder, the Atari game and cartridges. In Reginald's residence was found the .357 revolver and 24 pieces of jewelry. At arrest, Reginald was wearing Dean Pueschel's ring and carrying his watch.

Both defendants confessed to an Assistant State's Attorney, and both confessions were read in full to the jury. Reginald's confession was ultimately admissible against Jerry Mahaffey because Reginald testified on his own behalf.

Jerry Mahaffey told the prosecutor that he and Reginald had discussed committing a burglary on the north side and drove to a clothing store at Howard Street and Western Avenue. Jerry saw a "paddy wagon" in an alley, so Reginald drove around the block and parked in a lot. After deciding not to burglarize the store, they were unable to restart their van. They walked away from it and saw an open window leading into a bathroom. They climbed through the window into the bathroom. They went into the "grown-ups' room" and the "boy's room" and then to the kitchen where Reginald picked up a knife. Jerry wiped everything Reginald touched "for not finding fingerprints." They went to the boy's room, and Jerry tried to strangle him with a towel, then they put a pillow over his head, and Reginald strangled him four to five times. The boy kept struggling, and Jerry hit him on the head with a baseball bat he found in the room.

The brothers Mahaffey each took a bat from the boy's room, went to the other room and proceeded to hit the man on the head with the bats. Reginald took the woman to the living room where he raped her and forced fellatio. Jerry went into the room where the woman was present but returned to the man's room where the man was pulling a pistol out. Jerry hit the man with the baseball bat and then returned to the living room. Reginald asked the woman where there were other guns, and she told them. They went to get them, two could not be removed from a locked rack, but Reginald did get a shotgun. The man started moving again, so Reginald stabbed him four or five times in the chest and the side.

Reginald asked the woman for the keys to the car and took her with him to the car so she could disarm the alarm. He took her back to the house, and Jerry loaded their stolen goods in the car. During his statement, Jerry Mahaffey identified as the stolen items those things recovered from his and his brother's residences.

After loading up the car, Jerry went back to the house and told the woman to lie down. The boy was now with her saying, "Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma." Reginald struck her on the head several times with the pistol which blows killed her.

The brothers then drove the car to Reginald's house where they left their stolen goods. After this, they abandoned the car in the Henry Homer projects.¹

No prints of either of the brothers were found at the crime scene. There was physical evidence of intercourse, but no sign of vaginal trauma. The sperm was untypable.

The survivor of this offense could not remember what else happened, but in court he identified (at a 99% level of certainty) Jerry Mahaffey and Reginald Mahaffey as the two men in his home that night of August 28-29, 1983. Richard Pueschel conceded that he had been unable to identify either Mahaffey in a lineup conducted when he was being hospitalized for his wounds. He denied having seen photos of the Mahaffeys in the papers. He said he had only described the assailants, one as 5'10" or 5'11", 160 to 180 pounds, medium Afro, possibly scarred on his left cheek, and the other as 5'9" or 5'10", 150 to 170 pounds, skinny, short Afro and short moustache. An investigating detective had a different description in his reports and said his description was based on a canvass of residents in the Pueschel's apartment building. The description said one assailant was 25-30 years of age, 6'2", 210 pounds, scraggly beard, white shirt, black male, and the other assailant was 25-30 years of age, 5'4"-5'6", 125 pounds, dark clothing and a light-complected black or Latino.

The brothers Mahaffey were tried jointly. At trial, Jerry Mahaffey defended on grounds of coercion of the confession and the reasonable doubt arising from the absence of physical evidence and any identification other than that of the young, injured boy.

Reginald Mahaffey took the witness stand, denied his guilt, denied that any stolen property had been removed from his home, but then stated that he had purchased the stolen property from a man who visited his apartment shortly before the arrest. He also offered the theory that the real culprit was Cedric Mahaffey.

The police did not arrest Cedric Mahaffey despite his knowledge of unpublished details of the crimes and the fact that he was a light-complected black. Cedric Mahaffey's prints were never compared to the ones found at the crime scene.²

The jury convicted both men of all charges except that it acquitted Reginald of deviate sexual assault.³ At the sentencing hearing, members of Jerry Mahaffey's family testified, and so did Mahaffey who denied committing the crime. His counsel argued that prison was so bad that life in prison was enough punishment, that no one should be executed and that the crime was not planned in advance. The jury thought the death sentence was called for under Illinois law, and the trial judge decided to sentence Jerry Mahaffey to death.

This habeas corpus proceeding presents an attack on the conviction and on the death penalty. The principal theme is a customary one of incompetency of counsel but some trial errors are raised as well and these involve some matters to which defense counsel did object at trial.

The defendant's arguments here are ably drafted, but they fail primarily because they are based on a misreading of the law, a misreading of trial counsel's position and the defense of it he was first asked to make several years after the trial and a misreading of the trial record. The principal arguments depend on a narrow focus on specific details combined with a relentless ignoring of the factual context of the case as a whole.

The recitation of the prior legal challenges to conviction and sentence may be tedious but what has gone before counts in habeas corpus law.

On automatic appeal, defendant raised the claims of (i) racially discriminatory jury selection, (ii) improper exclusion of one juror for her death penalty views, (iii) failing to notify defense counsel that the young boy who survived the attack had told prosecutors he could identify the killers in open court, (iv) wrongly refusing to grant a mistrial or a new sentencing jury after the mother of Jo Ellen Pueschel rose during trial to ask Reginald Mahaffey if he killed her daughter, (v) improperly admitting a medical record to prove the absence of coercion leading to a confession, (vi) failure to prove the corpus delicti, (vii) improperly conducting a joint death penalty hearing, (viii) improper closing arguments which undermined the presumption of innocence, appealed to fear, misstated the law and minimized the jury's sense of responsibility, (ix) the failure to prove one aggravation factor, (x) the refusal to instruct the jury that the alternative to death was natural life imprisonment, (xi) excessiveness of the death penalty, (xii) the absence of enough information for an adequate appellate review of the sentence, and (xiii) various flaws in death penalty procedures in Illinois, to wit, prosecutorial discretion, the absence of a burden to disprove mitigating circumstances, the inability to rely purely on sympathy and mercy and that blacks are more likely than whites to receive the death penalty.⁴

In the state...