Williams v. Chrans
| Decision Date | 06 February 1995 |
| Docket Number | No. 95-1140,95-1140 |
| Parties | Hernando WILLIAMS, Petitioner-Appellant, v. James CHRANS and Neil F. Hartigan, Respondents-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Barry Levenstam, Michael T. Brody, Jerold S. Solovy, Jenner & Block, Sheldon Nagelberg, Chicago, IL, for petitioner-appellant.
Arleen C. Anderson, Asst. Atty. Gen., Chicago, IL for respondents-appellees.
Before CUDAHY, RIPPLE and MANION, Circuit Judges.
This is an appeal in a death case. Hernando Williams is under a sentence of death imposed by the courts of the State of Illinois. This is his third appeal to this court. See Williams v. Chrans, 945 F.2d 926 (7th Cir.1991), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 112 S.Ct. 3002, 120 L.Ed.2d 877 (1992) (Williams I ); Williams v. Chrans, 42 F.3d 1137 (7th Cir.1994) (Williams II ). We shall assume that the reader is familiar with our earlier opinions and therefore shall limit our discussion to the matters before us at the present time.
On January 6, 1995, Mr. Williams renewed in the district court his motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b). He submitted an affidavit describing a newly-completed study on jury confusion that, in his view, would address the infirmities in an earlier jury study criticized by this court in Free v. Peters, 12 F.3d 700, 706 (7th Cir.1993), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 433, 130 L.Ed.2d 345 (1994), and Gacy v. Welborn, 994 F.2d 305, 309-10 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 269, 126 L.Ed.2d 220 (1993). On the basis of this subsequent study, Mr. Williams contends that the death penalty instructions used in his case must be declared unconstitutional. On January 10, 1995, the district court issued a minute order that denied, without explanation, the motion for relief. On January 12, 1995, Mr. Williams filed his notice of appeal from that decision. On the same day, he filed a petition for a certificate of probable cause and a motion for stay of execution. Both of these requests were denied, without explanation, by the district court on January 12, 1995.
On January 19, 1995, Mr. Williams filed in this court a petition for a certificate of probable cause and a motion for a stay of execution. On January 23, the district court, vacating its earlier order, granted a certificate of probable cause. Although maintaining that the certificate of probable cause is a nullity, the State has filed, in the alternative, a motion for summary affirmance of the appeal. Mr. Williams has filed an opposition to that motion. We have been advised by the parties that the Supreme Court of Illinois has set an execution date of March 22, 1995. For the reasons set forth in the following paragraphs, we dismiss the petition for a certificate of probable cause filed in this court as moot. We affirm the judgment of the district court. We deny the motion for a stay of execution.
We turn first to the petition for a certificate of probable cause. We believe that Mr. Williams is correct in his assertion that the certificate of probable cause issued by the district court is valid. See Wilson v. O'Leary, 895 F.2d 378, 381-82 (7th Cir.1990).
Our next focus must be the motion for summary affirmance of the appeal. We set forth at some length in our last opinion the criteria that must govern the appropriateness of summary affirmance of an appeal in a capital case. 42 F.3d at 1138-39. We shall not repeat that discussion here. We therefore turn immediately to an examination of the contentions of Mr. Williams. Relying on the opinion of the court in Free, Mr. Williams submits that it is the duty of this court to examine de novo the newly-completed juror comprehension study, a study that he believes demonstrates "the unconstitutional incomprehensibility" of the instructions given at his sentencing hearing. In this regard, he relies upon Chief Judge Posner's remark that Free, 12 F.3d at 706 (citations omitted).
After careful examination of this court's decisions in Free and Gacy, we believe that those cases preclude further review of the issue tendered by Mr. Williams. We cannot escape the conclusion that those cases held, quite independently of their critique of Professor Zeisel's study, that consideration of this issue is barred by the holding of the Supreme Court of the United States in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989). We cannot accept Mr. Williams' contention that those cases invited the parties to undertake the sort of research contained in the new study as a permissible means to overcome the barrier which those panels saw in Teague. Indeed, in his dissenting opinion in Free, Judge Cudahy suggested the taking of further evidence to cure the infirmities in the Zeisel study noted by the majority. Free, 12 F.3d at 709 (Cudahy, J., dissenting). His view was not a...
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Williams v. Chrans
...112 S.Ct. 3002, 120 L.Ed.2d 877 (1992) (Williams I ); Williams v. Chrans, 42 F.3d 1137 (7th Cir.1994) (Williams II ); Williams v. Chrans, 50 F.3d 1356 (7th Cir.1995). The opinion of the Supreme Court of Illinois is People v. Williams, 97 Ill.2d 252, 73 Ill.Dec. 360, 454 N.E.2d 220 (1983), c......
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Brown v. Mesirow Stein Real Estate, Inc.
...that one panel of the Seventh Circuit cannot overrule another panel of the Seventh Circuit; the court agrees. See Williams v. Chrans, 50 F.3d 1356, 1358 (7th Cir.1995) ("[T]he members of this panel are precluded by the doctrines of stare decisis and precedent from taking a position differen......
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Calaff v. Capra
...court judge] of the authority to issue a CPC." Wilson v. O'Leary, 895 F.2d 378, 382 (7th Cir. 1990); see also Williams v. Chrans, 50 F.3d 1356, 1357 (7th Cir. 1995).The concern animating this rule is that the two courts might take duplicative action. However, that concern is not present her......