Williams v. Wainwright, 83-8169-CIV-JAG.
| Decision Date | 12 January 1984 |
| Docket Number | No. 83-8169-CIV-JAG.,83-8169-CIV-JAG. |
| Citation | 577 F. Supp. 894 |
| Parties | Henry WILLIAMS, Petitioner, v. Louie L. WAINWRIGHT, Respondent. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of Florida |
Lydia Valenti, West Palm Beach, Fla., for State, respondent.
Richard Jorandby, West Palm Beach, Fla., for petitioner.
THIS CAUSE arises out of the conviction of Petitioner, Henry Williams, on two counts of selling cocaine.1 At the outset of the trial, Petitioner moved to sever the two counts, claiming they "were neither based on the same act or transaction, nor ... connected acts or transactions." Initial Brief of Appellant, at 2 (filed ca. Feb. 11, 1981). After a hearing on the issue, the trial court denied this motion, and the Petitioner's conviction followed after a trial on the merits.
A subsequent appeal to Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal raised but one issue: "Whether the trial court erred in denying a severance of offenses." Id. at 3. Both that appeal, and a subsequent petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of Florida, proved unsuccessful; consequently, Petitioner filed a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to section 2254 of Title 28, United States Code.
The issue presented in the habeas petition, unlike that advanced before the Fourth District Court of Appeal, raises for the first time a federal constitutional question: "Whether petitioner was denied due process of law where the Florida state courts denied severance of drug sale counts on the theory that they were part of an `ongoing investigation.' Memorandum in Support of Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, at 1 (filed Apr. 5, 1983). The Magistrate reviewed a host of legal documents, and recommended that "the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus be dismissed without prejudice to provide the petitioner with an opportunity to exhaust his available state remedies." Review and Recommendation, at 7 (filed Oct. 28, 1983).
Pursuant to the review procedures spelled out in section 2254(a),2 this Court must now review de novo the Magistrate's Recommendation and Petitioner's objections thereto in order to determine the fate of the petition for writ of habeas corpus. The dispositive issue here is whether Petitioner has exhausted his available state remedies. Finding that he has not, the Court dismisses the petition without prejudice.
"Federal habeas corpus jurisdiction has been described as an `untidy area' of the law, Sunal v. Large, 332 U.S. 174, 184, 67 S.Ct. 1588, 1593, 91 L.Ed. 1982 (1947) (Frankfurter, J. dissenting), presenting `many procedural problems which are not easy of solution,' Price v. Johnson, 334 U.S. 266, 269, 68 S.Ct. 1049, 1052, 92 L.Ed. 1356 (1948)." Daye v. Attorney General of State of New York, 696 F.2d 186, 197 (2d Cir.1982) (en banc). Petitioner's habeas corpus petition is no exception, requiring the Court to interpret and apply a confused area of the law. Although federal law is clear that a habeas petitioner must exhaust his state remedies before seeking relief from the district court, 28 U.S.C.A. §§ 2254(b), (c) (1977),3 the law is substantially less clear as to when a habeas petitioner has satisfied this requirement.
The Supreme Court of the United States established a litmus test for determining when a petitioner has exhausted the available state remedies in Picard v. Connor, 404 U.S. 270, 92 S.Ct. 509, 30 L.Ed.2d 438 (1970). There Justice Brennan explained that before proceeding to the federal district court, the habeas petitioner must provide the state court with a "fair opportunity" to review the constitutional claim by presenting its "substantial equivalent" to the state court. Id. at 276-77, 92 S.Ct. at 512-13.
Trouble began when the courts attempted to define what constituted the "substance" of a federal habeas corpus claim. At one extreme, the Supreme Court observed that "it is not enough that all facts necessary to support the federal claim are before the state courts, or that a somewhat similar state-law claim was made." Anderson v. Harless, ___ U.S. ___, 103 S.Ct. 276, 277, 74 L.Ed.2d 3 (1982). At the other extreme, however, the petitioner need not "cite `book and verse on the federal constitution.'" Picard, 404 U.S. at 278, 92 S.Ct. at 513. The Court has not often attempted to give meaning to the broad spectrum between these extremes, and so it has been left to the circuit courts to give "substance" to the exhaustion doctrine.4
Petitioner here asserts that he sufficiently alerted the state courts to his constitutional claim by methods two through four above. This Court's task is to determine whether Petitioner's claim is correct.
Petitioner first argues that he raised a due process issue before Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal by citing to state cases that allegedly employed constitutional analysis in like fact situations. The Court has reviewed each of these cases, and finds that either no federal issue was in fact ever raised, e.g., Paul v. State, 385 So.2d 1371 (Fla.1980) (); Macklin v. State, 395 So.2d 1219 (Fla. 3d DCA 1981); Panzavecchia v. State, 311 So.2d 782 (Fla. 3d DCA 1975), or the constitutional claim asserted in the cited case was not the same as the federal claim on which habeas corpus relief is sought, e.g., Williams v. State, 110 So.2d 654 (Fla.1959) ().
The principal case relied on by Petitioner in support of his position is Paul v. State, 385 So.2d 1371 (Fla.1980). Paul addressed the propriety of consolidating a defendant's trial for sexual offenses committed on separate dates. The supreme court, adopting in part the dissenting appellate opinion of Judge Smith,5 id. at 1372, held that the pretrial consolidation of the alleged sexual offenses was improper because Rule 3.151 of the Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibits the consolidation of similar offenses which are unrelated in terms of time or sequence. Petitioner maintains that the citation in Paul to a federal case that applied due process analysis in resolving a challenge to the trial court's joinder of offenses, 365 So.2d at 1067 (citing United States v. Foutz, 540 F.2d 733, 737 (4th Cir.1976)), sufficiently alerted the Fourth District Court of Appeal to his own constitutional claim.
The suggestion that a habeas petitioner could satisfy the exhaustion requirement by citing a case within a cited case threatens to make a mockery of the exhaustion doctrine. Petitioner's interpretation of the exhaustion requirement places the burden on the reviewing court, and not on the defendant, to determine and apply the relevant constitutional principles; it all but obliterates the requirement set forth in Picard that a habeas petitioner present the state court with both the factual and legal premises of the claim he asserts in federal court.
The Supreme Court of the United States indicated that it will not tolerate such a misuse of the petition for habeas corpus relief in Anderson v. Harless, ___ U.S. ___, 103 S.Ct. 276, 74 L.Ed.2d 3 (1983). The petitioner in Harless had filed his writ of habeas corpus after a jury found him guilty of first degree murder. The petition alleged, inter alia, that the trial court's instruction on malice was unconstitutional. After finding that the petitioner had satisfied the exhaustion requirements of section 2254, the district court held the trial court's jury instruction unconstitutional as "inconsistent with the presumption of innocence." ___ U.S. at ___, 103 S.Ct. at 277. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed, reasoning in part that the petitioner had exhausted available state remedies because he had presented to the appellate court the facts on which he based his federal claim, and because his brief had cited a state court decision "predicated solely on state law in which no federal issues were decided, but in which the defendant had argued broadly that failure to properly instruct a jury violates the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments." Id.
The Supreme Court of the United States reversed, holding that the habeas petitioner did not alert the state courts to his due process challenge simply by citing in his brief to a decision predicated solely on state law, in which the defendant in the cited case raised, but the court did not consider, a similar federal claim. The Court reasoned first, that although the defendant in the cited case had argued in federal constitutional terms, the state court had decided no federal issues and had rested its decision solely on state law; and second, the constitutional claim advanced by the defendant in the cited case was not the same as the federal claim on which federal habeas relief was sought in Harless. ___ U.S. ___, 103 S.Ct. at 278. The Court's language is clear on the point:
We doubt that a defendant's citation to a state-court decision predicated solely on state law ordinarily will be sufficient to fairly apprise a reviewing court of a potential federal claim merely because the...
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Petrucelli v. Coombe, 915
... ... , the court said, would "threaten[ ] to make a mockery of the exhaustion doctrine." Williams v. Wainwright, 577 F.Supp. 894, 897 (S.D.Fla.1984) ... We agree. Petrucelli cited ... ...