Woodward v. Williams

• Citation: 263 F.3d 1135
• Decision Date: 17 August 2001
• Docket Number: No. 00-2093,00-2093
• Parties: (10th Cir. 2001) DAVID WOODWARD, Petitioner-Appellant, v. JOE WILLIAMS, Warden, Central New Mexico Correctional Facility, Respondent-Appellee
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Tenth Circuit

Page 1135

263 F.3d 1135 (10th Cir. 2001)

DAVID WOODWARD, Petitioner-Appellant, v. JOE WILLIAMS, Warden, Central New Mexico Correctional Facility, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 00-2093

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS TENTH CIRCUIT

August 17, 2001

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico. (D.C. No. CIV-97-465-BB/RPL) [Copyrighted Material Omitted] Richard A. Winterbottom, Assistant Federal Public Defender, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Petitioner-Appellant.

Patricia A. Gandert, Assistant Attorney General, State of New Mexico (Patricia A. Madrid, Attorney General, State of New Mexico, with her on the briefs), Santa Fe, New Mexico, for Respondent-Appellee.

Before EBEL and HENRY, Circuit Judges, and ROGERS,^* Senior District Judge.

EBEL, Circuit Judge.

David Woodward was convicted of murdering his wife. The district court denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. There are two issues raised in this appeal. We affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand for further proceedings.

Woodward challenges, under the Confrontation Clause, the trial court's admission of hearsay testimony from two witnesses that, before she was murdered, Woodward's wife told them, "He [Woodward] is going to kill me." The New Mexico Supreme Court found that these statements were excited utterances. The federal habeas court held they were not excited utterances because they were statements of belief rather than of fact, but found the admission of the testimony harmless. We agree with the New Mexico Supreme Court that the statements were excited utterances. Because this is a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule, admission of the testimony did not violate Woodward's rights under the Confrontation Clause.

The district court allowed Woodward to amend his habeas petition to add sixteen new issues that he had exhausted in a separate state habeas proceeding. The court later found these issues barred under the one-year statute of limitations applicable to federal habeas proceedings. Although pursuant to Duncan v. Walker, 121 S. Ct. 2120 (2001), Woodward's federal habeas petition did not toll this statute of limitations, we nevertheless remand for the district court to address one of the issues on the merits and determine whether the statute of limitations should be equitably tolled.

BACKGROUND

Deborah Woodward drowned in her bathtub after being poisoned with ether. David Woodward, Deborah's husband, was charged with the murder. Deborah had filed for divorce, but Woodward continued to spend weekends at their house (while Deborah was away) to visit their children. Evidence was introduced at trial that Woodward had talked about killing someone with ether, had stated on the day of her death that Deborah would be found dead in her bathtub, and had confessed to killing his wife, although the witness on the last point recanted at trial. A jury found Woodward guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated burglary, and battery.

At trial, two witnesses testified, over objection, that Deborah had stated Woodward would kill her.¹ The statements arose out of an incident that occurred on the date Deborah filed for divorce. Woodward had shown up at Deborah's parents' house, where Deborah and their children were staying, and he became angry when he learned that Deborah had obtained a restraining order against him. Deborah's father, who was also in the house that day, testified that when he opened the door to admit Woodward, he gave Woodward a copy of the restraining order and asked him to leave: "He [Woodward] gave the door a shove and he knocked me down in the hall. . . . I wrestled him down and he got away and when he went through the kitchen, he pulled the phone out of the wall and he went into the den and he took the boys, who were crying, and he went out through the garage." Deborah's father tried to stop Woodward with an unloaded gun. During this event, Deborah was hiding in the house.

Zelda Maggart, Deborah's mother, who was in the house and could see Deborah, described hearing the noise of the confrontation. Deborah ran over to the house of Benjamin Butler, a neighbor. Butler testified that Deborah knocked loudly on his door. When his wife opened the door, Deborah ran in, asked him to lock the door, and fell down on the couch in a fetal position, crying. According to Butler, she said, "He is going to kill me." Maggart came in about a minute later. When she arrived, Deborah was curled up on the sofa, saying, "He is going to kill me."

The trial court admitted the statements made by Deborah to Butler and Maggart under the excited-utterance hearsay exception. On direct appeal to the New Mexico Supreme Court, Woodward argued that this testimony should not have been admitted. State v. Woodward, 908 P.2d 231, 234 (N.M. 1995). The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that Deborah's statements to Butler and Maggart were admissible as an excited utterance. Id. at 234-35. Although the parties agree that Woodward also raised a Confrontation Clause argument with regard to this testimony, the New Mexico Supreme Court did not separately address the issue.

Woodward then filed a petition for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. 2254. A magistrate judge recommended finding that the admission of Butler's and Maggart's testimony violated Woodward's Confrontation Clause rights, but that the error was harmless. The district court adopted this recommendation.

Because Woodward's state conviction became final before April 24, 1996, the one-year statute of limitations on his federal habeas action, 28 U.S.C. 2244(d), began to run on April 24, 1996. United States v. Simmonds, 111 F.3d 737, 746 (10th Cir. 1997). Woodward filed his federal habeas petition on April 4, 1997, twenty days before the one-year statute of limitations ran. On April 9, 1997, he filed a state habeas petition raising sixteen more issues. That petition was denied, and the New Mexico Supreme Court denied certiorari on January 26, 1998. Thirty-eight days later, on March 5, 1998, Woodward filed a motion to amend his federal habeas petition to add the sixteen new issues raised in his state habeas petition. The magistrate judge granted the motion to amend. Upon reviewing the merits of the amended habeas petition, however, the magistrate judge recommended finding that the new issues were barred by the statute of limitations. The district court adopted this recommendation.

The district court granted a certificate of appealability (COA) on "[w]hether the violations of Petitioner's Confrontation Clause rights were harmless error under Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619 (1993)." We granted a COA on a second issue: "Were the claims petitioner was permitted to add by amendment properly dismissed thereafter as untimely under 2244(d)?" These two issues have been fully briefed.

The district court had jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 2254. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 1291 over the issues for which a COA has been granted. 28 U.S.C. 2253(c)(1)(A).

DISCUSSION

I. Confrontation Clause

The state asserts that the district court was incorrect to find that admission of Butler's and Maggart's testimony violated the Confrontation Clause.² The Sixth Amendment provides that a defendant has the right "to be confronted with witnesses against him." Hearsay evidence does not violate the Confrontation Clause if (1) the declarant is unavailable at trial and (2) the statement bears adequate "indicia of reliability." Idaho v. Wright, 497 U.S. 805, 814-15 (1990). "Reliability can be inferred without more in a case where the evidence falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception. In other cases, the evidence must be excluded, at least absent a showing of particularized guarantees of trustworthiness." Id. at 815. Here, Deborah was unavailable at trial because she was dead. The state asserts that her statements to Butler and Maggart fall within the "excited utterance" exception (also called a "spontaneous declaration") to the hearsay rule. That exception is firmly rooted. White v. Illinois, 502 U.S. 346, 355 n.8 (1992). The New Mexico Supreme Court found that this testimony fell within the state's excited utterance exception. Woodward, 908 P.2d at 234-35.

We may not grant habeas relief for a claim adjudicated on the merits in a state court proceeding unless the state decision was "contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States" or "was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts." 28 U.S.C. 2254(d). In this case, the New Mexico Supreme Court found the testimony of Butler and Maggart admissible under a state-law hearsay exception, but did not explicitly consider the federal constitutional question that confronts us. In such a situation, "we review a state court decision by assessing whether it is reasonably supported by the record and whether its legal analysis is constitutionally sound." Paxton v. Ward, 199 F.3d 1197, 1209 (10th Cir. 1999). We review de novo the federal district court's legal analysis of the state court decisions, and we review for clear error any factual findings by the federal district court. Valdez v. Ward, 219 F.3d 1222, 1230 (10th Cir. 2000).

The New Mexico Supreme Court correctly found that Deborah's statements to Butler and Maggart fall within the excited-utterance exception. This exception requires that (1) there was a startling event; (2) the statement was made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement from this event; and (3) the statement related to this event. E.g., 6 Wigmore on Evidence 1750, at 202-03, 222 (James H. Chadbourn rev., 1976 ed.); see also Paxton, 199 F.3d at 1209 (recognizing these elements for Confrontation Clause purposes). This is the same legal standard the New Mexico Supreme Court applied. See Woodward, 908 P.2d at 234. Its legal analysis is therefore constitutionally sound.

The New Mexico Supreme Court's findings that all three...