Wynne v. Renico , 606 F.3d 867 ( 2010 )

SUTTON, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which REEVES, D. J., joined. MARTIN, J. (pp. 872-75), delivered a separate opinion concurring in the reasoning and conclusion of the lead opinion.

OPINION

SUTTON, Circuit Judge.

A jury convicted Scott Wynne of murdering his neighbor, Philip Timmerman, and the trial court sentenced him to life in prison. Unable to obtain relief from the state courts, Wynne petitioned the federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus. The district court granted the writ, holding that the state courts denied Wynne his constitutional right to present a complete defense when it refused under state evidentiary rules to admit propensity evidence designed to show that someone else — namely, the prosecution’s key witness — committed the murder. We reverse.

I.

On May 18, 1995, Timmerman was shot to death while working on his farm. No eyewitnesses to the shooting emerged, but several pieces of physical evidence linked Wynne to the crime. Ballistics evidence identified Wynne’s .45 caliber pistol as the murder weapon. Wynne’s fingerprint appeared on the weapon’s ammunition magazine. And footprints at the crime scene matched boots found in Wynne’s house. Wynne also had a motive. Three days after the shooting, Wynne’s friend Mark Peckham contacted the police, telling them that he had heard Wynne say he wanted to kill Timmerman on several occasions, apparently because he thought Timmerman’s long-term lease on the Wynne family farm would terminate upon Timmerman’s death. Wynne was so frustrated about his land dispute with Timmerman, Peckham said, that he spoke with Peckham ten to thirty times about murdering Timmerman, sometimes in conversations that turned into detailed descriptions of how he would carry out the crime.

In October 1995, Wynne stood trial for Timmerman’s murder. As part of his defense, Wynne alleged that Peckham had killed Timmerman. The trial court allowed Wynne to introduce the following evidence to support this theory: Peckham wanted to frame him to retaliate for various wrongs, including Wynne’s purported firing of Peckham five months before the murder; Peckham acknowledged he had fired some of Wynne’s guns in the past and knew where Wynne kept most of his guns, including the .45 caliber murder weapon; Peckham told an investigator he was “really pissed” at Wynne because Wynne “had everything given to him and never returned anything to [his] family,” App’x at 2086; and Peckham’s insurance agent testified that Peckham had told him at least three or four times in the week after Wynne’s arrest that Peckham was “going to put [Wynne] away,” id. at 2180.

The trial court, however, drew the line at evidence directed only to Peckham’s bad character. The court excluded testimony by Peckham’s former girlfriend that, eight years before the murder when she was in middle school, he had threatened to cut off the fingers of a classmate who touched her breasts. It excluded her testimony that, several years earlier, Peckham had abused her and threatened to kill her and that Peckham’s trailer mysteriously burned down within hours of their break-up. It excluded testimony that, after a failed suicide attempt five years earlier, Peckham declined psychologically, becoming “passive aggressive” and intent on exacting revenge in secretive ways. Id. at 1952. And it excluded evidence of Peekham’s alleged admission to a co-worker several months before the murder that he had “done something so bad in his past that if the police ever found out about it he would go to prison for life.” Id. at 2070.

The trial court also excluded evidence about Peckham’s apparent interest in women’s underwear. At some point during the trial, Wynne’s investigator discovered a blue bag in Wynne’s house, which contained a boot with tread that matched the footprints found at the crime scene. The defense did not mention until several days after delivering the bag to the court that it found a black camisole near the bag. With this evidence, the defense sought to link Peckham to the bag via his apparent underwear fascination, but the court would not allow it.

A jury convicted Wynne of murder, and the trial court sentenced him to life in prison. See People v. Wynne, No. 192512, 1999 WL 33328893, at *1 (Mich.Ct.App. Dec. 3, 1999). After failing to obtain relief in the state courts, Wynne filed a petition for a writ of federal habeas corpus in June 2001, arguing that the trial court violated his constitutional right to present a complete defense by excluding the Peckham evidence. In September 2003, the district court granted the writ. See 279 F.Supp.2d. 866 (E.D.Mich.). After the State filed a notice of appeal, both parties alerted the district court that it had premised part of its ruling on several factual inaccuracies in Wynne’s pleadings, which the Michigan Attorney General’s Office had failed to notice. At Wynne’s request, we remanded the case to the district court to take a second look at the case, including the new light cast on it by the revised characterizations of the evidence. In January 2009, the district court issued a supplemental opinion, which also granted the writ but revised its reasons for doing so. See 595 F.Supp.2d. 775.

II.

Although Wynne filed his habeas petition after the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 went into effect, see Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U.S. 320, 326, 117 S.Ct. 2059, 138 L.Ed.2d 481 (1997), we give fresh review to his federal claim because the state courts addressed only his state law grounds for relief, see Wynne, 1999 WL 33328893, at *1, which means they did not “adjudicate[ ]” the federal claim “on the merits,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d); see Maples v. Stegall, 340 F.3d 433, 436 (6th Cir.2003) (“Where, as here, the state court did not assess the merits of a claim properly raised in a habeas petition, the deference due under AEDPA does not apply.”). The State does not argue that Wynne has failed to exhaust his federal claim in the state courts or that a procedural bar otherwise applies to this claim.

The Constitution guarantees “a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense,” Crane v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 683, 690, 106 S.Ct. 2142, 90 L.Ed.2d 636 (1986) (quotation marks omitted), but “not an unlimited right to ride roughshod over reasonable evidentiary restrictions,” Rockwell v. Yukins, 341 F.3d 507, 512 (6th Cir.2003) (en banc). A defendant must “comply with established rules of procedure and evidence designed to assure both fairness and reliability in the ascertainment of guilt and innocence.” Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 302, 93 S.Ct. 1038, 35 L.Ed.2d 297 (1973). The right to present a complete defense — including the third-party culpability defense raised here — thus does not mean that a defendant may introduce whatever evidence he wishes, only that any state-law evidentiary restrictions cannot be “arbitrary” or “disproportionate to the purposes they are designed to serve.” United States v. Scheffer, 523 U.S. 303, 308, 118 S.Ct. 1261, 140 L.Ed.2d 413 (1998) (quotation marks omitted).

The question here, then, is not whether the Michigan courts properly construed one of the State’s evidentiary rules, namely Evidence Rule 404(b)’s prohibition against introducing character evidence to show that an individual acted consistently with the evidence. It is whether the state courts’ construction of their evidentiary rule — a matter for them, not for us, to decide — violates the Sixth Amendment right to present a complete defense.

Unfortunately for Wynne, we already have resolved the point. In United States v. Lucas, 357 F.3d 599 (6th Cir.2004), the defendant tried to introduce propensity evidence — a previous conviction for cocaine possession — to prove that a third party, not the defendant, committed a drug crime. Id. at 604. Relying on Federal Rule 404(b), which likewise bars evidence about a person’s character “in order to show action in conformity therewith,” the district court excluded the evidence. In affirming, we first explained that Federal Rule 404(b) applies to all propensity evidence, whether used to show that the defendant or another individual acted in conformity with their prior misconduct. Id. at 606. We then rejected Lucas’ constitutional argument. The Sixth Amendment right to present “a complete defense,” we explained, “does not imply a right to offer evidence that is otherwise inadmissible under the standard rules of evidence.” Id. And “[t]he exclusion of [the third party’s] prior conviction,” we explained, “did not violate Lucas’s constitutional right to present a defense,” because “Lucas was able to explore her theory that [another individual] was in fact the culprit” through other evidence. Id. at 606-07.

What was true in Lucas is true today. Just as Federal Rule 404(b) permissibly limited Lucas’s right to introduce propensity evidence directed toward a third party, so the same kind of state law evidentiary rule — indeed essentially the same rule, see Mich. R. Evid. 404(b) — permissibly limited Wynne’s right to introduce propensity evidence about Peckham. And just as this rule did not bar Lucas from introducing other evidence to support this defense, so the same was true for Wynne, who introduced considerable non-propensity-based evidence in support of the Peckham-did-it defense. The court, for example, allowed Wynne to introduce the following: Peck-ham wanted to frame Wynne to retaliate for various wrongs, including Wynne’s purported firing of Peckham five months before the murder; Peckham acknowledged he had fired some of Wynne’s guns in the past and knew where Wynne kept most of his guns, including the .45 caliber murder weapon; Peckham told an investigator he was “really pissed” at Wynne because Wynne “had everything given to him and never returned anything to [his] family,” App’x at 2086; and Peckham’s insurance agent testified that Peckham had told him at least three or four times in the week after Wynne’s arrest that Peckham was “going to put [Wynne] away,” id. at 2180. The state trial court, in short, permitted Wynne to introduce considerable evidence that Peckham was the murderer, and accordingly its reasonable limit on sheer propensity evidence, some of it eight years old and much of it far removed from the issues in the case, did not deprive Wynne of his right to make a complete defense.

That leaves one other contention — • that the state trial court misapplied its own rule of evidence. But we cannot grant the writ based on our disagreement with “state-court determinations on state-law questions,” Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U.S. 62, 68, 112 S.Ct. 475, 116 L.Ed.2d 385 (1991), unless the state-court determination is so “fundamentally unfair” that it deprives a defendant of due process, Bey v. Bagley, 500 F.3d 514, 519-20 (6th Cir. 2007). Wynne does not argue that the state court’s application of Michigan Rule 404(b) was so askew that it violated this standard. And his explanations for introducing the evidence — that it would show Peckham’s “character for seeking secretive revenge, his violent tendencies, mental deterioration, and readiness to frame another” and that Peckham “was capable of murdering Timmerman” and framing Wynne, Wynne’s Br. at 46 — represent precisely the kind of propensity evidence that any court (state or federal) reasonably could exclude, whether under Rule 404(b) or for that matter under Rule 403.

In defense of the district court’s contrary ruling, we note that it faced a more vexing question when it first granted the writ in 2003. Not only had our 2004 Lucas decision not yet come down, but the parties’ filings up to that point also suggested that Peckham’s episodes of erratic behavior occurred soon before — and even soon after — Timmerman’s murder. It later became clear that much of Wynne’s propensity evidence against Peckham stemmed from events up to eight years earlier. Now that the parties have corrected the record, and now that we have Lucas to guide us, there is far less to Wynne’s position.

III.

For these reasons, we reverse the district court’s judgment.

CONCURRENCE