Roman v. Mitchell

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 18-1979
MIGUEL ROMAN,
Petitioner, Appellant,
v.
LISA A. MITCHELL, Superintendent,
Old Colony Correctional Center,
Respondent, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Allison D. Burroughs, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Torruella, Thompson, and Kayatta,
Circuit Judges.
Donald A. Harwood and Donald A. Harwood, Esq. PC on brief for
appellant.
Susanne Reardon, Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts,
and Maura Healey, Attorney General of Massachusetts, on brief for
appellee.
May 13, 2019
KAYATTA, Circuit Judge. Miguel Roman appeals from the
district court's dismissal of his habeas petition under 28 U.S.C.
§ 2254 contesting his state-court conviction and ongoing detention
for first-degree murder. The district court determined that the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) acted reasonably in
concluding that the evidence sufficiently supported the
conviction. We affirm for the same reason.
I.
A.
Because this appeal challenges the sufficiency of the
evidence, we recite the facts "in the light most compatible with
the jury's verdict, consistent with record support." Leftwich v.
Maloney, 532 F.3d 20, 21 (1st Cir. 2008) (citing Jackson v.
Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319 (1979)). We summarize here only those
central facts sufficient to explain our conclusion. A fuller
recitation of these facts are set forth in the SJC's opinion. See
Commonwealth v. Roman, 18 N.E.3d 1069, 1071 (Mass. 2014).
The events underlying Roman's conviction took place in
the early hours of January 29, 2010 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. At
around 2:00 a.m., five men left a nightclub in a Nissan Altima.
Luis Soto, whose girlfriend owned the car, drove, Angel Fernandez
was in the front passenger seat, his brother Felipe sat behind him
in the right rear seat, Roman was behind the driver's seat, and
Shawn Tiago sat in the middle of the backseat between Roman and
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Felipe. Soto drove down High Street until Roman told him to turn
right onto Essex Street. Soto testified that, after he turned the
car onto Essex Street, he "heard a detonation." He could not tell
whether there had been more than one shot because his ears were
ringing.
Soto immediately stopped the car and shifted it into
park. Felipe and then Angel got out of the vehicle and started
running toward High Street. Soto testified that he turned around
and saw Roman holding a gun in his right hand, close to Tiago's
head. Tiago slouched forward toward the front of the car. After
initially hesitating, Soto was the third person to exit the Altima.
Roman then got out of the vehicle, walked around the
back of the car, opened the rear passenger's side door, and leaned
inside. As Soto ran toward High Street, he heard another shot.
The car proceeded to Newton Street, where Tiago's body was later
found in the road with two bullet holes in the left rear side of
his head and one in his right temple.
Another government witness, Barbara St. Amand, who lived
on Newton Street, testified that she looked out her window after
hearing one or two gunshots and tires screeching outside. She saw
a man wearing a black hooded jacket, the same type Felipe was
wearing that night, pull something out of the rear passenger side
of the car and re-enter the backseat on the driver's side.
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Meanwhile, Felipe, Angel, and Soto arrived at Sam's
Food, a nearby store on High Street. Soto and Angel went inside
the store, and Felipe stayed outside, close to the door. Roman
called Angel's cellphone at 2:04 a.m., and the call connected for
forty-four seconds. Roman, driving the Altima, arrived at Sam's
within two minutes after the car first stopped on Essex Street.
Roman left the car outside the store and ran away.
B.
In February 2010, a Hampden County grand jury indicted
Roman for first-degree murder and possession of a class B substance
(cocaine). The case was severed from those of co-defendants Soto
and Angel, who agreed to testify against Roman pursuant to
cooperation agreements.
After trial, the jury found Roman guilty on both charges.
The Hampton County Superior Court sentenced him to life
imprisonment for the murder conviction. Roman timely appealed to
the SJC, arguing, inter alia, that the trial court erred by denying
his motion for a required finding of not guilty at the close of
the Commonwealth's case. The SJC affirmed his convictions and
found the evidence constitutionally sufficient to establish that
he shot Tiago.
In January 2016, Roman timely filed a petition for a
writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the District
of Massachusetts, raising a single claim challenging the
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sufficiency of the evidence grounding his murder conviction. The
district court denied his petition but issued a Certificate of
Appealability. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2253(a).
We review the district court's denial of Roman's habeas petition
de novo. See Scott v. Gelb, 810 F.3d 94, 98 (1st Cir. 2016).
II.
In this case, the petition assails only the sufficiency
of the evidence as governed by Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307
(1979).1 To set aside the verdict under the Due Process Clause of
the U.S. Constitution for insufficient evidence, Roman needed to
convince the state courts that, "after viewing the evidence in the
light most favorable to the prosecution, [no] rational trier of
fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond
a reasonable doubt." Id. at 319. "This standard 'exhibits great
respect for the jury's verdict,'" Winfield v. O'Brien, 775 F.3d 1,
7 (1st Cir. 2014) (quoting Magraw v. Roden, 743 F.3d 1, 4 (1st
Cir. 2014)), but it does not insulate verdicts based on
"evidentiary interpretations and illations that are unreasonable,
1
Under Commonwealth v. Latimore, 393 N.E.2d 370, 375 (Mass.
1979), Massachusetts state courts apply a sufficiency standard
that is "functionally identical" to the standard promulgated by
the U.S. Supreme Court in Jackson, 443 U.S. at 319. Logan v. Gelb,
790 F.3d 65, 71 (1st Cir. 2015). Thus, "we can securely reason
that in scouring the record for Latimore error and finding none
the SJC effectively answered the federal constitutional question."
Housen v. Gelb, 744 F.3d 221, 225 (1st Cir. 2014) (quoting
Leftwich, 532 F.3d at 24).
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insupportable or overly speculative," id. (quoting United States
v. Spinney, 65 F.3d 231, 234 (1st Cir. 1995)). Still, the Jackson
standard is "rarely met where there is plausible evidence to
support a verdict." Tash v. Roden, 626 F.3d 15, 20 (1st Cir.
2010).
Having lost in state court at trial and on appeal, Roman
does not get a full redo in federal court. When a state court has
decided a legal claim on the merits, a habeas petitioner must show
that the ruling was "contrary to, or involv[ed] an unreasonable
application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by
the Supreme Court of the United States." Tash, 626 F.3d at 18
(quoting 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1)). In short, in a case such as
this, we ask not whether the evidence was sufficient; rather, we
ask whether the SJC's sufficiency finding was "objectively
unreasonable." See Hurtado v. Tucker, 245 F.3d 7, 18 (1st Cir.
2001) (quoting Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 409 (2000)); see
also id. at 16 ("Habeas review involves the layering of two
standards. The habeas question of whether the state court decision
is objectively unreasonable is layered on top of the underlying
standard governing the constitutional right asserted."). In this
context, "unreasonable" means that the decision "evinces some
increment of incorrectness beyond mere error." Leftwich, 532 F.3d
at 23 (citing McCambridge v. Hall, 303 F.3d 24, 36 (1st Cir. 2002)
(en banc)).
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Here, Roman argues that the SJC's rejection of his
sufficiency claim "constituted an unreasonable application of the
law to the facts [and] . . . was arbitrary and devoid of factual
support." He contends that Soto's and Felipe's testimony at trial
was "uncorroborated," "perjurious," and "illogical." Roman's
consistent defense has been that Felipe was the shooter because
Tiago sustained a fatal gunshot wound to his right temple, and
Felipe was seated to Tiago's right. And, he asserts, Felipe and
Soto both testified to hearing only one shot fired in the car. He
also points to the testimony of St. Amand, a disinterested witness,
stating that she saw a man dressed like Felipe pulling something
(presumably the victim's body) out of the rear of the Altima and
suggesting that two men were there with the body, as opposed to
the government's theory that Roman alone dumped the body on Newton
Street.
But, as the SJC found, other trial testimony and video
recordings from local security cameras significantly undercut
Roman's alternate theory. Soto and Felipe testified that Felipe
fled from the rear passenger's side door as soon as he heard the
first gunshot. Video footage from an Essex Street camera confirmed
that between 2:02:22 a.m. and 2:02:56 a.m., a person from the rear
passenger's seat first exited the car, followed by a person from
the front passenger's seat, and then the driver. Roman, 18 N.E.3d
at 1073. The last person to leave the car got out from where Roman
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sat, behind the driver's seat. That person walked around to the
rear passenger's side, and leaned inside for about thirteen
seconds, before getting in the driver's seat and driving away.
Id. Accordingly, the SJC reasonably determined that the jury could
have found that Felipe, then Angel and Soto, abandoned the car and
ran toward High Street, while Roman stayed behind and shot Tiago
again, just as Soto testified.
Footage from Sam's Food, in turn, showed three men (not
two) arriving at the store between 2:04:02 a.m. and 2:04:17 a.m.
The recording also showed Angel talking on his cellphone at the
same time the Altima arrived out front. Coupled with telephone
records showing that Roman called Angel at around the same time as
the car pulled up, the SJC reasonably concluded that the jury could
have found in this evidence further support for the testimony that
Felipe was at the store when Roman arrived with the car.
The security camera recordings also allowed the SJC to
determine that only one minute and fifty-six seconds passed from
the time the Altima stopped on Essex Street until it arrived at
Sam's Food store. The SJC therefore reasoned that "[t]here would
only have been enough time for the convergence of Soto, Angel, and
Felipe, and the Altima at Sam's . . . if events had occurred as
Soto and Felipe testified." Roman, 18 N.E.3d at 1074. That is,
if the three men who arrived on foot ran directly to Sam's from
Essex Street.
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It is undoubtedly "within the province of the jury" to
evaluate witness credibility. Foxworth, 570 F.3d at 427. A
rational jury was certainly entitled to discredit St. Amand's
testimony in light of contravening evidence. See Housen, 744 F.3d
at 226 ("On review for evidentiary sufficiency, . . . 'a habeas
court may not freely reweigh competing inferences but must accept
those reasonable inferences that are most compatible with the
jury's verdict.'" (quoting Magraw, 743 F.3d at 7)); Hurtado, 245
F.3d at 19 ("[W]here the argument over the correctness of the state
court's ultimate conclusion . . . call[s] for a choice between
credible (although mutually opposed) views, the habeas inquiry on
objective unreasonableness ends.").
Roman's argument that the fatal gunshot wound to Tiago's
right temple "conclusively" proves that Felipe was the shooter
likewise falls flat. The medical examiner testified that Tiago
sustained three gunshot wounds to the head: two to the left rear
side almost on top of one another and a third on the right temple.
And at least one of the left-side wounds was also potentially
fatal. Roman, 18 N.E.3d at 1075. In any event, the evidence
credibly placed Roman on both the left and right sides of the
victim as he moved out of and around the car.
Felipe's and Soto's testimony regarding how many
gunshots they heard in the car is also not as conclusive as Roman
would have us believe. Although Soto initially testified that he
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heard one detonation, he also said that the sound was "very" loud
and that he could not tell at first whether it came from inside or
outside the vehicle. Soto clarified, in response to further
questioning, that he could not make out "whether there was one
bang or more than one bang" because his ears were ringing. Felipe
testified only that he "heard a bang" and that he knew it was "a
gunshot." These statements are entirely consistent with the
testimony of the government's ballistics expert, who opined that
the type of gun likely used to kill the victim, a Jennings Bryco
model J22 semiautomatic pistol, "is very loud and capable of firing
shots in rapid succession." Roman, 18 N.E.3d at 1075. Soto and
Felipe also testified to hearing another gunshot as they ran
towards High Street. A shell casing recovered from the vicinity
of where the Altima stopped on Essex Street further corroborates
this testimony and the SJC's conclusion that Roman fired a third
shot into Tiago's right temple area as he stood outside the open
right rear door of the car.
Finally, Roman also emphasizes that, while he had no
motive to kill Tiago, the Gonzalez brothers had been involved in
an altercation with Tiago the week before over an unpaid debt,
after which Tiago threatened to kill Angel. But, as the district
court explained, because motive, while probative, is not an element
of the crime of deliberately premeditated murder, the absence of
evidence of motive is insufficient to undermine the SJC's decision
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under Jackson. See Commonwealth v. Sylvia, 921 N.E.2d 968, 975–
76 (Mass. 2010) (noting that the government is not required to
prove motive to prove first-degree murder on a theory of
premeditation).
Viewing the evidence as a whole in the light most
favorable to the verdict, we cannot say that the SJC unreasonably
applied Jackson or reached an unreasonable determination of the
facts. The state court "did not ignore material evidence or a key
argument made by the defendant" and "[i]ts articulated reasons
went to the conclusions it reached." Hurtado, 245 F.3d at 18. It
reasonably concluded that a rational jury could have found beyond
a reasonable doubt "that [Roman] fired two shots at close range
into the left temple of the victim, then went around to the other
side of the car, opened the rear passenger's side door, and fired
a third shot into the victim's right temple."
III.
For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the district
court's denial of habeas relief.
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