Buie v. McAdoryBuie v. McAdory
- Reporters:
- ,
- Before:
- Easterbrook, Rovner, Diane P. Wood
EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. Someone bludgeoned Bennie Ervin to death in her home and stole her jewelry plus other valuables. A jury convicted Joel Buie of these crimes; the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. The evidence supporting this verdict includes Buie’s confession, the fact that he was hard up for money (shortly after the murder he tried to exchange a gold chain for cocaine, and Ervin’s husband testified that she always wore such a chain), and the fact that there were no signs of forced entry. Buie and Ervin lived a few doors apart, and he had agreed to install a hook for a flower pot in her
Though Buie later contended that his confession to this sequence of events had been obtained unlawfully, the state judge found that Buie lied about what had occurred in the police station. He contended, for example, that the police severely beat him, but medical personnel found no bruises or scratches on his body. The confession also was consistent with statements of Buie’s girlfriend and a neighbor’s recollection that Buie related that he had visited the Ervin home to install a hook.
The state’s appellate court affirmed Buie’s conviction and sentence. People v. Buie, 238 Ill. App. 3d 260, 606 N.E.2d 279 (1st Dist. 1992). A collateral attack in state court was abandoned after counsel concluded that it was frivolous. The federal district judge denied Buie’s petition for relief under
Buie’s principal argument is that the trial judge violated the due process clause by permitting an expert witness to overstate the strength of her conclusion. Police found some strands of hair on Ervin’s clothing and among shards of glass on the basement floor. (Ervin had been beaten with a bottle as well as a hammer.) Maria Pulling, who Buie acknowledges to be a legitimate expert in hair
According to Buie, the Constitution forbids any expert witness to misstate scientific conclusions in a criminal prosecution. It is far from clear that Pulling did this; she and the defense expert debated the accuracy of hair analysis, and Buie does not cite any scientific literature establishing that Pulling was in the wrong. “Reasonable degree of scientific certainty” is a plastic phrase. Let us assume, however, that Buie’s expert had the better of the argument. Still, to obtain collateral relief, Buie must show that the state’s decision “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States“.
The state’s appellate court did not apply any of these principles unreasonably in holding that the jury was entitled to hear Pulling’s testimony. And if state law contains the principle for which Buie contends, and the state court therefore should have struck this portion of Pulling’s testimony—well, an error of state evidence law cannot be the basis of federal collateral relief. See Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U.S. 62 (1991). See also Gilmore v. Taylor, 508 U.S. 333 (1993). Although the federal Constitution may be offended when probative exculpatory evidence is pointlessly excluded, see Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284 (1973), no comparable rule condemns the admission of evidence that the defendant deems untrustworthy, as long as the state affords the defendant the means to demonstrate its weaknesses (and its use does not violate the confrontation clause). Informants may be lying, eyewitnesses may be tricked by their own memories, and experts may produce flawed analyses. The tools of the adversary process supply the means to expose these testimonial shortcomings. The Constitution does not impose
Although the state must not withhold exculpatory evidence or use testimony that the prosecutor knows is false, see Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972);
Buie’s other contention is that his lawyer in the state proceedings furnished constitutionally ineffective assistance. This claim was defaulted, as the district judge held. It was not presented to the state judiciary on direct appeal or pursued to conclusion on collateral attack. See O‘Sullivan v. Boerckel, 526 U.S. 838 (1999). Buie does not
According to Buie, his innocence is established by the fact that his fingernails were intact when he was arrested. This seemingly mundane fact acquires significance, Buie’s lawyer insists, when combined with the fact that a fingernail fragment was retrieved from the bottom of the basement stairs in Ervin’s house, tested, and found not to be Ervin’s. If it was not Ervin’s, and could not have been his, then someone else must have committed the crime, Buie contends. The problem with this argument is that the record does not show how old the fragment was when collected and how many other people may have broken a fingernail in the Ervin basement within the available time. Without that information, the fact that it could not have come from Buie on the day of the murder reveals nothing about who committed that crime.
Nothing else in the record implies actual innocence. We say this cognizant of the fact that the record in this collateral attack is only a subset of the record assembled in state court. It contains some pages of the transcript, but not the full thing. At oral argument, Buie’s lawyer said that he had made informal inquiries and been told that much of the transcript had been lost in the lengthy time (more than a decade) since the trial, and that the court reporter was unavailable to recreate it. At this point counsel let matters drop. He did not ask the federal judge to require the state to locate or recreate a
AFFIRMED
A true Copy:
Teste:
Clerk of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
USCA-02-C-0072—8-25-03