DEREK RENE EDMONDS v. AARON SMITH, Warden
No. 17-5982
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
Decided and Filed: April 26, 2019
19a0080p.06
RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION Pursuаnt to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b). Argued: March 20, 2019. Before: BATCHELDER, ROGERS, and THAPAR, Circuit Judges. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Kentucky at Louisville. No. 3:15-cv-00859—Charles R. Simpson, III, District Judge.
COUNSEL
ARGUED: Alex Potapov, JONES DAY, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. Thomas A. Van De Rostyne, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF KENTUCKY, Frankfort, Kentucky, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Alex Potapov, JONES DAY, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. Thomas A. Van De Rostyne, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF KENTUCKY, Frankfort, Kentucky, for Appellee.
ROGERS, Circuit Judge. Derek Edmonds and Tyreese Hall were together tried and convicted in state court of brutally beating and sodomizing a homeless man to death. After their joint
In their joint state appeals and individual federal habeas actions, Hall and Edmonds raised, among others, four overlapping claims. Edmonds‘s versions of those claims are before us on this appeal. First, Edmonds argues, as Hall did previously, that he was dеprived of a fair trial under the Due Process Clause because the trial court erroneously allowed prejudicial victim-impact testimony by Kaye Thomas, a victim advocate whо testified about her emotional hospital visits to see the victim before he died. Second, Edmonds argues that he was denied his constitutional right to present a complete defense when the trial court instructed the jury not to consider exculpatory hearsay statements of a non-testifying eyewitness, Larry Milligan, who identified Hall as an attacker but not Edmonds. Hall, on the other hand, argued that he was prejudiced by the trial court‘s initial introduction of those statements, which were inculpatory as to him. Third, Edmonds argues that the trial court violated his constitutional right to an impartial jury by restricting voir dire in three ways: limiting each defendant to two minutes of questioning per prospective juror, curtailing certain lines of questioning about mitigation (including race-based mitigation), and рrohibiting certain leading questions. Finally, Edmonds argues that the trial court further violated his right to an impartial jury by refusing to strike two potential jurors for cause. Hall raised versions of these last two clаims in his own
The defining feature of the law-of-the-case doctrine is that it applies only within the same case. See Christianson v. Colt Indus. Operating Corp., 486 U.S. 800, 815–16 (1988) (quoting Arizona v. California, 460 U.S. 605, 618 (1983)); Burley v. Gagacki, 834 F.3d 606, 618 (6th Cir. 2016); 18B C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4478 (2d ed. Nov. 2018 update). A post-conviction habeas action is not a subsequent stage of the underlying criminal proceedings; it is a separate civil case. See Pennsylvania v. Finley, 481 U.S. 551, 556–57 (1987). It follows that separate habeas actions brought by petitioners who were codefendants in the underlying criminal proceedings are separate also—from the criminal proceedings and from each other. Thus, the law-оf-the-case doctrine does not apply across separate habeas actions brought independently by petitioners who were codefendants in the underlying criminal proсeedings.
While the doctrine is a judicially created one, and so potentially open to modification or extension, extending it here would unmoor the doctrine from its core purposes. As the doctrine goes, “findings made at one stage in the litigation should not be reconsidered at subsequent stages of that same litigation.” Burley, 834 F.3d at 618. The doctrine does not mark a limit on a court‘s authority—courts are
More importantly, applying the law-of-the-case doctrine across separate habeas cases would deprive the second petitioner of the opportunity to present his own arguments and would therefore implicate due process concerns. Due process limits res judicata, for instance, to preclude parties from contesting only matters that they have had a full and fair opportunity to litigate. See Montana v. United States, 440 U.S. 147, 153–54 (1979). That means that one must generally have been a party to a litigation to be bound by its judgment. As the Supreme Court explained in Taylor v. Sturgell, 553 U.S. 880, 892–93 (2008),
[a] person who was not a party to a suit generally has not had a “full and fair opportunity to litigate” the claims and issues settled in that suit. The application of claim and issue preclusion to nonparties thus runs uр against the “deep-rooted historic tradition that everyone should have his own day in court.” Richards v. Jefferson County, 517 U.S. 793, 798 (1996).
Nothing about the law-of-the-case doctrine suggests that it can apply across casеs to bind new parties, when generally not even res judicata—the doctrine actually charged to determine the preclusive effects of judgments—can do that.
The Fifth Circuit has similarly ruled that thе law-of-the-case doctrine does not apply between separate
The conviction and its appeal constituted a discrete case. The subsequent post-conviction motions are distinct both from the initial proceeding, which became final with our affirmance of the convictions, and from each other. Thus, there is no law of the case that binds the instant motion to vacate, and the doctrine did not require the district court to reach the same result in considering the respective motions filed by Lawrence and Tolliver in separate proceedings.
Id. Although this court has not addressed this issue, in certain circumstances we have held that the law-of-the-case doctrine does not apply even to a second post-conviction action by the same petitioner. See Patterson v. Haskins, 470 F.3d 645, 660–61 (6th Cir. 2006). In Rosales-Garcia v. Holland, 322 F.3d 386, 398 n.11 (6th Cir. 2003) (en banc), we also suggested as much in dicta. If the doctrine does not apply across post-conviction actions by the same petitioner, it follows that it should not apply across actions by different petitioners.
In response to all of this, the State merely insists that because a codefendаnt‘s appeal can create law of the case for an ongoing criminal case, a once-codefendant‘s habeas action must do the same. The district court similarly еxtrapolated from the doctrine‘s application to a codefendant‘s appeal. But resolution of a codefendant‘s appeal in an ongoing case satisfies the core “same case” requirement of the doctrine, whereas resolution of a separate habeas action does not. That the doctrine applies to codefendants in the same case therefore says nothing about its application across separate cases.
Thus, the district court erred in denying four of Edmonds‘s claims on law-of-the-case grounds. That does not mean that Edmonds‘s claims are necessarily winners, but rather that they must be assessed on their merits. This court is not, however, in a position to make that assessment on the current record, which does not include the record from the underlying criminal proceedings. We therefore reverse the district court‘s decision on the four claims that are before us and remand for the district court to obtain the entire state court record and assess those claims on the merits.
The parties agreed at oral argument that, if there is a remand, Edmonds‘s voir dirе and for-cause-strikes claims should be analyzed under AEDPA‘s deferential review,
The judgment of the district court is reversed and remanded for proceedings consistent with this opinion.