Killens v. Anglea

Background

Jordan Luis Killens, a state prisoner proceeding without a lawyer, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 challenging his state-court murder conviction. A Monterey County jury found him guilty of the first-degree murder of Demetrius Isaiah Safford, with a lying-in-wait special circumstance and firearm enhancements. The jury found him not guilty of the murder of Navneal Singh. After state-court proceedings, the trial court sentenced Killens to 20 years consecutive to life without the possibility of parole.

Killens’s federal petition asserted four claims: (1) the admission of irrelevant and inflammatory evidence; (2) a violation of the constitutional right to confront witnesses; (3) an improper jury instruction on accomplice testimony; and (4) cumulative error. In his traverse, he raised an additional claim that his appellate lawyer had provided ineffective assistance.

Court’s analysis

The court reviewed the claims under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Under that law, a federal court generally may not grant relief on a state conviction unless the state court’s decision was contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, clearly established United States Supreme Court law, or was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts.

On the evidence claims, Killens challenged the admission of Facebook posts and evidence that he was on probation when officers searched his home and cell phone. The court held that the Facebook posts supported permissible inferences about Killens’s association with co-defendant Richard Ravenesh Singh and Killens’s state of mind. It also held that the probation evidence explained why the search occurred and was not so arbitrary or prejudicial that it made the trial fundamentally unfair. The court concluded that the state appellate court’s decisions on these issues were not contrary to or an unreasonable application of Supreme Court authority.

On the confrontation claim, Killens argued that he should have been allowed to question eyewitness Eric Romero about a later incident in which Singh possessed a gun while Romero was with him. The court acknowledged that the evidence could have been relevant to Romero’s credibility, but found that its exclusion was justified by the risk of prejudice to Singh and that Romero had already been impeached in several other ways. The court concluded that the state court’s rejection of this claim was reasonable and that excluding the evidence did not have an actual and prejudicial effect on the jury.

On the accomplice-testimony instruction, Killens argued that the instruction improperly placed the burden on the defense to prove that Saxton and Romero were accomplices and required only slight corroborating evidence. The court held that the state court’s interpretation of California law controlled and that the instruction did not violate clearly established Supreme Court authority. The court also rejected the argument that the instruction created structural error. Because the court found no individual constitutional error, it rejected the cumulative-error claim as well.

Additional claim and disposition

Killens raised his ineffective-assistance-of-appellate-counsel claim for the first time in his traverse, so he had not presented it to the state courts. The court stated that it could deny an unexhausted claim on the merits when the claim was not a valid federal claim. It reviewed the state appellate brief and opinion and found that appellate counsel had addressed Killens’s claims, that the claims were researched and argued, and that the appellate opinion separately identified and analyzed Killens’s arguments. The court therefore dismissed this claim because it was not a colorable claim.

Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. denied the petition for a writ of habeas corpus. He also denied a certificate of appealability, entered judgment in favor of Hunter Anglea, and directed the clerk to close the file.