Johnson v. Ayers

Background

A California jury convicted Willie Johnson in 1987 of murdering Willie Womble, attempting to murder Angela Womble, robbing an inhabited dwelling, and first-degree burglary. The jury also found firearm-use and great-bodily-injury allegations true and sentenced Johnson to death.

Johnson’s federal habeas petition included Claim I, a freestanding actual-innocence claim asserting that his brother, Tim Johnson, committed the murder, and a subclaim of Claim H alleging that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate Tim’s possible involvement and related evidence. The court had previously found that the California Supreme Court’s fact-finding process on Claim I was unreasonable because it narrowly defined the claim and refused to consider Johnson’s alibi evidence. The federal court then held an evidentiary hearing in 2018 and considered the parties’ post-hearing briefing.

Claim I: Actual Innocence

The court deferred to the state court’s credibility findings about witnesses who testified regarding Tim’s alleged guilt because those findings were fairly supported by the record. The court found that testimony about Tim’s alleged confessions was not credible and that the remaining evidence showed, at most, that Tim may have planned or participated in a robbery; it did not establish that Tim committed the murder or exclude Johnson’s guilt.

Johnson’s 2018 alibi evidence came from Johnson, Sedrick Henderson, Nena Johnson, and Wanda Smith. The court found significant inconsistencies in Sedrick Henderson’s accounts and gave his testimony little weight. Nena Johnson and Wanda Smith described visits with Johnson but could not establish that the visits occurred at the time of, or even close to, the murder. Johnson’s own testimony was the only evidence that placed him elsewhere at the relevant time, and he first gave that sworn account decades after the murder.

The court rejected Johnson’s request to use the lower standard for an actual-innocence gateway claim. It applied the more demanding standard discussed in Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit decisions, under which Johnson had to affirmatively prove that he was probably innocent. The court concluded that his evidence fell short of that extraordinarily high threshold and denied Claim I.

Claim H: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel

To establish ineffective assistance of counsel, Johnson had to show both that counsel’s performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness and that counsel’s alleged errors created a reasonable probability of a different result. The court focused on prejudice and concluded that Johnson had not shown such a probability.

The court found that the investigator reports and declarations submitted by Johnson did not provide concrete evidence that Tim was the shooter or identify specific investigative leads that trial counsel could have pursued. The court also found that evidence linking the murder weapon to Tim was double-edged: it might have suggested Tim’s involvement, but it could also have linked Johnson to the crime by showing Johnson’s access to a gun through his brother. Without concrete evidence that Tim, rather than Johnson, was the shooter, the court found that counsel reasonably moved to exclude the gun evidence.

Disposition

The court denied Claim I and denied the ineffective-assistance-of-counsel subclaim of Claim H. The order was signed by United States District Judge Susan Illston.