Hutchins v. Lizarraga

Background

A California state-court jury convicted Kenneth Hutchins of several sex offenses against his eight-year-old great-niece and possession of child pornography. He received a prison sentence of 55 years to life, plus 8 years and 8 months. After an unsuccessful direct appeal and petition for review, Hutchins filed a federal petition challenging his conviction. The petition raised claims involving the admission of evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel, jury instructions, and prosecutorial misconduct. The court denied that petition and entered judgment on March 30, 2020.

Hutchins then moved under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 59(e) and 60(b) to vacate the court’s order and judgment. He argued that newly discovered evidence supported actual innocence. The evidence included his testimony denying the offenses at a 2019 restitution hearing, information that he had a neurological condition related to a head injury, and a transcript of his 2013 police interview. He also requested a stay while state habeas proceedings continued.

The court initially denied the motion as an unauthorized second or successive habeas petition because it presented a new actual-innocence claim. While Hutchins’s appeal was pending, the Supreme Court held in Banister v. Davis that a Rule 59(e) motion is not a second or successive habeas petition. The Ninth Circuit therefore remanded the case for the limited purpose of allowing the district court to reconsider the post-judgment motion.

Legal standard

Rule 59(e) allows a party to ask the court to alter or amend a judgment. It is generally limited to correcting a legal or factual error, considering newly discovered or previously unavailable evidence, preventing manifest injustice, or responding to an intervening change in controlling law. In a habeas case, the rule permits reconsideration of matters properly included in the challenged judgment, but not arguments that could have been raised earlier.

The court reconsidered Hutchins’s request only under Rule 59(e). It stated that nothing in Banister or the Ninth Circuit’s remand indicated that its earlier denial of relief under Rule 60(b) was improper.

Court’s reasoning

The court held that the restitution-hearing transcript and police-interview transcript were not newly discovered or previously unavailable. Hutchins’s counsel could have obtained them before judgment, and the information that Hutchins denied molesting his great-niece was not new because he had pleaded not guilty and pursued an actual-innocence defense at trial.

The court also found that Hutchins himself had known about his neurological condition and had received treatment for it from 2007 through 2013. The police-interview transcript and an investigator’s memorandum in trial counsel’s file also contained information about his head injury, medication, headaches, and memory problems. The court therefore concluded that this evidence could have been presented before judgment. It added that, even if the evidence had been new or previously unavailable, Hutchins had not explained how a condition causing headaches and memory problems could have caused the conduct at issue.

The court rejected Hutchins’s argument that relief was necessary to prevent manifest injustice. It found that the requested King/Kelly stay procedure did not fit a case in which the federal habeas petition had already been denied and judgment had been entered. The court further found that Hutchins had not shown a sufficiently supported actual-innocence claim on the existing record or shown that state habeas proceedings were likely to produce one.

Disposition

The court concluded that Hutchins had not shown that Rule 59(e) relief was warranted, either to consider newly discovered evidence that was previously unavailable or to prevent manifest injustice. Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered: “Petitioner’s Motion to Vacate the Court’s Final Order and Judgment is DENIED.”