Hedgepeth v. Madden

Background

Hasson Hedgepeth filed a pro se petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 challenging his state criminal judgment. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and attempted voluntary manslaughter and found great-bodily-injury and firearm enhancements. The state court sentenced him to a total term of 50 years to life in prison. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment, and the California Supreme Court summarily denied review. Hedgepeth later pursued state post-conviction petitions before filing this federal case. The federal petition was initially dismissed with leave to amend for failure to exhaust; after exhaustion, the respondent was ordered to respond.

Claims

Hedgepeth presented two claims: (1) the trial court violated his rights by failing to instruct the jury on voluntary manslaughter based on sudden quarrel or heat of passion, as a lesser-included offense of murder; and (2) appellate counsel was ineffective for failing to raise that alleged instructional error on direct appeal.

Hedgepeth also raised arguments in his traverse concerning allegedly prejudicial rap lyrics and insufficient evidence for his first-degree-murder conviction. The court declined to consider those arguments because additional grounds for relief could not be raised for the first time in a traverse.

First claim: jury instruction

The California Supreme Court had denied Hedgepeth’s state claim while citing several state-law authorities. The respondent argued that the claim was procedurally defaulted, but the federal court exercised its discretion to review the claim on the merits because it clearly failed on the merits.

The court explained that heat-of-passion voluntary manslaughter requires adequate provocation—conduct by the victim, or reasonably believed by the defendant to be by the victim, sufficiently provocative that an ordinary person would act rashly or without due deliberation. The court concluded that the trial evidence did not show adequate provocation. In particular, neither victim threatened Hedgepeth, neither had a weapon, and Hedgepeth’s prior friendship and dealings with Montenegro had been without incident.

The court also held that the defense theory was adequately covered by the self-defense and imperfect-self-defense instructions. Those instructions allowed the jury to consider whether Hedgepeth believed he faced imminent danger and whether deadly force was necessary to defend against that danger. Because the evidence supporting heat of passion was essentially the same evidence used to support imperfect self-defense, and the jury rejected the imperfect-self-defense theory, the court concluded that any instructional error would have been harmless. Habeas relief was denied on this claim.

Second claim: ineffective assistance of appellate counsel

The court applied the two-part standard from Strickland v. Washington. Under that standard, a petitioner must show both objectively unreasonable attorney performance and prejudice. In the appellate context, the petitioner had to show that counsel unreasonably failed to discover and brief a meritorious issue and that there was a reasonable probability of a different result without that failure.

The court had determined that the underlying instructional-error claim lacked merit. It therefore concluded that, even if Hedgepeth could show that appellate counsel acted unreasonably, he could not show prejudice. The court denied habeas relief on this claim as well.

Disposition

The court denied the Petition. It also denied a Certificate of Appealability because Hedgepeth had not made the required substantial showing that a constitutional right was denied and had not shown that reasonable jurists would find the court’s assessment debatable or wrong. The court stated that Hedgepeth could seek a certificate from the Court of Appeals. The clerk was directed to enter judgment in favor of the respondent, terminate pending motions, and close the file.