Davis v. Asuncion

Background

John Davis, who was incarcerated at the California State Prison, filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 seeking federal review of his California state-court murder conviction. A jury found Davis guilty of first-degree murder and found true special circumstances alleging murder during a rape and during a burglary. The state trial court sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment, and the California Supreme Court denied review.

The federal court reviewed the California Court of Appeal’s last reasoned decision under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Under that law, federal habeas relief generally is unavailable unless the state court’s decision contradicted or unreasonably applied clearly established United States Supreme Court law, or rested on an unreasonable determination of the facts. Davis did not argue that the state court unreasonably determined the facts.

Claims About the Prior-Offense Evidence

Davis’s first two claims challenged the admission of evidence concerning a prior residential robbery or burglary. During that earlier offense, a witness testified that Davis swung a hatchet at a teapot the witness was holding. Davis argued that the evidence was irrelevant or unfairly prejudicial and that the trial court should have removed the testimony about the hatchet, or “sanitized” the evidence.

The California Court of Appeal had assumed, without deciding, that the evidence might have been improperly admitted under state law. It nevertheless held that any error was harmless because the testimony was brief, was less inflammatory than the charged rape and murder, and was outweighed by the prosecution’s other evidence. The state court also rejected Davis’s due-process argument, finding that the evidence did not infect the entire trial or make it fundamentally unfair.

The federal court agreed that habeas relief was unavailable. It explained that the United States Supreme Court had not clearly held that admitting irrelevant, prejudicial, or propensity evidence automatically violates due process. Even assuming that the burglary or hatchet evidence was irrelevant or prejudicial, the claimed constitutional right was not clearly established under the governing federal habeas standard. The court therefore held that the California Court of Appeal’s decision was not contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, clearly established Supreme Court law.

Claim About the Jury Instruction

Davis’s third claim challenged the jury instruction concerning the prior offense. The instruction permitted jurors to consider the prior offense only if they found by a preponderance of the evidence—a more-likely-than-not standard—that Davis committed it, and only to decide whether he had the intent or motive to burglarize Martz’s home. The instruction also told jurors not to use the evidence for any other purpose, not to conclude that Davis had a bad character or a tendency to commit crimes, and not to treat the evidence alone as sufficient to prove the murder or the rape or burglary allegations.

Davis argued that the instruction’s direction to consider the similarities between the prior and charged offenses allowed the jury to use the prior offense as evidence that he had a tendency to commit the charged murder. The California Court of Appeal concluded that any constitutional error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.

The federal court rejected the claim. Considering the instruction as a whole, it held that the instruction limited the evidence to intent or motive to commit burglary and expressly barred using it to show bad character or a tendency to commit crime. The court found no reasonable likelihood that the jury applied the instruction in the unconstitutional manner Davis proposed. It also held that the state court’s harmless-error analysis was not objectively unreasonable, citing the strong DNA, location, and property evidence and the prosecutor’s limited use of the prior-offense evidence in closing argument.

Disposition

The court DENIED Davis’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. It also DENIED a certificate of appealability because reasonable jurists would not find the court’s assessment of Davis’s constitutional claims debatable or wrong.