Wilson v. lynch

Background

In February 2019, an Alameda County Superior Court jury convicted Anthony Roy Wilson and two other men of murdering Anthony Stevens. The jury also convicted Wilson of unlawfully possessing a firearm as a felon and added firearm enhancements to the murder charge. Wilson was sentenced in July 2019 to 40 years to life.

At trial, Wilson testified that he shot Stevens in self-defense after Stevens pointed a gun at the group. During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked Wilson whether Kermit Tanner had told him before the shooting that Stevens had a gun. Tanner had been present but had not shot Stevens, and he was tried separately. The prosecutor also presented a transcript of recorded jail phone calls, some of which referred to Tanner and his separation from the case.

The trial court excluded some of the phone-call evidence, denied the defendants’ joint request for a mistrial, and instructed the jury to disregard the prosecutor’s questions about Tanner’s statement and any portions of the transcript the jurors had seen. The California Court of Appeal later held that the prosecutor had not committed prejudicial misconduct, that the trial court properly denied a mistrial, and that the questioning did not violate Wilson’s confrontation rights. After the California Supreme Court denied review, Wilson filed this federal petition challenging his confinement.

Claims and standard of review

Wilson raised three claims: that the prosecutor used facts not admitted into evidence in violation of federal and California law; that using Tanner’s statement violated the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause; and that the state court unreasonably denied his motion for a mistrial.

Under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), a federal court generally may not grant relief on a claim decided on the merits by a state court unless the state decision contradicted or unreasonably applied clearly established Supreme Court law, or rested on an unreasonable determination of the facts. The federal court applied that deferential standard.

Prosecutorial-misconduct claim

The court stated that prosecutorial misconduct can violate due process when it makes a trial so unfair that the conviction cannot stand. The court did not decide whether the prosecutor’s questioning about Tanner’s statement or the phone-call transcript was itself misconduct. Instead, it held that even assuming misconduct occurred, the conduct did not infect the trial enough to make the state court’s decision unreasonable under the federal habeas standard.

The trial court expressly instructed the jurors to disregard the questions, answers, and transcript material and not to consider them for any purpose. The federal court applied the general presumption that jurors follow judicial instructions and noted that there was no evidence showing otherwise. It also relied on the state appellate court’s conclusion that Wilson’s defense depended on his claim that Stevens pointed a gun at him, not on whether Wilson already knew Stevens had a gun. The court therefore held that the state court did not unreasonably apply federal law in rejecting the due-process claim.

Confrontation Clause claim

The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause generally bars testimonial hearsay unless the witness is unavailable and the defendant previously had an opportunity to cross-examine that witness. The court distinguished between Tanner’s statement to police about what he had told Wilson and the prosecutor’s question about whether Tanner had made a statement to Wilson before the shooting.

The court said Tanner’s statement to police was testimonial, but that the prosecutor did not ask Wilson about the police statement itself. The statement allegedly made to Wilson before the murder was not testimonial because it was not made to police during an investigation. The court also accepted that the question was offered to show its effect on Wilson as the listener, rather than to prove that Stevens actually had a gun. For those reasons, the court held that the state court did not unreasonably apply federal law in finding no Confrontation Clause violation.

Mistrial claim

Wilson argued that the trial court unreasonably concluded that its jury instruction could cure the risk that jurors would draw improper conclusions from the prosecutor’s question about Tanner. He also argued that a six-day delay between questioning the jurors and giving the instruction made the instruction ineffective, and that later video shown to the jury undermined it.

The federal court rejected those arguments. It noted that the prosecutor did not mention Tanner or the gun statement while showing the video. It also concluded that the delay reflected the trial court’s careful inquiry into the issue and did not make the instruction ineffective. The court held that the state court’s factual determination was not unreasonable enough to justify federal relief.

Disposition

The court denied Wilson’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.