Roman v. Ryan

MIGUEL ROMAN, Petitioner, v. LISA RYAN, Respondent.

Civil Action No. 16-cv-10116-ADB

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

September 12, 2018

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER ON PETITION FOR A WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS

BURROUGHS, D.J.

On December 29, 2011, Petitioner Miguel Roman was convicted of deliberately premeditated murder and possession of a class B substance. Currently pending before the Court is a petition for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254, in which Petitioner asserts that the evidence was insufficient to sustain his murder conviction. [ECF No. 1]. For the reasons stated herein, the petition for a writ of habeas corpus is denied.

I. BACKGROUND

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ("SJC") provided the following account of the facts of the case as the jury could have found them.¹

Shortly before midnight on January 28, 2010, Angel Gonzalez (Angel) called the [Petitioner] on his cellular telephone to arrange a purchase of cocaine. Angel and Luis Soto then drove to a night club in Holyoke where [Petitioner] sold them cocaine. They traveled in a grey four-door 2006 Nissan Altima owned by Soto's girl friend. They then drove to a bar in Holyoke, ingesting the cocaine en route.

At about 12:56 a.m. on January 29, Angel's mother called Angel on his cellular telephone and told him that the victim was at the Holyoke Medical Center and needed a ride. Soto, Angel, and Angel's brother Felipe left the bar in the Altima. They drove to the hospital and went inside to get the victim. The four men then returned to the bar. After about one hour they all left together. Angel called [Petitioner] on his cellular telephone to arrange another purchase of cocaine. Angel's cellular telephone records showed three calls that connected with the [Petitioner's] cellular telephone between 1:30 a.m. and 1:52 a.m. They drove to the night club to meet [Petitioner]. Angel and the victim got out of the car and went inside the club. When they returned, [Petitioner] was with them and the three men entered the Altima.

Soto was driving; Angel was in the front passenger seat; [Petitioner] sat behind Soto; Felipe was behind Angel; and the victim sat between [Petitioner] and Felipe. [Petitioner] told Soto to drive. They proceeded down High Street. [Petitioner] directed Soto to turn right onto Essex Street. [Petitioner] pulled out a handgun and shot the victim twice in the left rear side of his head. Soto stopped the car and shifted into the "park" position. Felipe got out of the car and ran toward High Street. Angel got out of the car and stood nearby for a short time before running toward High Street. Soto was the third to get out of the car. He hesitated because he was concerned about abandoning his girl friend's car, but then he left and ran toward High Street.

[Petitioner] was the last person to get out of the Altima. He walked around the rear of the car, opened the rear passenger's side door and fired a third shot into the victim's right temple. He then got into the driver's seat of the Altima and sped off. [Petitioner] turned onto Newton Street where he stopped and dumped the victim's body in the road. In the meantime, Felipe, Angel, and Soto made their way to Sam's Food, a nearby store on High Street. [Petitioner] called Angel's cellular telephone at 2:04:07 a.m. The call connected for forty-four seconds. The Altima, driven by [Petitioner], arrived at Sam's Food store shortly thereafter. [Petitioner] left the car there, and left the scene himself. The others then drove away in the Altima. Soto turned himself in to police the next day.

Commonwealth v. Roman, 18 N.E.3d 1069, 1071 (Mass. 2014).

Following a jury trial in the Hampden County Superior Court, Petitioner was found guilty of deliberately premeditated murder and possession of a class B substance (cocaine). [ECF No. 1 at 1]. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder conviction and to a concurrent one-year House of Correction sentence for the possession conviction. Id.

Petitioner appealed his convictions on the following grounds: (1) insufficiency of the evidence; (2) the denial of his right to a speedy trial; (3) prosecutorial misconduct in the delayed production of discovery; (4) the trial court's failure to declare a mistrial due to jury tampering by the victim's family; and (5) an erroneous jury instruction regarding the testimony of a cooperating witness. Roman, 18 N.E.3d at 1071. He also requested that the SJC exercise its power under Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 278, § 33E to reverse his convictions and either order a new trial or reduce the conviction of murder to a lesser degree. Id. On November 4, 2014, the SJC affirmed the convictions and declined to exercise its authority under § 33E. Id. On January 26, 2016, Petitioner filed this petition for a writ of habeas corpus, asserting a single claim that the SJC misapplied the sufficiency of the evidence standard and made unreasonable factual determinations concerning the murder conviction. [ECF No. 1].

II. DISCUSSION

A. Applicable Law

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA") permits federal courts to grant habeas corpus relief on a claim "adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings" if that adjudication:

(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or (2) resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.

28 U.S.C. § 2254(d). The First Circuit has further explained the § 2254(d)(1) standard as follows:

An adjudication will be contrary to clearly established law if the state court applies a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth by the Supreme Court or confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of [the Supreme Court] and nevertheless arrives at a result different from [its] precedent. On theother hand, a state court adjudication constitutes an unreasonable application if the state court identifies the correct governing legal principle from the Supreme Court's then-current decisions but unreasonably applies that principle to the facts of the prisoner's case.

Hensley v. Roden, 755 F.3d 724, 731 (1st Cir. 2014) (internal citations and quotations omitted). Here, Petitioner only claims under § 2254(d)(1) that the SJC unreasonably applied the governing law from Supreme Court precedent. An unreasonable application of clearly established federal law requires "some increment of incorrectness beyond error." Norton v. Spencer, 351 F.3d 1, 8 (1st Cir. 2003) (internal quotations omitted). The state court decision must be "'objectively unreasonable,' not merely wrong." White v. Woodall, 572 U.S. 415, 419 (2014) (quoting Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63, 75-76 (2003)); see also Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86, 102 (2011) ("[E]ven a strong case for relief does not mean the state court's contrary conclusion was unreasonable."). Petitioner "must show that the state court's ruling . . . was so lacking in justification that there was an error well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement." Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86, 103 (2011).

Under § 2254(d)(2), the AEDPA permits "relief from a state court judgment if that judgment is based on an unreasonable determination of the facts." Rashad v. Walsh, 300 F.3d 27, 35 (1st Cir. 2002). A state court judgment is based on an unreasonable determination of the facts if the decision is "objectively unreasonable in light of the evidence presented in the state-court proceeding." Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322, 340 (2003). The federal habeas court may not characterize the state court factual determinations as unreasonable "merely because [it] would have reached a different conclusion in the first instance." Wood v. Allen, 558 U.S. 290, 301 (2010). The state court's factual findings "are entitled to a presumption of correctness that can be rebutted only by clear and convincing evidence to the contrary." Rashad, 300 F.3d at 35 (quoting Ouber v. Guarino, 293 F.3d 19, 27 (1st Cir. 2002)). Thus, Petitioner's burden in this regard is"heavy," and if it is not met, "a federal habeas court must credit the state court's findings of fact—and that remains true when those findings are made by a state appellate court as well as when they are made by a state trial court." Id.

Here, the parties agree that the petition rests solely on a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence as governed by the Supreme Court's decision in Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307 (1979).² Jackson held that the constitutional right to due process guarantees "that no person shall be made to suffer the onus of a criminal conviction except upon sufficient proof—defined as evidence necessary to convince a trier of fact beyond a reasonable doubt of the existence of every element of the offense." 443 U.S. at 316. "More succinctly, the relevant test . . . from Jackson is 'whether, after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.'" O'Laughlin v. O'Brien, 568 F.3d 287, 299 (1st Cir. 2009) (quoting Jackson, 443 U.S. at 319). "In evaluating the evidence, the reviewing court must exercise 'some degree of intellectual rigor,' and not credit 'evidentiary interpretations and illations that are unreasonable, insupportable, or overly speculative.'" Akara v. Ryan, 270 F. Supp. 3d 423, 431 (D. Mass. 2017) (quoting Leftwich v. Maloney, 532 F.3d 20, 23 (1st Cir. 2008)). The federal habeas court "faced with a record . . . that supports conflicting inferences must presume . . . that the trier of fact resolved any such conflicts in favor of the prosecution, and must defer to thatresolution." Linton v. Saba, 812 F.3d 112, 123 (1st Cir. 2016) (quoting...