Stiles v. Wetzel

RAFIK STILES, Petitioner, v. JOHN E. WETZEL, et al., Respondents.

Civil Action No. 20-5977

United States District Court, E.D. Pennsylvania

November 10, 2022

REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION

DAVID R. STRAWBRIDGE UNITED STATES MAGISTRATE JUDGE

Before the Court for Report and Recommendation is the pro se petition of Rafik Stiles (“Stiles” or “Petitioner”), a prisoner at the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, for the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus filed pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2254. Stiles was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison following his conviction in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas on two counts of first-degree murder and firearms offenses that he committed when he was a juvenile. He seeks habeas relief on four grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel at trial and on appeal. He also challenges his sentence as a violation of the Miller and Montgomery cases that interpreted the Eighth Amendment as applied to juveniles convicted of murder. For the reasons that follow, we recommend that the petition be denied and dismissed.

I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND^[1]

Stiles was convicted following trial as an adult for his role in two separate criminal incidents that occurred in July 2010, when he was 17 years old. The first was the killing of Kyle Featherstone, age 16, which occurred just before midnight on July 4, 2010, near the 3400 block of Spring Garden Street following the fireworks display at the nearby Philadelphia Museum of Art. Eyewitness Lonnie Burton provided an account from his perspective among a group of boys near 31^st and Spring Garden Streets, which included victim Featherstone. Talk of a fistfight had spread among his group after one of the boys “spoke to somebody's girl.” N.T. 10/20/14 at 2-15. Several of them ran toward the location where they were going to fight when “somebody started shooting.” Id. at 7 16-17. Burton was shot in his hand, but he saw that Featherstone was lying on the ground and had been shot in the head. Another individual in the area, Joachim Fundenberg, who did not know Featherstone or Burton, testified that he started running when he heard approximately four gunshots. He suffered a gunshot wound to his left shoulder. N.T. 10/20/14 at 119-29.

A few weeks after the shooting, police took a statement from Katrina Session, Petitioner's sister, in which she acknowledged that she was present when Stiles shot and killed Featherstone. She explained that she was holding the arm of a friend named “Reek” (not Petitioner Rafik Stiles) when another boy walked up to her and grabbed her by the arm before walking away to rejoin his friends. Reek ultimately followed that boy to his friend-group, which prompted the friends to run after Reek. Session then heard gunshots and saw her brother shooting into the crowd and running towards 34^th Street. When called at trial, Session disavowed her statement. Detectives, however, testified about the circumstances under which her statement had been taken as they did for the many subsequent witnesses whose trial testimony diverged from prior statements. See N.T. 10/17/14 at 59-144.

A friend who had been with Fundenberg, Parrish Grantham, also gave police a description of the shooter in July 2010. In October 2012, he identified Petitioner from a photo array as the shooter. He acknowledged to detectives at that time that he had not identified Stiles when detectives showed him photographs on a prior occasion because he “didn't want to get involved” or “labeled a snitch.” When it came time to testify at Stiles's preliminary hearing, Grantham claimed that he did not know who shot Featherstone and suggested that detectives had fabricated his statement identifying Stiles as the shooter. At the time of Stiles's trial, Grantham was ruled unavailable to testify and his preliminary hearing testimony was read to the jury. See N.T. 10/22/14 at 77-140.

As forensic and medical experts explained at trial, Featherstone died from three perforating gunshot wounds he suffered in his head, torso, and forearm. Police recovered three bullet specimens from the area of 34^th and Spring Garden Streets following the shooting. They determined that they were caliber .38 Special/.357 magnum and were all fired from the same gun. They later determined that the same gun was used six days later in another Philadelphia homicide.

Barbara Crowder was fatally shot in the head at approximately 2:30 a.m. on July 10, 2020 in front of 600 North 53^rd Street. Her fiance, Bernard Lewis, told detectives that Crowder would obtain prescription pills like Xanax and Percocet from her doctor and sell them for money on the street. She was going to “make a deal” with someone on 53^rd Street and told Lewis to wait for her nearby. Lewis observed her meet up with a man on 53^rd Street, whom he described to police. Crowder and the man turned onto Poplar Street and Lewis then heard a gunshot. Crowder ran to the corner and fell, and Stiles and another man ran on 53^rd Street toward Wyalusing Avenue. In October 2012, Lewis selected Stiles from a photo array as the shooter. When he testified at trial, however, he suggested that the man he had seen with Crowder had lighter skin than did Stiles. He also testified that he was not close enough to have seen the two men on the night of the shooting. See N.T. 10/20/14 at 37-93.

In December 2011, detectives took a statement from Shiheed Gaskins, who rented a room in a house on North 53^rd Street at the time Crowder was shot. He reported that he and his girlfriend had friends over to the house that night, including Stiles and his girlfriend Sapphia Pressley. Gaskins stated that he was in his house when he heard a gunshot. He then heard Pressley run into the house, screaming that “Rafik [Stiles] shot somebody.” N.T. 10/21/14 at 105. Gaskins looked out from the front door and saw [Stiles] biking away toward 53^rd and Market Street. See N.T. 10/21/14 at 95-146. At trial, he too denied that this happened and asserted that detectives forced him to sign a statement.

A year later, in December 2012, detectives questioned Pressley, Stiles's one-time girlfriend, about the events described by Gaskins on 53^rd Street.^[2] She stated that she was on the porch when she heard shots and saw Stiles shooting someone, whom she then saw lying on the ground. She described an older man - presumably Bernard Lewis - running up to the person on the ground and screaming for help. Pressley then ran into the house and called out that “they shooting.” Pressley stated that Stiles later told her that he shot Crowder “because she owed him something,” but he did not state what that “something” was. See N.T. 10/21/14 at 2-44. At trial, she too asserted that she did not recall giving this statement to police and disavowed much of the contents of the statement.

Apart from the forensic testimony linking the July 4^th shooting of Kyle Featherstone to the July 10^th shooting of Barbara Crowder, the two incidents were also linked through testimony from an informant. Juvenile Z.N. had been placed at the New Castle Youth Detention Center for approximately three months in 2010 when Stiles was placed there for unrelated offenses. Z.N. gave a statement to homicide detectives in August 2011 that during their placement, Stiles told him “about the 4^th of July shooting and right after that, he told [him] about another shooting he did where he killed a lady.” N.T. 10/22/14 at 12. Stiles provided Z.N. details of both crimes that were consistent with the descriptions of others of the events. N.T. 10/22/14 at 4-53. Z.N. too disavowed any recollection of his police interview or the statements of Stiles when he was called to testify at Stiles's trial. See generally Commonwealth v. Stiles, 143 A.3d 968, 971-74 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2016) (quoting Trial Court Opinion, filed 10/6/15, at 2-9).

Stiles was arrested in October 2012 and charged as an adult with the murder of Featherstone and, later, Crowder. The Commonwealth initially designated the case as a capital prosecution but withdrew that designation in April 2013. Over a defense objection, the two cases were consolidated for trial, which took place in front of a jury sitting before the Honorable Rose Marie DeFino-Nastasi in October 2014. As noted above, all of the purported eyewitnesses to the two killings or admissions by Stiles as to the shootings - Session, Gaskins, Lewis, Pressley, Z.N., and Grantham (via his preliminary hearing testimony) - recanted the statements they had given to investigators. The Commonwealth, however, presented the detectives who had taken the statements from these witnesses. On October 24, 2014, the jury found Petitioner guilty of first-degree murder for each of the two killings, as well as related firearms counts.

At the time of his conviction, Pennsylvania's sentencing laws had been amended to provide that persons who were under the age of 18 at the time they committed a first-degree murder could be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or to a term of years sentence with a mandatory maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole.^[3] The Commonwealth sought a sentence of life imprisonment, which required the sentencing court to consider specific factors outlined in the statute. The court convened a hearing on April 28, 2015 but ultimately declined to sentence Stiles to life in prison. Rather, the court sentenced him to 40 years to life imprisonment for each of the first-degree murder convictions, and 2 ½ to 5 years for each of the firearms offenses, all of which were to run concurrent to each other.

Petitioner filed a direct appeal, challenging the consolidation of the cases for trial, the denial of his motion to suppress eyewitness identifications, and the weight and sufficiency of the...