Habeas corpus petition denied despite hearsay eyewitness testimony

This habeas corpus petition alleged that the petitioner's murder conviction in state court was unconstitutional because the trial court committed certain errors that deprived him of a fair trial. We see in this case how difficult is it win habeas petitions ever since Congress in the mid-1990s tightened the standards for challenging your state court convictions in federal court. The defendant loses the habeas petition.

The case is Wilson v. Capra, a summary order issued on November 1. Based in part on two eyewitnesses, and police testimony about out-of-court statements from two other eyewitnesses, the jury convicted Wilson of fatally shooting someone outside a residential building in 2006. The trial court determined that Wilson caused the two latter eyewitnesses to avoid testifying in court. The habeas petition challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to convict Wilson, the hearsay testimony, the lack of any missing witness instruction, and the trial court's instruction on witness credibility.

To win a habeas petition in federal court, it is not enough to show that unconstitutional things happened during the criminal trial. That was the rule prior to the mid-1990s, when Congress said the criminal defendant has to show the questionable trial court rulings violated clearly-established Supreme Court authority. That standard gives state courts, including the state appellate courts which can independently review the convictions, some leeway to interpret the Constitution so long as they do not run afoul of specific Supreme Court holdings.  Wilson does not meet that difficult standard, the Court of Appeals (Parker, Bianco and Rakoff [D.J.]) holds.

On the evidence sufficiency claim, the Second Circuit defers to the jury's credibility findings against Wilson even though the two eyewitnesses had credibility issues. While Wilson said "their trial testimony was inconsistent with their prior statements and other evidence in the case, and that one eyewitness . . . had received financial benefits and lodging from prosecutors for several months and was hoping they would help her with her parole application," the jury was still able to rely on their eyewitness accounts. Credibility issues are almost always for the jury.

On the police testimony drawing from eyewitness statements from witnesses who did not testify at trial, the first witness recanted his statement that he saw the shooting because two men told his father he was a "snitch" and that Wilson himself told the witness he should "do the right thing." The other eyewitness told the police that Wilson's cousin asked him about his name being on the witness list. The Second Circuit defers to the trial court's finding that Wilson had commissioned these people to scare the witnesses from testifying, and the trial court's analysis, while did not use the magic words in its analysis, was enough to show it had thoughtfully analyzed this issue in allowing the police to testify about these outside witnesses' account implicating Wilson.

Get the picture? This is a long ruling for a summary order because Wilson raised a series of issues, and since the federal district court issued a certificate of appealability, which allows you to appeal an adverse habeas ruling to the Second Circuit, Wilson's issues were not frivolous. But they were not strong enough to get around the strict habeas corpus rulings now in place.