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In a 6-3 per curiam decision announced on December 2, the United States Supreme Court has overturned a federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which had voided the conviction of a San Mateo man found guilty of murdering a gas station clerk. The issue in Hedgpeth v. Pulido was the standard used by the Ninth Circuit to overturn a conviction when there was an error that was unlikely to have made any difference in the case.
“Once again, the Supreme Court has had to rein in the Ninth Circuit for ignoring established rules,” said Kent Scheidegger, who authored an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
In its ruling, the Ninth Circuit had chosen not to follow the standard of review required by the Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in Brecht v. Abrahamson, which CJLF helped to win. Noting this, the Supreme Court’s opinion states “....despite full briefing on the applicability of Brecht, the Court of Appeals mentioned Brecht only briefly in a footnote, ...and then went on to agree with Pulido’s alternative assertion....”
The case involves the 1993 conviction and life sentence of Michael Robert Pulido for the robbery and murder of Ramon Flores, a cashier at a Bay Area Shell gas station. According to court records, Flores was murdered in the early morning hours of May 24, 1992, by a .45 caliber gunshot to the head. The following day, the gas station cash register was found on the side of a road.
Shortly after the murder, Pulido was arrested on an auto theft charge. While in custody, he volunteered information about the crime and led police to some discarded .45 caliber cartridges which appeared to have come from the same gun used in the murder. Initially, Pulido blamed the robbery and murder on several people, but in a later telephone conversation with his uncle, Michael Aragon, he said that he committed the robbery by himself.
At trial, Aragon and two of his children testified to seeing Pulido with a .45 caliber pistol and hearing him say the Shell station would be easy to rob because the cashier was always asleep. Aragon also testified that, on the day of murder Pulido told him that he had bought a Coke at the Shell station, then shot the cashier in the face and took the cash register.
Pulido denied this, claiming that Aragon entered the Shell station alone early that morning, supposedly to buy some cigarettes, while he waited in the car. After hearing a gunshot, Pulido claims that he ran inside to find the victim on the floor and Aragon holding the gun. After they left with the cash register, Aragon forced him at gunpoint to open it, give him the money, and throw the register along the road. The defense attorney also attacked Aragon’s credibility, presenting evidence that he was a liar, a drug user, and a thief.
Evidence introduced by the prosecution included Pulido’s fingerprints on the cash register and on a can of Coke found on the gas station counter. No fingerprints from Aragon were on the cash register or the Coke can. Pulido testified that he never touched a Coke can on the morning of the murder and that perhaps he handled the can when he was visiting the station on an earlier occasion.
Probably recognizing that both the defendant and Aragon were liars, the jury convicted Pulido of the robbery and the murder but could not agree whether he had personally used the gun. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
The conviction and sentence were upheld on direct appeal by the Court of Appeal and later by a unanimous California Supreme Court. In its decision, the state court clarified California’s felony-murder law, announcing that 1) an accomplice could be found guilty of felony murder if he was a conspirator who aided and abetted in the felony at the time of the killing, but that 2) a person who was initially unaware that a robbery was planned, and only participated after someone was killed, could not be an accomplice to murder. Because this was a new definition of the law, the trial court’s jury instructions, three years earlier, had not included this second point. However, the Court determined that, in light of other specific findings made by the jury showing they rejected Pulido’s “late joiner” story, this error was harmless.
Pulido’s error claims were also rejected by the California Supreme Court on state habeas corpus. In 1999, he filed his federal habeas corpus petition, and, in 2005, a district judge finally ruled on it, overturning the conviction due to the error in the jury instructions. Later, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, citing its own precedent which provides the defendant with a unique standard for determining when an error is harmful, different from the standard established by the U. S. Supreme Court.
CJLF joined California’s appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court to argue that the Ninth Circuit had failed to follow the standard announced by the high court’s holding in Brecht v. Abrahamson, which requires that claims reviewed on federal habeas corpus be accompanied by stronger evidence of harm to the defendant’s case than is necessary on direct appeal to the state appellate courts.
“Trials are never perfect. Today’s ruling reaffirms that convictions will not be overturned for minor problems which have no substantial effect on the verdict,” said Scheidegger.