United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 13-1637
LARRY WILKINS,
Petitioner, Appellant,
v.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Respondent, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Richard G. Stearns, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Lynch, Chief Judge,
Selya and Kayatta, Circuit Judges.
George F. Gormley, with whom Stephen P. Super and George F.
Gormley, P.C. were on brief, for appellant.
Dina Michael Chaitowitz, Assistant United States Attorney,
with whom Carmen M. Ortiz, United States Attorney, was on brief,
for appellee.
June 3, 2014
SELYA, Circuit Judge. In August of 2012, Massachusetts
was rocked by the disclosure that Annie Dookhan, a chemist at a
state testing laboratory, had falsely certified drug-test results.
These revelations called into question a large number of federal
and state drug convictions. This case is near the head of the
parade: it marks the first time that this court has had the
occasion to deal with the effect of Dookhan's skullduggery on a
federal criminal conviction.
The architecture of the case is easily described.
Petitioner-appellant Larry Wilkins was charged in federal court
with a drug-distribution offense; the drugs were sent to the state
testing laboratory; and Dookhan thereafter certified that they were
crack cocaine. The petitioner subsequently pleaded guilty and went
to prison.
When news of the drug-testing scandal broke, the
petitioner returned to the district court and filed a motion to set
aside his conviction and vacate his guilty plea. The district
court refused. Concluding, as we do, that Dookhan's misconduct was
not likely to have influenced the petitioner's decision to enter a
guilty plea, we affirm.
I. BACKGROUND
The raw facts are largely undisputed. In April of 2011,
an undercover police officer approached Ronald Merritt on the
streets of Boston and signaled a desire to buy drugs. After a
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brief dialogue, the officer handed $40 to Merritt, who went to
retrieve the merchandise. As Merritt began to walk away, the
putative buyer demanded (and received) Merritt's cell phone as
temporary collateral for the $40.
Merritt crossed the street to meet with the petitioner.
The petitioner gave something to Merritt, who then returned with a
plastic bag presumably containing crack cocaine.
The undercover officer took the bag and returned
Merritt's cell phone — but not before having Merritt dial the
officer's number. The two men then parted company.
A cadre of Boston police officers had been anticipating
this moment. On the undercover officer's signal, the police
arrested both Merritt and the petitioner. A search revealed an
additional bag of crack cocaine in Merritt's possession and a cell
phone in which the undercover officer's number resided atop the
call history.
The petitioner's stockpile of contraband was considerably
larger. In addition to having the undercover officer's "buy" money
(the serial numbers of which had been pre-recorded), the petitioner
clenched a napkin containing five bags of what appeared to be crack
cocaine. While en route to the police station, the petitioner
discarded thirty more bags, which fell to the floor of the police
cruiser. During booking, one last bag was discovered on the sole
of the petitioner's shoe.
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Officers inspected the stash confiscated from Merritt and
the petitioner and field-tested one bag. This bag tested positive
for crack cocaine. All of the bags were then shipped to a state
facility, the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute (the
Hinton Lab), for further analysis. About one month later, Annie
Dookhan, a chemist at the Hinton Lab, certified that she had tested
a representative sample of the bags in the petitioner's and
Merritt's cases and that the tests were positive for cocaine base
(crack cocaine).
In due season, a federal grand jury indicted the
petitioner for possessing crack cocaine with the intent to
distribute. See 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). The petitioner initially
maintained his innocence but, some seven months later, tendered a
guilty plea.1 At the change-of-plea hearing, he admitted that the
government's version of the offense, which prominently featured the
fact that the seized bags contained crack cocaine, was true. The
district court accepted the guilty plea and subsequently sentenced
the petitioner to a 102-month term of immurement. The petitioner
did not appeal.
After the appeal period had expired, news broke of
irregularities at the Hinton Lab. The investigation centered on
1
Although no written agreement accompanied the petitioner's
change of plea, the government made clear on the record that it had
forgone the filing of an information under 21 U.S.C. § 851 in
exchange for the plea.
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Annie Dookhan, the chemist who had signed the drug certification in
the petitioner's case. At first, the burgeoning scandal was
limited to reports that Dookhan had failed to follow laboratory
protocols. Further probing, spearheaded by the Massachusetts State
Police, disclosed that Dookhan's perfidy ran much deeper: she had
purposely contaminated certain samples to ensure that they would
test positive for drugs. She also had "dry-labbed" (identified by
sight, rather than by chemical test) other specimens.
The investigation culminated in the filing of a bevy of
criminal charges against Dookhan. She ultimately admitted her
guilt in a Massachusetts state court to charges of perjury,
obstruction of justice, evidence tampering, and falsely claiming to
hold a degree. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 266, § 89; id. ch. 268,
§ 1; id. § 13B(1)(c); id. § 13E(b).
Although there was no direct evidence that Dookhan had
committed any transgressions with respect to this case, the
petitioner moved to set aside his conviction and vacate his guilty
plea based on the scandal. Construing the motion as a petition for
post-conviction relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, the district court
denied it. See United States v. Wilkins, 943 F. Supp. 2d 248, 254,
259 (D. Mass. 2013). The court subsequently granted a certificate
of appealability, see 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c)(1)(B), limited to the
issue of whether the petitioner's plea was voluntary within the
purview of Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742 (1970). See United
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States v. Wilkins, 948 F. Supp. 2d 87, 89 & n.3 (D. Mass. 2013);
see also Brady, 397 U.S. at 755 (holding that a "plea of guilty
entered by one fully aware of the direct consequences . . . must
stand unless induced by threats . . . , misrepresentation . . . ,
or perhaps by promises that are by their nature improper as having
no proper relationship to the prosecutor's business"). This timely
appeal followed.
II. ANALYSIS
We start by clarifying the controlling legal standard.
Although the petitioner insistently invokes the "fair and just
reason" standard of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(d)(2)(B),
that standard applies only to attempts to vacate a guilty plea
arising "after the court accepts the plea, but before it imposes
sentence." Fed. R. Crim. P. 11(d)(2). Where, as here, a defendant
first seeks to vitiate his guilty plea after sentencing, he "may
not withdraw [the] plea of guilty . . . , and the plea may be set
aside only on direct appeal or collateral attack." Fed. R. Crim.
P. 11(e). Because the petitioner did not pursue a direct appeal
from his conviction and sentence, the only avenue of relief that
remains open to him is a collateral attack.
That path is a narrow one, demarcated here by the
jurisprudence of 28 U.S.C. § 2255. The petitioner bears the burden
of demonstrating that he can successfully traverse the path. See
David v. United States, 134 F.3d 470, 474 (1st Cir. 1998). He
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faces an arduous trek: as a general matter, "a voluntary and
intelligent plea of guilty made by an accused person, who has been
advised by competent counsel, may not be collaterally attacked."
Mabry v. Johnson, 467 U.S. 504, 508 (1984).
But this path is not necessarily a dead end. Among other
things, "a prisoner can collaterally attack his sentence on the
ground that his guilty plea was not knowing or voluntary if his
claim is based on evidence not available to him at the time of the
plea." Ferrara v. United States, 456 F.3d 278, 289 (1st Cir.
2006); see Machibroda v. United States, 368 U.S. 487, 493 (1962).
In this instance, the petitioner pins his hopes on such a ground.
To prevail on this kind of claim, a convicted defendant
who asserts a right to rescind his guilty plea because of newly
discovered government misconduct must make two showings. "First,
he must show that some egregiously impermissible conduct (say,
threats, blatant misrepresentations, or untoward blandishments by
government agents) antedated the entry of his plea." Ferrara, 456
F.3d at 290. "Second, he must show that the misconduct influenced
his decision to plead guilty or, put another way, that it was
material to that choice." Id.
The parties vigorously dispute whether the petitioner has
made the first showing. According to the petitioner, Dookhan's
conduct was both egregious and attributable to the government by
virtue of Dookhan's relationship to the prosecution team. The
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government demurs, arguing that the federal sovereign cannot and
should not be held responsible for the misfeasance of a laboratory
worker employed by a separate sovereign (the state). In this
regard, it notes that the federal prosecutors were themselves
blameless.
We need not resolve this contretemps. To succeed, the
petitioner must carry the devoir of persuasion on both elements of
the Ferrara framework, and his obvious inability to make the second
of the two required showings dooms his appeal. We therefore turn
directly to that element: materiality.
To satisfy this requirement, the petitioner "must show 'a
reasonable probability that, but for [the misconduct], he would not
have pleaded guilty and would have insisted on going to trial.'"
Id. at 294 (alteration in original) (quoting Hill v. Lockhart, 474
U.S. 52, 59 (1985)). For this purpose, a reasonable probability
means "a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in a belief
that the petitioner would have entered a plea." Id.
When the misconduct involves newly emergent evidence not
previously disclosed, the probability assessment "will depend in
large part on a prediction whether the evidence likely would have
changed the outcome of a trial." Hill, 474 U.S. at 59. This
inquiry demands the use of an objective standard. See Ferrara, 456
F.3d at 294.
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The trial court plays a pivotal role in fashioning this
probability assessment. On appeal, its factual findings must be
accepted unless those findings are clearly erroneous. See id. at
295. Its ultimate conclusion, however, constitutes a legal
judgment that is subject to de novo review. See id.
Here, the district court concluded that the petitioner
failed to show a reasonable probability that he would have insisted
on a trial had he known of Dookhan's misconduct. In reaching this
conclusion, the court supportably determined that the evidence of
the petitioner's guilt was "overwhelming." Wilkins, 943 F. Supp.
2d at 258. To begin, the circumstances of the sale to the
undercover officer and the petitioner's role in it comprised
powerful circumstantial evidence. And there was more: the
transaction followed the pattern of a prototypical street corner
drug buy; a field test of one of the seized bags proved positive
for crack cocaine; and the petitioner was arrested with a stockpile
of similar bags. See id. at 251.
The petitioner concedes, as he must, that Dookhan bears
no relationship to this mass of circumstantial evidence. He
focuses instead on the only point at which his case intersects with
Dookhan: whether the bags seized from him actually contained crack
cocaine. He theorizes that because the chemist who certified the
contents of the bags as crack cocaine (Dookhan) has now been
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disgraced, his newfound ability to lay siege to Dookhan ought to
shake our confidence in his guilty plea.
This theory elevates hope over reason. After the
petitioner moved for section 2255 relief, the government
commissioned new testing by a different chemist. This second round
of testing was performed exclusively on samples that the district
court found were "untouched" by Dookhan. Id. at 258 n.10. Such a
supplemental evaluation was possible because Dookhan had "tested
only random samples of the drugs seized," id., leaving some thirty-
one virgin bags untouched and untested, see id. at 252. Of these,
thirteen randomly selected bags were tested by the second chemist
and were found to be positive for the presence of cocaine. See id.
at 252-53. These uniform results set to rest any real doubt about
the nature of the merchandise purveyed by the petitioner.
Undaunted, the petitioner labors to discredit these
results because, in his view, the mere presence of the virgin
samples at the Hinton Lab during Dookhan's tenure corrupts the
chain of custody. Dookhan's wrongdoing was so malignant, his
thesis runs, that it infected everything that was at the Hinton
Lab.
This miasmic theory of evidentiary corruption has little
to commend it. Critically, the petitioner has done nothing to
defile the district court's factual finding that the bags involved
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in the second round of testing were "untouched" by Dookhan.2 Id.
at 258 n.10. This finding is not clearly erroneous — indeed, the
record does not permit any contrary inference — and the petitioner
has not explained how Dookhan could have contaminated the virgin
bags without touching them.
The petitioner interposes two other objections to the
district court's consideration of the second round of testing. His
first plaint — that evidence of these test results came by way of
the second chemist's affidavit, without an evidentiary hearing — is
jejune. The petitioner did not request an evidentiary hearing, and
there was no evident need for one. In such circumstances, the
petitioner cannot be heard to complain that the district court did
not convene an evidentiary hearing sua sponte. See United States
v. Mala, 7 F.3d 1058, 1062 (1st Cir. 1993); Teamsters Union, Local
No. 59 v. Superline Transp. Co., 953 F.2d 17, 20 n.4 (1st Cir.
1992).
The petitioner's second plaint focuses on the decision in
Commonwealth v. Scott, 5 N.E.3d 530 (Mass. 2014). There, the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) applied our two-part
Ferrara framework to a state criminal defendant who was seeking to
withdraw his guilty plea, post-conviction, because of Dookhan's
2
By the same token, there is no evidence that Dookhan might
have expected that anyone else would ever test those bags. It
follows that there is no reason to suspect that she took the time
and trouble to open, contaminate, and close each one.
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misconduct. In the course of remanding for factfinding, the SJC
prohibited the trial justice from "consider[ing] any assertion by
the Commonwealth that it would have offered to retest the
substances at issue in the defendant's case if the defendant had
known of Dookhan's misconduct." Id. at 548. Crediting any such
assertion "would require a court to heap inference upon inference
and will bring the inquiry . . . too far afield of the facts and
circumstances actually known to the defendant at the time of his
guilty plea." Id.
This case is a horse of a different hue, and the Scott
prohibition has no bearing here. The second round of testing here
was not an attempt to create a hypothetical scenario but, rather,
produced test results concerning bags that nobody had previously
purported to test. The distinction is readily apparent: contrary
to the hypothetical inquiry that Scott prohibits, the results of
the second round of testing are concrete, definitive, and
susceptible to intelligent analysis.
The petitioner has another shot in his sling. At oral
argument, his counsel offered a different slant on the effect of
Dookhan's skullduggery. He speculated that he might have urged a
jury to make his client's trial a referendum on Dookhan rather than
a proceeding aimed at determining his client's guilt or innocence.
Refined to bare essence, this importuning asks us to find
materiality based on the possibility of jury nullification. But
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courts are duty-bound to presume that jurors will follow their
instructions, see United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 740 (1993);
Evans v. Avery, 100 F.3d 1033, 1041 (1st Cir. 1996), and there is
no principled way in which we can rely on a petitioner's hope of
jury nullification to find prejudice. See, e.g., Sorich v. United
States, 709 F.3d 670, 678 (7th Cir. 2013), cert. denied, 134 S. Ct.
952 (2014); United States v. Allen, 406 F.3d 940, 949 (8th Cir.
2005) (en banc).
There is one last point. The petitioner, unlike the
petitioner in Ferrara, admitted his factual guilt (including the
nature of the contraband sold) in open court at the time that he
changed his plea. This admission is entitled to significant
(albeit not dispositive) weight when, as now, he seeks to vacate
that plea through a collateral attack. See, e.g., Campbell v.
Marshall, 769 F.2d 314, 321-22 (6th Cir. 1985). And such an
admission is especially compelling because the petitioner neither
attempts to explain it away nor makes any assertion of factual
innocence. Cf. United States v. Parrilla-Tirado, 22 F.3d 368, 373
(1st Cir. 1994) (explaining that the absence of a claim of
innocence "cuts sharply against allowing [a defendant's] motion to
withdraw his guilty plea" when a fair and just reason is required
for plea withdrawal).
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III. CONCLUSION
We need go no further. We write without attempting to
lay down any broad rule to govern all Dookhan-related cases.
Rather, our decision rests on the facts and circumstances of the
petitioner's case. To prevail, he must convince us that there is
a reasonable probability that, considering the totality of the
circumstances, he would not have pleaded guilty had he known of
Dookhan's transgressions. See Ferrara, 456 F.3d at 294. Given the
overwhelming evidence of the petitioner's guilt and the fact that
the Dookhan scandal, though sensational, does not provide him a
viable defense, the petitioner manifestly failed to cross this
threshold. Thus, he is not entitled to any relief.
Affirmed.
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