Judges Ask State Supreme Court to Overturn Colleagues’ Ruling

A Ninth Circuit Court judge was joined by 13 of his colleagues in asking the Nevada Supreme Court to reverse a decision made by his own court earlier this year after a rehearing request was denied this week.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit maintained that Domonic Malone, an inmate convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole, was entitled to habeas relief a decade after his conviction following his claimed that he was forced to represent himself at trial. Nevada Attorney General Brian Williams requested a rehearing about the matter but was denied by the circuit court when it went to a vote.

The filing, in which the rehearing was denied, was published on Thursday. Newsweek reached out to the Ninth Circuit by email for comment.

In the filing, Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee and 13 of his colleagues expressed their concerns about the ruling and called on the Nevada Supreme Court to reverse the case, blaming an “unreasonable determination of the facts” involved in the original request.

Bybee argued that habeas relief should not have been granted, given that Malone was ambiguous in his request for self-representation during his trial. Malone allegedly made frequent requests for counsel while also expressing that he hoped to represent himself. At one point, Malone complained that his appointed attorney was trying to kill him, the filing said.

Habeas relief is a type of post-conviction relief that involves filing a petition for habeas corpus in state or federal court. Habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner before a court to determine if the imprisonment is lawful.

Bybee said that the case “cries for reversal,” and explained several of Malone’s “obstructionist tactics” in his dissent.

“This should have been an easy case,” Bybee wrote in the filing. “A defendant has the right to represent himself, but he must invoke that right unequivocally. Clearly established federal law requires courts to ‘indulge in every reasonable presumption against waiver’ of the right to counsel. Malone asked for representation—repeatedly—and accused the state court of denying him the right to counsel. The right outcome could not have been more obvious. But our panel did not apply clearly established federal law as determined by the Supreme Court.”

Bybee also said he wrote his dissent “as a warning to lower federal courts and, especially, our colleagues in the state courts not to rely on our deeply flawed memorandum disposition.”

Meanwhile, several other judges held firm with the court’s original ruling, arguing that Bybee’s dissent “inaccurately characterizes both the memorandum disposition and the record upon which it is based, and seeks to substitute its own factual determinations for that of the panel majority.”

“The court is right not to hear this case en banc,” the judges wrote.