7th Circuit reverses Wisconsin defendant’s district court habeas win
Maurice J. Holt v. Gary Boughton, 7th Circuit Court of Appeals No. 24-3346, 3/30/26
Holt was tried and convicted of armed robbery and other crimes after three men entered an apartment and took property at gunpoint. After exhausting his state appeals, Holt sought habeas relief in federal court and the district court granted his petition. The 7th circuit disagrees and reverses.
Two of the three robbers were identified and caught quickly, but there was confusion about the identity of the third man. There was evidence that Holt’s nephew, Raevonne Gosha, was the third robber. However, other evidence suggested that Holt was the third robber. After trial, Holt filed a postconviction motion seeking a new trial based on the trial court’s exclusion of certain photographs and his attorney’s failure to present evidence. The circuit court denied the motion after an evidentiary hearing.
At the hearing, Holt’s friend testified, providing an alibi. Trial counsel testified that he had made several mistakes, including failing to call another witness to provide a contradictory alibi for Holt, failing to impeach one of the victims, failing to introduce evidence about Holt’s and Gosha’s heights and weights, failing to elicit testimony that Holt’s DNA wasn’t found at the crime scene, and failing to introduce a letter from one of the other robbers to Gosha that may have referenced both Holt and the robbery.
First, Holt argued that the circuit court’s exclusion of certain photographs, which showed two masked men with weapons, denied him his right to present a defense. The court here disagrees with the district court, concluding that the district court “misread the Wisconsin Court of Appeals’s decision” because the WI court did not find constitutional error. Thus, the court asks whether exclusion of the evidence violated Holt’s right to present a defense. It concludes that the court of appeals’ decision was not unreasonable because the images only showed that Gosha and one of the robbers had been together with weapons close in time to the robbery, which was uncontested, and “the images were of only peripheral importance[.]” Holt also needs to show prejudice, and the court concludes that the addition of the pictures would not have created a reasonable probability that the jury would have gone the other way.
On appeal, Holt argued that his counsel’s performance was deficient in 13 different ways. COA rejected those arguments either because Holt failed to show deficient performance, prejudice, or both. The district court found ineffective counsel based on five areas of prejudicial deficient performance. Holt argues those five areas, and that his attorney was ineffective for failing to introduce the letter. The court finds no prejudice as to counsel’s failures to: (1 and 2) call two alibi witnesses, as their testimony would have contradicted other trial evidence and they had credibility issues, (3) introduce the evidence that Holt’s DNA was not found at the scene because the state could have shown that the other two robbers’ DNA wasn’t at the scene either, (4) introduce evidence of Holt’s and Gosha’s height and build because they were the same weight and the difference between 5’9″ and 6′ is “narrow” and “so small that it likely would not have mattered”, (5) introduce a statement that Gosha had been casing the apartment the night before the robbery because the victims initially identified Gosha as the third robber so it was “not unreasonable” for COA to conclude that this additional statement “would not have created a reasonable probability of a different outcome”, and (6) introduce the letter because the letter was ambiguous and could have implicated Holt.
Finally, the court considers the cumulative impact of the errors Holt raised. COA noted that the state’s case wasn’t overwhelming, but identified the significant evidence introduced against Holt at trial and the ways in which both Holt’s defenses were undermined. Thus, considering the record as a whole, the court concludes that the state’s case was not so weak that defense counsel’s errors—individually or together—caused a substantial likelihood of a different result.