26 August 2020 :
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit released habeas corpus appeal decisions in two capital cases involving California death-row prisoner Martin Kipp, overturning his conviction in a case prosecuted in Orange County and upholding his conviction and death sentence in a Los Angeles County case. In granting a new trial in the 1983 Orange County murder of a 19-year-old woman, a 2-1 panel of the circuit court held that the trial court violated Kipp’s due process rights by permitting the prosecution to present evidence of the unadjudicated Los Angeles murder under the theory that there was a “highly distinctive pattern” between the two crimes. The panel found that the state court’s distinctive-pattern finding was an unreasonable determination of the facts because the state court misstated the record in reaching the conclusion that the condition in which the bodies were discovered was “unusually similar” and ignoring evidence presented by Kipp supporting his claim that the murders were “too dissimilar to support the inference of connection by common identity or intent” necessary for the Los Angeles case to be admissible in the Orange County trial. The same three-judge panel unanimously upheld Kipp’s conviction and death sentence in the rape and murder of an 18-year-old college student in Los Angeles County three months earlier. The court rejected Kipp’s claims that the court unconstitutionally permitted the prosecution to present personal letters to his wife in which he admitted to sexually assault and murder, denigrated the victims, and made references to Satan. It ruled that even if presenting the references to Satan to the jury was unconstitutional, the error was harmless because it did not have “a substantial and injurious effect” on the jury’s verdict. The court similarly rejected Kipp’s claim that his trial counsel was ineffective in failing to object to the introduction of the letters.
