Whether the district court ignored due process by its repeated failure to rule on petitioner's Brady claims

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Counterintuitive though it may be in this.later stage in the litigation, which has gone on for more than two decades, the fact is, that this petitioner has never had his case heard on the actual facts and evidence that was in the possession of the prosecutors at the time of his trial. Given the existing record of new developments, it is clear, and as this Court’s decision in McCoy v. Louisiana, 584 U.S. __ (2018), has confirmed, that the trial was not fair, was a perversion of the truth, and produced an unreliable result. ~ At petitioner’s 1997 trial, the trial court excluded three witnesses from testifying that the initial suspect had confessed to the murder and implicated the victim’s girlfriend in the crime. Defense counsel went to trial having conducted no investigation of the initial suspect and his ties to the victim. As trial began, counsel insisted petitioner give his signed consent allowing him to argue “self-defense” and . admit identification. Over petitioner’s objection and without written consent, counsel abandoned the defense’s position from his opening statement that petitioner was an innocent party, and in a stunning turnaround—argued in closing, that petitioner, in extreme emotional disturbance had stabbed the victim in “self-defense.” In 2008, the district court granted petitioner habeas relief under Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284 (1973), and denied petitioner’s Sixth Amendment claim involving trial counsel’s actions arguing “self-defense” over petitioners’ objection. Despite well-establish law at the time, the district court defended counsel’s actions as “strategic” trial strategy on grounds that because there was not “strong enough” evidence to corroborate a third-party’s confessions to the murder, “It was within the wide range of competence and trial strategy to argue that in the event the jury believed the prosecution, 1t should consider that the stabbing was in self-defense.” The district court failed to recognize that a strategic decision that does not conform to the client’s objectives is ethically impermissible. As the record below documents—the district court engaged in a pattern of egregious legal error by intentionally failing to follow the law. More fundamentally, the effort to excuse the misconduct of habeas prosecutors to constrain the judiciary’s inherent authority to police fraud on the court, is an alarming position for a district court to embrace. The district court's repeated failure to rule on petitioner’s Brady claims presented in the original petition and in subsequent motions is not ambiguous. The district court’s disabling conflict lies in the simple fact that the judge would have to find Brady misconduct against his former law students—a decision the district court has avoided at all costs. The original panel deciding Christian v. Frank, (2010) took the unprecedented ; step to set in place an order permanently barring petitioner’s case from any collateral / review, no matter the circumstances. These errors of law combined to deprive MW ' petitioner of the habeas review of his claims to which he was entitled under 28 U.S.C. ~ ~———--—"§"22.54, effectively depriving him of his first habeas corpus petition. A decade after the district court defended trial counsel’s actions in conceding petitioner’s guilt, this Court pronounced in McCoy v. Louisiana, 138 S. Ct. 1500, 1508 (2018), that the Sixth Amendment guarantees a defendant the right to choose “the objective of his defense and to insist that his counsel refrain from admitting guilt.” McCoy’s holding confirms the district court’s manifest error in defending trial counsel’s actions over petitioner’s objection, resulted in “a grave miscarriage of —_ justice” because petitioner was denied the right to make a fundamental choice about — his own defense. Under these circumstances, petitioner properly sought to reopen his habeas application invoking McCoy, because he had been erroneously left without any adjudication