Marcus Roosevelt Taylor v. United States

During petitioner’s jury trial, two essential prosecution witnesses testified about a key event concerning petitioner’s alleged involvement in the charged offenses in a manner that was flatly contrary to (1) their pretrial statements given to the two trial prosecutors (reflected in FBI memoranda); (2) the factual basis of the plea agreement of a codefendant, which had been prepared by the two trial prosecutors and executed shortly before petitioner’s trial began; and (3) a passage from a book published by the lead trial prosecutor several years after the trial. Although petitioner’s trial counsel possessed the FBI memoranda and the codefendant’s plea agreement during the trial, petitioner’s trial counsel did not make the FBI memoranda or the codefendant’s plea agreement part of the trial record that was used on petitioner’s subsequent direct appeal. As a result, petitioner’s new counsel on his direct appeal could not have raised a due process perjury claim at that juncture. For that reason, petitioner first raised a due process perjury claim in subsequent post-conviction proceedings under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. The district court and Fourth Circuit both held that petitioner’s perjury claim was procedurally defaulted for purposes of his § 2255 motion because petitioner had not raised the perjury claim on his direct appeal. In view of the foregoing, the questions presented are: I. Whether the Fourth Circuit’s decision – that petitioner procedurally defaulted his due process perjury claim by not raising it on his direct appeal despite the undisputed fact that the evidence supporting petitioner’s perjury claim was “dehors the record” on direct appeal, Waley v. Johnston, 316 U.S. 101, 104 (1942) (per curiam) – conflicts with this Court’s well-established precedent, most recently reflected in Bousley v. United States, 523 U.S. 614, 621-22 (1998) (citing Waley). II. Whether this Court should vacate the Fourth Circuit’s judgment and remand with instructions to order an evidentiary hearing on petitioner’s perjury claim.