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Nature of Suit Code: 530
Nature of Suit: Prisoner Petitions - Habeas Corpus
Cause of Action: 

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-2539

OSCAR C. THOMAS,

Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

MARC CLEMENTS,

Respondent-Appellee.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 12-cv-1024 — William E. Callahan, Jr., Magistrate Judge.

____________________

DECIDED AUGUST 7, 2015

____________________

Before FLAUM, WILLIAMS, and TINDER, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM. The panel has voted unanimously to deny 

appellee’s petition for rehearing, and no judge in active service has called for a vote on the petition for rehearing en 

banc, which also is denied.

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge, concurring in the denial of

rehearing en banc. The panel held that, if two state courts 

consider a subject, with Court A denying relief on one 

ground and Court B on a different ground, then a federal 

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2 No. 14-2539

court must ignore the first decision and consider only the 

second for the purpose of 28 U.S.C. §2254(d). See 789 F.3d 

760 (7th Cir. 2015). Section 2254(d) provides that “[a]n application for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a person in 

custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not 

be granted with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on 

the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication 

of the claim” contradicted the Supreme Court, applied that 

Court’s decisions unreasonably, or determined the facts unreasonably. If Court A’s decision must be ignored, then 

whatever topic it resolved has not been “adjudicated on the 

merits” and §2254(d) drops out.

Whether the first in a sequence of state-court decisions 

should be ignored has divided the courts of appeals. Compare Barton v. Warden, Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, 786 

F.3d 450, 463 (6th Cir. 2015), and Barker v. Fleming, 423 F.3d 

1085, 1093 (9th Cir. 2005) (both limiting §2254(d) to the final 

state-court decision that included at least one reason), with 

Collins v. Secretary, 742 F.3d 528, 546 n.12 (3d Cir. 2014), Loden v. McCarty, 778 F.3d 484, 495 (5th Cir. 2015), and Hammond v. Hall, 586 F.3d 1289, 1332 (11th Cir. 2009) (considering 

the explanations given by all state judges).

The panel thought that Ylst v. Nunnemaker, 501 U.S. 797 

(1991), supports ignoring reasons that precede the final state 

decision. That is not so clear to me. Nunnemaker deals with a 

situation in which Court A says something and Court B is 

silent (say, when it denies a petition for discretionary review). When this sequence occurs, Nunnemaker holds, the 

federal court should treat the reason given by Court A as the 

state’s rationale. See also Hittson v. Chatman, 135 S. Ct. 2126 

(2015) (Ginsburg, J., concurring in the denial of certiorari). 

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No. 14-2539 3

The Court adopted this look-past-silence approach to provide proper respect to the state’s effective adjudications. 

When two state courts give different reasons, and the second 

(a court of appeals or state supreme court) does not disagree 

with the first (a trial court or intermediate appellate court), 

there is little reason to treat the first as having been obliterated. Respect for the state judiciary requires considering both.

Still, there is little point in granting rehearing en banc to 

move this circuit from one side of a conflict to another. The 

subject belongs on the Supreme Court’s plate.

Rehearing en banc is especially inappropriate because the 

answer may not matter. I have been generic, talking about 

“grounds” in general, resolved by “Court A” and “Court B.” 

But most disputes of this kind arise from a single asserted 

problem: ineffective assistance of counsel. Under Strickland 

v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), ineffective assistance has 

two components: deficient performance and prejudice. 

Courts can reject an ineffective-assistance claim by deciding 

either of these components adversely to the petitioner. Resolving an ineffective-assistance claim on one of these 

grounds makes for a shorter opinion and also avoids what 

many judges consider to be dicta (others would call it an alternative holding).

Consider what happened in this case. After Oscar Thomas petitioned for collateral relief, the state’s court of first instance held a hearing and concluded that counsel’s performance satisfied the Sixth Amendment. Wisconsin’s court of 

appeals did not disagree with that assessment but thought it 

unnecessary to address the performance component. It held 

that, even if counsel’s performance fell short, Thomas did 

not suffer prejudice. Our panel thought that the court of apCase: 14-2539 Document: 38 Filed: 08/07/2015 Pages: 8
4 No. 14-2539

peals had contradicted the Supreme Court by misstating the 

standard for prejudice—it asked whether better performance 

would have led to a different result, while Strickland poses 

the question whether there was a reasonable probability of a 

different result. The panel then put everything the state judiciary had said to one side and made an independent decision on every issue. Nothing any state judge did mattered 

because the initial decision (about performance) didn’t 

count, and the appellate decision (about prejudice) articulated the wrong legal standard. On the merits, the panel found 

both deficient performance and prejudice—though it conceded that the case might well have come out the other way 

had §2254(d) been applied to either component of the ineffective-assistance analysis.

Two legal rules underlie this approach. One is the proposition that the opinion of every state court except the last 

must be ignored. The other is the proposition that performance and prejudice, the two components of an ineffectiveassistance claim under Strickland, are separate “claims” for 

the purpose of §2254(d). The panel discussed the first of these but not the second, and it is on the second that I want to 

concentrate.

Why should two components of ineffective assistance be 

separate “claims” for the purpose of §2254(d)? They are distinct issues, certainly, but why distinct claims? Unless every 

“issue” is a “claim” for the purpose of §2254(d), it should be 

enough that the state court adjudicated the ineffectiveassistance contention. That it avoided alternative grounds of 

decision does not mean that it failed to adjudicate the 

“claim”; addressing either the performance or the prejudice 

component resolves the claim, and enough is enough.

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No. 14-2539 5

Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86, 97–100 (2011), holds 

that §2254(d) applies even when a state court gives no reason; §2254(d) is activated by a decision on the merits, not by 

the length (or even the existence) of an opinion. Doesn’t this 

imply that, when a state court gives one sufficient reason 

and stops, the claim has been fully adjudicated? We know 

from Davis v. Ayala, 135 S. Ct. 2187 (2015), that, if a state 

court rejects a claim on harmless-error grounds, that’s a ruling “on the merits” for the purpose of §2254(d). Doesn’t this 

imply that a decision on Strickland’s prejudice component 

resolves the whole ineffective-assistance claim on the merits 

for the purpose of §2254(d)?

A series of decisions in this circuit since §2254(d)’s enactment in 1996 equates “claim” with “issue.” The most 

thorough of these is Woolley v. Rednour, 702 F.3d 411 (7th Cir. 

2012). See also, e.g., Toliver v. Pollard, 688 F.3d 853 (7th Cir. 

2012); Sussman v. Jenkins, 642 F.3d 532 (7th Cir. 2011) (Ripple, 

J., in chambers). These decisions collect earlier opinions, but 

none explains why “claim” means “issue.” Elsewhere we 

have treated all aspects of ineffective assistance as a single 

“claim” for the purpose of 28 U.S.C. §2244(b), which addresses successive litigation. See Duarte v. United States, 81 

F.3d 75 (7th Cir. 1996). Why should “claim” have one meaning in §2244 and a different meaning in §2254?

Before 2011, when the Supreme Court decided Richter, 

panels in this circuit tacitly equated “issue” with “claim” by 

asserting that §2254(d) requires a federal court to “defer to” 

the reasoning of the state judiciary—and, when there is no 

reasoning on a particular topic, there’s nothing to defer to. 

But §2254(d) does not mention deference. It does not treat a 

state court as if it were a federal administrative agency, 

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whose decision were being reviewed under the APA subject 

to the Chenery doctrine, which limits the judiciary to evaluating the agency’s stated reasons. Section 2254(d) says that, if a 

state court has resolved a “claim” on the merits, the prisoner’s petition must be denied unless an exception has been 

established. That a state court thinks one reason enough, and 

omits what on its understanding would be either dictum or 

an alternative holding, does not authorize the federal court 

to substitute its judgment for the state judiciary’s (which is 

what “de novo review” means).

Richter pulled the rug out from under our pre-2011 cases 

by holding that §2254(d) applies even if the state court was 

silent. According to Woolley, however, although Richter rejects this court’s original rationale, it does not require a 

change in result. That’s because, in Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 

510, 534 (2003), the Supreme Court itself made a de novo decision on an issue that the state court did not address, although the state court did resolve the “claim” on the merits. 

See also Rompilla v. Beard, 545 U.S. 374, 390 (2005); Porter v. 

McCollum, 558 U.S. 30, 39 (2009).

Wiggins, Rompilla, and Porter all say that the application 

of §2254(d) depends on which issues a state court discusses. 

Porter, the most recent of this line, states flatly (558 U.S. at 

39): “Because the state court did not decide whether Porter’s 

counsel was deficient, we review this element of Porter’s 

Strickland claim de novo. Rompilla v. Beard, 545 U.S. 374, 390 

(2005).” But it is not sound to treat as a holding everything 

the Supreme Court ever said on the way to any decision. The 

Court resolves the questions on which certiorari was granted. None of the petitions in Wiggins, Rompilla, and Porter

presented the question whether “issue” is the same as 

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No. 14-2539 7

“claim” under §2254(d). None of the briefs in any of these 

cases devotes an argument to that subject. The Supreme 

Court did not address that topic in any of its opinions or 

even recognize that “issue” and “claim” might differ; it has

never explained why each component of Strickland is a 

“claim” for the purpose of §2254(d).

We have the judicial equivalent of a rumor chain. The 

first decision in a sequence (Wiggins) makes an unreasoned 

assertion on which no one had focused—perhaps because in 

2003, when Wiggins was decided, many lawyers thought

about §2254(d) in terms of deference to the state court’s reasons and found it natural to say that §2254(d) is limited to 

issues expressly discussed. Later cases, such as Rompilla and

Porter, repeat an assertion from Wiggins that was not important to the questions those petitions raised. Because the 

parties have not questioned the first link of the chain, the 

Justices don’t question it either. A later decision (Richter) 

then jettisons the assumption behind the first link in the 

chain, showing that “claim” in §2254(d) is not a synonym for 

the state court’s rationale. But no one notices that the most 

recent decision affects the earlier assumption, and further 

litigation gets diverted. The diversion in this proceeding is 

that the parties have concentrated on the question whether a 

federal court should look through the opinion of Court B to 

the reasons on a different issue given by Court A.

Instead of tackling that fallout from Wiggins, the Supreme Court ought to revisit the unreasoned statement in

Wiggins that has made the subject important. The Justices do 

not think of drive-by statements (that is, things said without 

the benefit of briefs or reasoning) as “holdings” that need to 

be followed or overruled. When the subject is finally preCase: 14-2539 Document: 38 Filed: 08/07/2015 Pages: 8
8 No. 14-2539

sented for consideration, it can be resolved on the merits 

without pretending that stare decisis controls the outcome. 

This is so when the topic is subject-matter jurisdiction. See, 

e.g., Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, 559 U.S. 154, 161 (2010); 

Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, 523 U.S. 83, 91 

(1998). When the subject is non-jurisdictional, the non-effect 

of an unreasoned declaration is even clearer.

The federal judiciary should apply §2254(d) as written 

and ask whether the state judiciary has decided a “claim” on 

the merits, rather than whether the last state court has written an opinion about a particular issue relevant to that claim. 

But the contrary view is entrenched in this circuit’s precedent, and it has the support of declarations (if unreasoned 

ones) by the Supreme Court and several other circuits. See, 

e.g., Rayner v. Mills, 685 F.3d 631, 637 (6th Cir. 2012). Rehearing this case en banc would not avoid the need for the Justices to consider this topic. That is why I have not called for a 

vote on the petition for rehearing en banc.

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