Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca9-09-15341/USCOURTS-ca9-09-15341-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
D. K. Sisto
Appellee
Frank Taylor
Appellant

Document Text:

FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

FRANK TAYLOR,  No. 09-15341

Petitioner-Appellant, D.C. No.

v.  2:06-cv-02878-

GEB-CHS D. K. SISTO,

Respondent-Appellee. OPINION 

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Eastern District of California

Garland E. Burrell, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted

February 9, 2010—San Francisco, California

Filed May 25, 2010

Before: John T. Noonan, Marsha S. Berzon and

Sandra S. Ikuta, Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge Noonan;

Dissent by Judge Ikuta

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COUNSEL

Deanna F. Lamb, Central California Appellate Program, Sacramento, California, for the petitioner-appellant.

David Andrew Eldridge, Deputy Attorney General, Sacramento, California, for the respondent-appellee.

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OPINION

NOONAN, Circuit Judge:

Frank Taylor, a California state prisoner, appeals the judgment of the district court denying his petition for habeas corpus. We reverse the judgment.

FACTS

Early morning September 9, 2002, Frank Taylor was driving his wife’s car. For reasons undisclosed by the record she

had reported the car to the police as stolen. Officer Halk called in the license number. The dispatcher told him that the car

was stolen. Halk gave chase and called for backup. Eventually, Halk’s patrol car and another patrol car boxed Taylor in

his wife’s car into a driveway and signaled to Taylor to obey

orders from the police. Taylor backed up his car until it

touched Halk’s, then revved his engine and pushed the patrol

car backwards, forcing Halk to jump into his car to avoid

injury. Taylor then drove on to the sidewalk and briefly

escaped. He led the police on a chase in which he sped at

speeds from 60 to 100 miles per hour, ignoring speed limits

and stop signs. Ultimately, he crashed into a truck and was

captured.

PROCEEDINGS

Taylor was charged with evading a peace officer in violation of California Vehicle Code § 2800.2(a) and assault with

a deadly weapon on a peace officer in violation of California

Penal Code § 245(c).

At the start of jury selection the trial judge gave this admonition to the prospective jurors:

The reason that being a juror is hard is because it’s

probably the only time in your life that you are ever

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asked to take all of the experiences that you have had

that have contributed to how you think about everything that you think about and to lay those experiences aside and to only make your decisions based

upon what you hear that goes on in this trial, that you

hear in this courtroom, and upon that, you must

make your decision.

So I ask you to imagine as prospective — as

jurors, that there is a large box at the doorway to this

courtroom. And when you walk into this courtroom

as a juror, you take all the decisions that you have

made, all the opinions you have about how people

act, how people behave, what kind of people behave

in what way, what makes them do that, and you

leave them in that box. We call them your biases and

your prejudices, and we all have them. We depend

upon those biases and prejudices in our normal lives

a lot of times, but you can’t depend upon them when

you are jurors.

The only thing that we ask you to walk into this

courtroom with is your common sense, and that

serves you well as a juror, and that’s why it’s the

second hardest job in the world [the most difficult

job being that of a parent], but that’s what we call

upon you to do.

The court’s reference to the “box” and to the putting aside

of experience came up during the questioning of ten potential

jurors, eight of whom were dismissed. Mr. L, who was dismissed, stated that “[t]he judge told us yesterday to put personal experiences at the door, and if I’m selected as a juror,

I would do my best to put that aside, but . . . I might have a

tough time doing that . . . .” Ms. D, who was also dismissed,

did not understand the challenged admonition. When questioned outside of the presence of the other potential jurors, she

told the judge that she could set aside her personal experience

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with sexual assault if the charge did not have elements of sexual of assault, but that she would have “a greater difficulty of

putting aside just my everyday experience, because I think

that’s what my common sense is based on, is my everyday

experience. So I would be hard-pressed to put that aside and

still have my common sense.” The court clarified the admonition as follows:

The Court: Let me see if I can make it clearer to

you . . . so you can be clear with us.

Your everyday experience, like knowing that the

sun comes up in the west and sets in the east —

comes up in the east and sets in the west, whatever

it does, and those kinds of things, that nightfall is the

end of the day, that’s pretty common sense; that if

you throw things up in the air, they’ll fall down to

the ground, that’s what we’re talking about, common

sense, the kind of judgment that we make. Prejudice

and judgments have kind of the same root.

Prospective Juror D: Oh, Okay.

The Court: That all people with blue eyes act in

this particular way, all people with black skin act in

that particular way, those are the kind of judgments

that you leave in the box outside my courtroom.

During the sequestered questioning of Mr. T, whom the court

dismissed for cause, Mr. T stated that he would not be able

to put “in the box” his experience of having a brother who

was beaten and called racial epithets by sheriffs’ deputies.

During the questioning of the other jurors in open court, the

court referred to the “box” as “experiences . . . that might

affect your judgment.” The judge asked individual potential

jurors if they could put particular personal experiences “in the

box.” For example, the court asked Mr. J, whom the prosecu7454 TAYLOR v. SISTO

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tor ultimately dismissed, about an experience being subjected

to an arrest warrant for a different person with the same name.

When Mr. J said that he could be objective, the court

asked,”[a]nd your experience with law enforcement would

remain in my box out there while listening to the testimony

of law enforcement officers?” The court asked other potential

jurors if they could set aside the following experiences:

• Mr. K (dismissed): “experiences with your sons

that might affect your ability to be fair and impartial” and “feelings” that the potential juror might

have if the charged crime was similar to one in

which his son had been involved.

• Juror No. 4: “personal experiences” that might

create sympathy, referring to the juror’s experience being questioned by a grand jury.

• Mrs. W (dismissed): “experiences like that that

might affect your judgment” that must be “control[led] in this particular setting,” referring to

prior experiences with law enforcement.

Defense counsel also brought up the “box” in questioning

three potential jurors, two of whom he dismissed. Ms. G, who

had been prosecuted for a DUI, stated that she did not understand what the “box” was, and counsel clarified that he meant

whether her experience of having committed a crime and been

prosecuted “will affect your ability to be fair to both sides in

this case.” Counsel asked Ms. T, whose husband was a retired

peace officer, whether she could leave anything she might

have heard from her husband “in the proverbial box outside

the courtroom.” Counsel also asked Juror No. 8 whether he

could “leave in the box” the “whole experience” of having his

father incarcerated for murder, or “whether there is part of

that experience that may affect your attitude toward either

side in this proceeding.”

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At the close of evidence, the court did not refer to the

“box” or personal experiences. The court instructed the jury

that it “must not be influenced by pity for or by prejudice

against a defendant” and that it must “not be biased against

the defendant because he’s been arrested for this offense,

charged with the crime, or brought to trial.” The court

instructed the jury that it “must not be influenced by sentiment, conjecture, sympathy, passion, prejudice, public opinion, or public feeling,” and that it “must decide all questions

of fact in this case from the evidence received in this trial, and

not from any other source,” giving as examples visits to the

location and consulting reference works. The court also

instructed the jury that it might draw inferences from circumstantial evidence. It instructed that the jury is “not bound to

decide an issue of fact in accordance with the testimony of

number of witnesses which does not convince you as against

the testimony of a lesser number or other evidence which

appeals to your mind with more convincing force.” Finally,

the court instructed the jury on reasonable doubt.

During voir dire, Taylor had objected under Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), and People v. Wheeler, 583 P.2d

748 (Cal. 1978), to the prosecution’s use of peremptory challenges to strike three jurors: Mrs. W, whom the trial court

assumed to be Hispanic, Mr. L, who was of Southeast Asian

descent, and Ms. D, who was African-American. The trial

court rejected Taylor’s motions.

The jury acquitted Taylor of assault with a deadly weapon

but convicted him of the lesser included offense of assaulting

a peace officer in violation of Penal Code § 241(b). It convicted him of evading a police officer. Under California’s

“three strikes” system, he was sentenced to imprisonment for

26 years to life.

Taylor appealed to the state court of appeal for the third

district. His first ground was what the appeal court labeled

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“the preinstruction of the jury,” that is, what Taylor described

as “the dehumanizing of the jury.”

Taylor had not objected to the preinstruction. The Court of

Appeals said that nonetheless it would review his objection

now. The court declared: “Read in context, and contrary to

defendant’s view, the instruction, although a bit odd, did not

create a jury of ‘automatic robots with sterilized minds’ . . . .

In context, the instruction did not command the jurors to

ignore life experiences.”

The Court of Appeals then addressed the Wheeler/Batson

objections, citing California cases that specifically rejected

Ninth Circuit precedents in this area. The court held that the

prosecutor’s stated reasons for his objections were raceneutral and sincere. The court also rejected Taylor’s additional claims regarding the instructions on Vehicle Code

§ 2800.2(a), which were raised for the first time on appeal.

The Supreme Court of California summarily affirmed.

Taylor filed a habeas petition in federal court, raising the

same claims brought on direct appeal. The district court

denied his petition. This appeal followed.

ANALYSIS

The Standard of Review. We review the decision of the

California court of appeal. We are bound by federal statute to

affirm unless the decision “was contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” 28 U.S.C.

§ 2254(d)(1). “Clearly-established” law consists of the holdings not the dicta of the Supreme Court. Williams v. Taylor,

529 U.S. 362, 412 (2000).

The Judge’s Box. With a wonderfully concrete image, the

trial judge instructed all the prospective jurors in this case that

“they must as jurors, take all the decisions that you have

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made, all the opinions you have about how people act, how

people behave, what kind of people behave in what way, what

makes them do that, and you leave them in that box.” He told

them that they must “take all of the experiences that you have

had that have contributed to how you think about everything

that you think about” and “lay those experiences aside.”

The instruction was an unqualified directive that each juror

disregard his or her own life experience. The instruction

included a reference to “your biases and your prejudices” but

perversely or paradoxically stated that the jurors’ experiences

were what “we call your biases or your prejudices.” Sweepingly, the instruction asked the prospective jurors to deposit

all their experience in the judge’s disposal box.

The judge’s colloquies with individual prospective jurors

showed that the judge was not joking. The responses of individuals in the voir dire show them taking the judge’s instruction equally seriously. The judge’s only attempt to explain

what he meant consisted in the statements that a juror could

use her experience to know what nightfall was and where the

sun rose or set. Nightfall and sunrise are universal facts, not

experiences that may be particular to an individual juror.

Nothing in this explanation permitted a juror to draw on the

personal experiences that make up human life.

The Court of Appeals characterized the preinstruction as “a

bit odd,” but defensible “in context.” The Court of Appeals

did not specify the context to which it referred. The only context that was apparent was the context of the criminal trial in

which the jury had a key role. It was in that context that the

potential jury members were told to shed their life experience.

[1] A reviewing court must consider “the reasonable likelihood that the jury has applied the challenged instruction in a

way that prevents the consideration of constitutionally relevant evidence.” Boyde v. California, 494 U.S. 370, 380

(1990). It might be argued that the instruction was harmless

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because it could not have been obeyed — no one can completely discard life experience. But juries are presumed to

obey their instructions. See Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U.S.

200, 206 (1987). The colloquies with members of the voir dire

show them grappling with the instruction. To follow it completely may have been impossible, but it set a goal which

jurors were instructed to achieve. The instruction, in context,

created a pool of prospective jurors who were seeking to strip

themselves of part of what made them human.

[2] The standard instructions to the jury did not cure the

deficiency. These instructions on evidence and on reasonable

doubt, were not framed to correct or neutralize the preinstruction, whose central image had played such a prominent part

in the voir dire.

Did the preinstruction contradict or unreasonably apply a

holding of the Supreme Court? We conclude that it unreasonably applied a series of holdings concerning the nature of trial

by jury under the Sixth Amendment.

[3] “[T]he essential feature of a jury . . . lies in the interposition between the accused and his accuser of the commonsense judgment of a group of laymen.” Williams v. Fla., 399

U.S. 78, 99 (1970). This fundamental precept has been recognized in a diverse series of Supreme Court cases. In Head v.

Hargrave, 105 U.S. 45 (1881), Justice Stephen Field, writing

for a unanimous court, reversed a judgment when the jury had

been instructed to be “governed by the opinions of the

experts” in evaluating the value of the legal services whose

amount was in controversy. The instruction, Justice Field

wrote, “in effect, forbade them to exercise their own knowledge and ideas.” Id. at 51. “So far from laying aside their own

general knowledge and ideas, the jury should have applied

that knowledge and those ideas to the matters of fact in evidence in determining the weight to be given to the opinions

expressed; and it was only in that way that they could arrive

at a just conclusion.” Id. at 49. The error in instructing the

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jury to discard their own knowledge was fundamental and

fatal.

Head was a civil case, and so did not involve the Sixth

Amendment, but a long line of Supreme Court cases establishes that criminal defendants are entitled to be judged by “a

body truly representative of the community.” Smith v. Texas,

311 U.S. 128, 130 (1940). The requirement of representativeness explicitly connects the right to trial by an impartial jury

to the varied and unique experiences that Americans of different backgrounds bring into the jury box. 

In Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 85 (1942), the

Supreme Court noted that the Constitution as originally

drafted guaranteed only that “the trial of all crimes . . . shall

be by jury,” but “the people and their representatives . . . were

quick to implement that guarantee by the adoption of the

Sixth Amendment which provides that the jury must be

impartial.” The Supreme Court went on to hold that the “selection of jurors from the membership of particular private

organizations” is impermissible because it does not “comport

with the concept of the jury as a cross-section of the community.” Id. at 86.

Around the same time, the Supreme Court struck down a

procedure for jury selection that excluded low wage laborers.

The Supreme Court observed that such laborers “constitute a

very substantial portion of the community, a portion that cannot be intentionally and systematically excluded in whole or

in part without doing violence to the democratic nature of the

jury system.” Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co., 328 U.S. 217, 223

(1946). In Ballard v. United States, 329 U.S. 187 (1946),

reversing a criminal conviction because the jury was composed exclusively of men, Justice William O. Douglas wrote:

“The truth is that the two sexes are not fungible; a community

made up exclusively of one is different from a community of

both . . . . a distinct quality is lost if either sex is excluded.”

Id. at 193-94.

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Ballard was grounded in the supervisory power of the

Supreme Court over the federal judiciary. See 329 U.S. at

193. Ballard has been relied on in subsequent Supreme Court

cases interpreting the Sixth Amendment right to trial by an

impartial jury and the Equal Protection Clause. See, e.g.,

J.E.B. v. Alabama, 511 U.S. 127, 133 (1994); Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522,527, 531 (1975). Ballard quoted approvingly from the dissenting opinion in the Ninth Circuit, which

explained that women should have been included in the jury

pool precisely because women may possess singular experiences and beliefs that could have influenced their assessment

of the defendant’s culpability. See 329 U.S. at 194-95.

In Peters v. Kiff, 407 U.S. 493 (1972), reversing a conviction of a white man for burglary by a jury composed exclusively of whites, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that

we are unwilling to make the assumption that the

exclusion of Negroes has relevance only for issues

involving race. When any large and identifiable segment of the community is excluded from jury service, the effect is to remove from the jury room

qualities of human nature and varieties of human

experience, the range of which is unknown and perhaps unknowable.

Id. at 503. Justices Douglas and Stevens joined this opinion.

Justices White, Brennan, and Powell concurred, stating that

the court here proclaimed a new rule “governing criminal proceedings instituted hereafter.” Id. at 507 (White, J., concurring).

[4] In Taylor v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court again

emphasized that “the fair-cross-section requirement [i]s fundamental to the jury trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.” Invoking “the commonsense judgment of the

community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken

prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps . . .

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biased response of a judge,” Taylor made clear that the constitutional right to a jury pool comprised of a “fair cross-section”

of the community derives from the importance of bringing a

broad spectrum of juror life experiences to bear on the process

of adjudicating guilt. 419 U.S. at 530.

More recently, in J.E.B. v. Alabama, reversing a judgment

in a state paternity case, in which the exercise of peremptory

challenges had eliminated all the men in the jury pool, Justice

Harry Blackmun, writing for the court, quoted: “Restricting

jury service to only special groups or excluding identifiable

segments playing majority roles in the community cannot be

squared with the constitutional concept of jury trial.” 511 U.S.

at 134 (quoting Taylor, 419 U.S. at 530). “The diverse and

representative character of the jury must be maintained ‘partly

as assurance of a diffused impartiality and partly because

sharing in the administration of justice is a phase of civic

responsibility.’ ” Id. (quoting Taylor, 419 U.S. at 530-31).

[5] These cases establish that a jury is meant to be made

up of human beings whose experience is vital to the validity

of the verdict. The cases stand as indices to the particular kind

of experience that a man or woman, a black person or a white

person, a low-wage laborer as distinct from a well-paid desk

worker may be expected to bring to service as a juror. In the

recognition of the need for diversity there is recognition of the

role of the experience of the jurors. That the jurors must be

human is an axiom. That humanity implies experience is also

axiomatic. The Sixth Amendment, as incorporated by the

Fourteenth Amendment, guarantees the right to “trial by an

impartial jury,” U.S. Const. Am. VI; Duncan v. Louisiana,

391 U.S. 145 (1968). The holdings of the Supreme Court confirm that an impartial jury is one that applies common sense

informed by the full range of human experience. The “box”

instruction affirmed by the California Court of Appeals

instructed the jury to abandon that experience.

[6] The statute governing habeas recognizes “that even a

general standard may be applied in an unreasonable manner.”

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Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930, 953 (2007). In our case,

the Court of Appeals engaged in an “unreasonable application” of federal law, as established by the holdings of the

Supreme Court. Applying the law to the facts of Taylor’s

case, the state court “ignor[ed]the fundamental principles

established by [the Supreme Court’s] most relevant precedents.” Abdul-Kabir v. Quarterman, 550 U.S. 233, 258

(2007).

Judge Ikuta’s earnest dissent requires a response: In this

case we are applying a first principle: juries are made up of

human beings. One would not expect that principle to be

denied by any court and so one would not expect that the

Supreme Court would have occasion to enunciate it in so

many words. But as the decisions we have cited do demonstrate, courts have occasionally acted as though the experience of diverse human beings can be eliminated from a jury,

and the Supreme Court has accordingly had to vindicate the

essential requirement of diversity of humans.

“Not one of these cases formulates a rule regarding how

individuals in the venire pool should use their life experiences

if seated on a jury,” the dissent observes. Exactly so. We did

not seek or set a rule as to how jurors should use their life

experiences. We are declaring that the established constitutional functions of a jury forbids the elimination of such experiences.

[7] Why did such exclusion do injury to the defendants in

these cases? The defendants obtained reversals of their convictions not because the rights of fellow citizens had been violated but because they, the defendants, had been deprived.

That deprivation was deprivation of the diversity of human

experience to which the defendants were entitled and which

is the governing principle here. 

As the Supreme Court held:

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AEDPA does not ‘require state and federal courts to

wait for some nearly identical factual pattern before

a legal rule must be applied.’ Carey v. Musladin, 549

U.S. 70, 81 (2006) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). Nor does AEDPA prohibit a federal court

from finding an application of a principle unreasonable when it involves a set of facts ‘different from

those of the case in which the principle was

announced.’ Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63, 76

(2003).

Panetti, 551 U.S. at 953.

Because we grant Taylor’s petition based on his challenge

to the preinstruction, we do not reach Taylor’s additional

claims.

The judgement of the district court is REVERSED and the

case REMANDED with direction to the district court to issue

a writ of habeas corpus.

IKUTA, Circuit Judge, dissenting:

Once again, this court disregards both the language of the

Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”)

and the Supreme Court’s repeated direction not to grant

habeas petitions unless the state court’s adjudication of the

petitioner’s claim “resulted in a decision that was contrary to,

or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established

Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the

United States,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). 

In this case, the trial court instructed prospective jurors to

put their biases and prejudices into a metaphorical “box” outside the courtroom, and to use only their common sense while

acting as jurors. Taylor’s counsel did not object to this

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instruction. On appeal, Taylor claimed that the instruction

violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury because the

instruction denied him the “common-sense judgment of a

jury” of his peers by requiring the jurors to ignore their life

experiences. The California Court of Appeal held that “the

instruction, although a bit odd, did not create a jury of ‘automatic robots with sterilized minds,’ ” and did not vitiate the

trial court’s reasonable doubt instruction to the jurors, which

they are presumed to follow.

It is readily apparent that this decision does not conflict

with any “clearly established” Supreme Court precedent. As

the Supreme Court has repeatedly explained, its precedent is

“clearly established” only if it squarely addresses an issue in

the state case or clearly extends to a similar factual context.

See, e.g., Wright v. Van Patten, 552 U.S. 120, 125 (2008) (per

curiam) (Supreme Court precedent must “squarely address[ ]”

the question at issue); Carey v. Musladin, 549 U.S. 70, 77

(2006) (Supreme Court precedent must “require” the state

court to reach a conclusion); see also Panetti v. Quarterman,

551 U.S. 930, 953 (2007) (Supreme Court precedent must

enunciate a principle that applies in an analogous case). 

Although the majority has scoured over a century of

Supreme Court decisions, none of the cases it cites “squarely

address” the question whether the voir dire instruction at issue

here violates the Sixth Amendment, see Van Patten, 552 U.S.

at 125, or announces a principle clearly applicable to this

case, see Panetti, 551 U.S. at 953. All but one of the opinions

cited by the majority address a different question: whether

excluding an identifiable group from the jury pool violates

statutory or constitutional principles.1 The only case not con1

J.E.B. v. Ala. ex rel. T.B., 511 U.S. 127, 130-31 (1994) and Ballard v.

United States, 329 U.S. 187, 193 (1946) held that the systematic exclusion

of individuals on the basis of gender from grand and petit juries violated

the equal protection clause and relevant federal statutes, respectively.

Smith v. Texas, 311 U.S. 128, 131-32 (1940) held that a complete absence

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sidering this jury pool issue held that a trial court erred in

instructing jurors in a civil case to rely on the testimony of

expert witnesses, rather than on their own judgment. Head v.

Hargrave, 105 U.S. 45, 50 (1881). 

Not one of these cases formulates a rule regarding how

individuals in the venire pool should use their life experiences

if seated on a jury. Nor, as the majority itself acknowledges,

does any case enunciate the so-called “first principle” that

courts may not eliminate “the experience of diverse human

beings” from a jury. Maj. Op. at 7463. While these cases do

contain scattered dicta, broad aphorisms, and general observations regarding the “kinds of harm that flow from discrimination in jury selection,” Peters, 407 U.S. at 498, such remarks

do not amount to “clearly established Federal law” on the

Sixth Amendment issue presented here. Under AEDPA’s

“highly deferential standard for evaluating state-court rulings,” Renico v. Lett, No. 09-338, slip op. at 5 (May 3, 2010)

(internal quotation marks omitted), we cannot reverse a state

court’s ruling for being an unreasonable application of inferences drawn from such isolated phrases. See Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 412 (2000) (The phrase “clearly established

Federal law” ”refers to the holdings, as opposed to the dicta,

of this Court’s decisions . . . .”). 

Even if the majority’s handful of cases could stand for a

general principle requiring juries to apply “common sense

of African-Americans from grand jury lists violated the defendant’s equal

protection rights. Peters v. Kiff, 407 U.S. 493, 501 (1972) held that the

systematic exclusion of African-Americans from both the grand jury and

the petit jury pools denied the defendant due process. Glasser v. United

States, 315 U.S. 60, 86-87 (1941), superseded on other grounds by rule

as stated in Bourjaily v. United States, 483 U.S. 171, 181 (1987), held that

selecting jurors from membership lists of private organizations would violate a defendant’s constitutional rights. And Thiel v. S. Pac. Co., 328 U.S.

217, 224 (1946) held that a federal court could not exclude daily wage

earners from a jury panel. 

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informed by the full range of human experience,” Maj. Op. at

7462, we could still not say that the California Court of

Appeal’s decision here was objectively unreasonable. The

“more general the rule at issue—and thus the greater the

potential for reasoned disagreement among fair-minded

judges—the more leeway [state] courts have in reaching outcomes in case-by-case determinations.” Lett, slip op. at 8

(alterations in original) (internal quotation marks omitted)

(quoting Yarborough v. Alvarado, 541 U.S. 652, 664 (2004));

see Knowles v. Mirzayance, 129 S. Ct. 1411, 1420 (2009).

Here, the state appellate court reasonably concluded that the

voir dire instruction, read in context, “did not command the

juror to ignore life experience.” Even if this conclusion is

wrong, “a federal habeas court may not issue the writ simply

because that court concludes in its independent judgment that

the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established

federal law erroneously or incorrectly.” Lett, slip op. at 5

(internal quotation marks omitted). AEDPA “demands that

state-court decisions be given the benefit of the doubt.” Id.

(internal quotation marks omitted).

In sum, the majority has strayed far from the Supreme

Court’s AEDPA jurisprudence in granting the writ in this

case. Under the explicit terms of § 2254(d)(1) and the oftrepeated direction of the Supreme Court, habeas relief is

unauthorized. As a result, I fear this decision is set to join the

long line of Supreme Court reversals of decisions by our court

that decline to take AEDPA seriously. See McDaniel v.

Brown, 130 S. Ct. 665, 666 (2010) (per curiam); Wong v. Belmontes, 130 S. Ct. 383, 384 (2009) (per curiam); Hedgpeth v.

Pulido, 129 S. Ct. 530, 530-31 (2008) (per curiam); Kane v.

Garcia Espitia, 546 U.S. 9, 9-10 (2005) (per curiam); Schriro

v. Smith, 546 U.S. 6, 7 (2005) (per curiam); Middleton v.

McNeil, 541 U.S. 433, 436 (2004) (per curiam); Yarborough

v. Gentry, 540 U.S. 1, 5 (2003) (per curiam); Woodford v. Visciotti, 537 U.S. 19, 20 (2002) (per curiam); Early v. Packer,

537 U.S. 3, 4 (2002) (per curiam); Stewart v. Smith, 536 U.S.

856, 857 (2002) (per curiam). I respectfully dissent.

TAYLOR v. SISTO 7467

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