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BROWN v. DAVENPORT 

Syllabus 

habeas relief and ordered Michigan either to retry or release Mr. Dav-
enport.  This Court granted certiorari to resolve a circuit conflict about
the proper interaction between the tests found in Brecht and AEDPA. 

Held: When  a  state  court  has  ruled  on  the  merits  of  a  state  prisoner’s 
claim, a federal court cannot grant habeas relief without applying both
the test this Court outlined in Brecht and the one Congress prescribed
in  AEDPA;  the  Sixth  Circuit  erred  in  granting  habeas  relief  to  Mr. 
Davenport  based  solely  on  its  assessment  that  he  could  satisfy  the 
Brecht standard.  Pp. 6–25.

(a) When Congress supplies a constitutionally valid rule of decision, 
federal courts must follow it.  In AEDPA, Congress instructed that a 
federal court “shall not . . . gran[t]” relief with respect to a claim that 
has been adjudicated on the merits in state court “unless” certain con-
ditions are met.  §2254(d).  To be sure, the court below in this case was 
required to ensure that petitioner carried his burden under the terms 
of Brecht.  But satisfying Brecht is only a necessary condition to habeas
relief here; AEDPA must also be satisfied.  The Sixth Circuit erred in 
holding otherwise.  Pp. 6–7.

(b) Since the founding, Congress has authorized federal courts to is-
sue habeas writs to federal custodians, and since the Civil War, Con-
gress has extended that authority to include issuance of writs to state
custodians.  All along, Congress’s statutes used permissive rather than
mandatory language; federal courts enjoy the “power to” grant writs of
habeas corpus in certain circumstances.  That structure persists today; 
federal courts “may” grant habeas relief “as law and justice require.” 
28 U. S. C. §§2241, 2243.

Under  the  traditional  understanding  of  habeas  corpus,  a  prisoner 
could not usually use the writ to challenge a final judgment of convic-
tion  issued  by  a  court  of  competent  jurisdiction.    But  by  1953,  this 
Court had begun to depart from that understanding.  In Brown v. Al-
len, 344 U. S. 443, 458, it held that a state-court judgment “is not res 
judicata” in federal habeas proceedings with respect to a petitioner’s 
federal  constitutional  claims.    After  Brown,  federal  courts  struggled
with an exploding caseload of habeas petitions from state prisoners. 

Eventually,  this  Court  responded  by  devising  new  rules  aimed  at
separating the meritorious needles from the growing haystack of ha-
beas petitions.  The Court’s decision in Brecht—which reasoned that 
Chapman’s  harmless-error  rule  for  direct  appeals  was  inappropriate 
for  use  in  federal  habeas  review  of  final  state-court  judgments,  507
U. S.,  at  633–634—was  part  of  that  effort.    Brecht,  like  this  Court’s 
other  equitable  doctrines  restricting  habeas  relief,  stems  ultimately 
from the discretion preserved by Congress’s habeas statutes. 

Congress  later  introduced  its  own  reforms  in  AEDPA,  instructing