Source: https://habeascorpusblog.typepad.com/habeas_corpus_blog/clearly-established-law/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 10:54:10+00:00

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Metrish v. Lancaster - Has SCOTUS Imposed a Reasonable Doubt Standard on Habeas Petitioners?
My first post in quite some time deals with the Supreme Court's decision last week in Metrish v. Lancaster, which reversed a Sixth Circuit habeas grant. The most disturbing thing about the opinion is that it appears to me that the Court has, as a practical matter, elevated AEDPA deference to a reasonable doubt standard in favor of "reasonably bad" state court decisions. This is unfortunate for several reasons.
In 1993, Burt Lancaster shot and killed his girlfriend in a shopping mall parking lot. Lancaster, “a former police officer with a long history of severe mental-health problems,” presented a diminished-capacity defense to a jury. The jury found that Lancaster had the capacity to commit willful, deliberate, and premeditated homicide and accordingly convicted him of first-degree murder.
Eight years later, a federal habeas court reversed the conviction on Batson grounds, holding that the prosecutor had impermissibly used race as a factor in jury selection. Four years after that, in 2005, Michigan again tried Lancaster for the murder. Lancaster’s plan, once again, was to go with a diminished capacity defense. However, that was a problem this time around. In 2001, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that there was no diminished capacity defense under Michigan law, notwithstanding that Michigan’s lower courts had continually recognized such a defense. The judge presiding over Lancaster’s retrial applied the new decision ("Carpenter") and excluded evidence of diminished capacity. Lancaster and his attorney apparently did not view this ruling as a sign that they were facing a hangin’ judge: they proceeded with a bench trial after which Lancaster was again convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life plus two years. The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed.
Lancaster’s habeas claim was that the Michigan courts violated due process by applying Carpenter, 2001 Michigan Supreme Court decision, to a 1993 homicide. The District Court denied the petition, but a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit reversed and granted.
The Supreme Court acknowledged that Lancaster might have prevailed if the Court were to apply the Rogers rule de novo. To be sure, that acknowledgment was tepid ("Lancaster’s argument against applying Carpenter retroactively is arguably less weak than the argument opposing retroactivity we rejected in Rogers”). But the Court did a good job acknowledging the merits of Lancaster's Due Process claim. Unlike the year and a day rule at issue in Rogers, the diminished capacity defense was “not an ‘outdated relic of the common law’ widely rejected by modern courts and legislators.’” To the contrary, the Model Penal Code includes a diminished capacity defense, the American Bar Association has reported that a majority of States allow presentation of diminished capacity evidence in at least some circumstances and, prior to Carpenter, the Michigan State Bar’s pattern jury instructions included an instruction on diminished capacity. Also unlike Rogers, Michigan appellate courts had regularly acknowledged diminished capacity as a viable defense both before and after Lancaster’s first trial.
While AEDPA deference can often result in injustice in individual cases, in this case it strikes me as particularly stark. As Justice Breyer noted in his Rogers dissent, “the Due Process Clause asks us to consider the basic fairness or unfairness of retroactive application of the [state] court's change in the law.” Justice Stevens' Rogers dissent criticized the majority for “undervalu[ing] the threat to liberty that is posed whenever the criminal law is changed retroactively.” (Justice Scalia also wrote a lengthy dissent in Rogers focusing on the history of retroactive changes in common law). In Lancaster, the majority essentially admitted that the petitioner did not have fair warning that the Michigan courts would abolish the diminished capacity defense. In denying his claim, the Court indicated that it was willing to ignore such threats to liberty in the habeas context.
The case was admittedly complicated by the long delay between Lancaster's first trial and the retrial. But that delay is more properly laid at the feet of the prosecutors who violated Batson (and waited four years to retry the petitioner after the first conviction was reversed) and the courts which took ten years (including an appeal of the Batson habeas grant) to resolve that claim. A practical consequence of the Supreme Court's decision is that Lancaster is held responsible for the delay.
What disturbs me more generally is the Court’s continued ratcheting up of AEDPA deference in favor of reasonably bad state court decisions. To describe that deference, the Court used language I first noticed in its 2011 decision in Harrington v. Richter: “To obtain habeas corpus relief from a federal court, a state prisoner must show that the challenged state-court ruling rested on ‘an error well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.’” When I read this "any possibility" language in 2011 it struck me that the Court had essentially imposed a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for habeas petitioners. Lancaster convinces me (beyond a reasonable doubt, you might say) that this is indeed the current standard.
I understand that AEDPA deference is grounded in important interests – comity, federalism and scarce judicial resources, to name a few. But by further closing the door to habeas relief, I believe the Roberts court is favoring these interests too much over the judiciary’s primary interest (and core competence) of doing justice in individual cases. If the Justices feel that other interests should weigh more heavily in the habeas context, they need to do a better job of explaining why.
The Supreme Court issued its opinion today in Greene v. Fisher. And as I expected (or is feared the better word?), the Court concluded that "clearly established law" is the law in place at the time of the relevant state court merits adjudication. It was unanimous. It's available here.
It's a short, pretty straightforward opinion. Basically, it comes down to the language of the statute. The Court believes that the language of the statute compels the result. While the Court makes it seem like this is such a no-brainer, it really isn't. If it was, then this would have been decided years ago. Not to overstate it, but I think it does alter a common understanding of habeas law.
And this decision will have ripple effects throughout habeas law. In particular on retroactivity and, in my mind, exhaustion.
As for retroactivity, the Court states that "clearly established law" and retroactivity are two different concepts. But they are completely intertwined. This decision is going to necessarily overrule parts of Teague. It is going to be interesting (and probably a little frustrating) to see how this plays out.
*Certainly, a defendant in that situation could (and I emphasize could) seek review from the Supreme Court. But there is absolutely no guarantee that the Supreme Court would grant cert. to the defendant in that situation. The Court in Greene seems to believe it's a GVR is a certainty. But we saw after the decision in Melendez-Diaz that it's not a certainty. The Court held many petitions, but did not grant all of them. For example, it denied cert. in Rawlins but Rawlins was right on point with Melendez-Diaz. So seeking cert. is not a certainty. It also now has no effect on the clearly established law date. It also has no effect on exhaustion, as seeking cert. is not part of that process.
And, in my mind, Greene has an impact on exhaustion. First of all, this decision is inconsistent with the exhaustion requirement. The idea of exhaustion was to give state courts the first crack at a constitutional violation. Now a denial of discretionary review is absolutely meaningless to habeas review. Why force a petitioner to seek discretionary review if that step will in most cases have no impact on federal review? It shifts the equities. A petitioner may want to seek review from the higher state court, but it shouldn't be required to in order to obtain habeas relief.
So the Court has continued down the path of placing even greater restrictions on habeas review. Not unexpected, but very troubling.
The transcript for Greene v. Fisher is available here.
I read through it last night. Wow. This is really gonna happen. The Court is going to make the temporal cutoff for "clearly established" law the date of the relevant state court decision. If you think I am just being all doom and gloom here about the argument, just go read it. Not a single judge was on petitioner's side. The questions to the State's attorney were not very probing. And the State's attorney did not even have to use up all of his time. Indeed, the questioning made it seem as if this issue was not a difficult one at all, particularly in light of what happened last term in Pinholster.
This inevitable result is going to raise a lot of questions going forward. The first, what is going to happen to the retroactivity rules? The only way that this is going to work is for Greene to completely supplant Teague's "after conviction becomes final" retroactivity rule. There's no way around that. It's funny how petitioner had to ask to keep Teague, when the Teague rules were originally conceived as a way to make life harder for petitioners.
But what about Teague's two exceptions to the retroactivity bar. Do those still apply? They are not in the statute. And what about the situation where a Supreme Court case is decided after the relevant state court decision but does not state a new rule? For example, in Portalatin, the Second Circuit decided that, in Apprendi and Blakely cases, Cunningham was such a decision. Thus, Cunningham could be considered when reviewing a habeas petition where the conviction became final before it was decided. Will this still be allowed?
Another impact will be exhaustion. Why should the strict exhaustion rules remain in place? In particular, the requirement that the defendant seek discretionary review where available. Certainly, one policy underlying exhaustion would remain in place -- giving the State first shot at correcting the error. But discretionary review is discretionary. The overwhelming odds are that permission to appeal will be denied. And that decision will soon be immune from federal review. That's not equitable. So why should a petitioner be required to seek discretionary review when the state has already issued the decision that will be up for habeas review and the almost certain denial of review will have no impact on the habeas proceeding?
These things and more will have to be sorted out in the future. And just when I thought habeas law couldn't get any worse for petitioners . . .
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in the habeas case of Greene v. Fisher. The question: what is the temporal cut off for clearly established under 2254(d)(1).
To get a little more into the weeds, I believe that this issue presents a conflict between long-standing equitable principles of habeas corpus -- exhaustion -- and the preclusion issues that came up last term. If the original intent of exhaustion wins out, then the date for clearly established law will be when the last state court reviews the case. If preclusion wins out, then it will be the date of the last reasoned state court decision up for review on habeas.
And, if it goes the latter way, then such a decision could potentially conflict with Teague retroactivity principles. Under Teague, a Supreme Court decision cannot be applied retroactively to a convicion after the conviction has become final. And that finality date was always looked at as the date that the direct appeal ended. From what I remember, there was a recent debate in a capital case in the Supreme Court over whether it ended at the conclusion of state court review or did you include the time to seek cert (a-ha, found it; it was Smith v. Spisak). But both of those dates is later than what the clearly established law date could end up being.
So, what happens if the clearly established law date is different from the retroactivity date? Not sure. I am still working through the potential logic and permutations. Will it mean that the retroactivity date is gonna change? It shouldn't really since it was originally set based on the equitable principles underlying habeas. But the retroactivity date would have to change in order to make everything work.
Or does it mean that the "clearly established law principle" is simply going to subsume all of the Teauge rules? But that could potentially mean that retroactivity would no longer even be available on habeas review as none of those rules are written into the statute. It's an extreme view, but that seems like something that could actually happen.
Or maybe I am just overthinking all of this.
Either way, I truly believe that Greene is a very important case this term. I am very eager to see the transcript of that argument.
UPDATE: For more in depth analysis, you can check out these previews.
Two quick notes. I neglected to mention that the Supreme Court dismissed the cert. petition in Tolentino v. New York on Monday. The Court did not provide an explanation. SCOTUSblog speculated that there could have been a procedural problem with the case. It's a very disappointing result.
Second, SCOTUSblog also has a new post up about relisted cases. Added to the list of relist cases are two habeas cases that share the same issue: Whether “clearly established law” is based on the law in effect when the state conviction becomes final or at the time of the state court decision? The two cases that present this issue are Stovall v. Miller, 10-851, and Greene v. Fisher, 10-637.
Just to clarify, though, Greene is not technically a relisted case. It was put on for an earlier conference, but taken off that list when a response was requested. So that one doesn't count for the purposes of relisting. That means it is now on for, technically, its first conference on April 1. SCOTUSblog speculates that Stovall was relisted in order to get it on to the same conference list as Greene. I am describing Greene here as "relisted" since it appears that it is in the same boat as a relisted case.
Summary Order today from Second Circuit in Jenkins v. Brown, 09-4812-pr. It's a bit of a head-scratcher. Explanation below.
ANALYSIS: For the most part, the relatively lengthy summary order is pretty fact-intensive. The defendant was in the middle of testifying and began to complain that he felt sick. The trial court concluded that it was simply a delaying tactic and decided to allow the trial to continue without the defendant finishing his testimony. Second Circuit concludes that the court's factual finding that the defendant was just seeking to delay should not be disturbed.
The head-scratching part has to do with the second half of the analysis. This issue had to do with whether the court's failure to grant a continuance infringed upon his contitutional right to testify. The court states that there is clearly established law that a defendant has a right to testify but that it's not absolute as it must bow to accomodate other legitimate interests in a criminal trial. HOWEVER, -- and this is really the knub of the case -- the restriction may not be arbitrary or disproportionate to the purposes they are designed to serve.
The clearly established law seems pretty clearly established, right? The question should have been whether the state court's decision denying the adjournment was an unreasonable application of that principle, namely whether the restriction was arbitrary or disproportionate.
The Second Circuit spends a page setting it up that way. It dedicates a whole 9-line block quote to explaining how a federal court should decide whether a state court's decision was unreasonable.
But then it does not analyze it that way. Without ever mentioning that there was even a question about clearly established law, it held, "Where the Supreme Court's cases 'give no clear answer to the question presented, . . . it cannot be said taht the state court unreasonably applied clearly established Federal law."
Huh? That is a "clearly established law" denial. It's a 100% Musladin* analysis. In fact, the court even cites Musladin!
*Musladin = ever-shrinking definition of what constitutes clearly established law.
And, of course, this holding seems completely contradictory to the fact that it had just explained exactly what the clearly established law was for this situation. If this was going to be the basis of the holding, why structure the opinion this way? Why spend all of the real estate explaining the relevant law and what would make something an unreasonable application of that law -- dedicating a whole block quote to the subject matter for crying outloud -- just to shift gears and deny it for a reason that the court had just shown was inapplicable to the case?

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