Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/lafler-v-cooper-and-aedpa
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 10:47:52+00:00

Document:
Lafler presented the Supreme Court with an unusual opportunity to declare new doctrine on habeas review. First, the State had conceded that the performance of respondent Anthony Cooper’s lawyer was deficient under the first prong of Strickland v. Washington3—a point not easily demonstrated in most habeas cases because of the deference afforded strategic decisions.4 Second, the Court managed to avoid what would have been a difficult hurdle for the petitioner to clear in seeking relief under§ 2254(d)(1), the provision of the habeas statute that conditions relief upon a showing that the state decision was either “contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.”5 The state court’s vague wording allowed the Court to characterize the state decision as “contrary to” Strickland and to bypass the issue of whether it was an “unreasonable application” of Strickland.
To establish ineffective assistance, the defendant must demonstrate that his counsel’s performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness and that counsel’s representation so prejudiced the defendant that he was deprived of a fair trial. With respect to the prejudice aspect of the test, the defendant must demonstrate a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s errors, the result of the proceedings would have been different, and that the attendant proceedings were fundamentally unfair and unreliable.
Consider, by contrast, what would have happened had the Court decided to review a federal habeas challenge to a state decision in which the state court rejected a claim like Cooper’s, but had more clearly relied on Strickland in its reasoning and interpreted Strickland as did the Lafler dissenters. In order to grant habeas relief in such a case, the Court first would have had to conclude that the position held by four Justices (assuming Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would have taken the same position on the merits of the Sixth Amendment question), a unanimous Utah Supreme Court,14 and at least four court of appeals judges,15 was “unreasonable” under § 2254(d)—that is, “so lacking in justification that there was an error well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.”16 Not likely.
Indeed, a petitioner who had challenged a state court decision that said virtually nothing except “denied,” after a bare citation of the correct Supreme Court precedent, would have had a much more difficult time than Cooper did convincing a federal court that the decision was “contrary to” established federal law, and would instead have had to meet Richter’s exacting “unreasonable application” standard. As the Court explained in Richter, “Where a state court’s decision is unaccompanied by an explanation, the habeas petitioner’s burden still must be met by showing there was no reasonable basis for the state court to deny relief.”17 In short, but for the unusual combination of ambiguous reasoning by the state court and admitted incompetence in Lafler, the Supreme Court probably would have had to save its development of the constitutional regulation of representation during the plea process for a different case—an appeal of either a state postconviction decision (like Frye and Padilla v. Kentucky18) or a decision under § 2255,19 where the “unreasonable application” standard of § 2254(d) would not apply.
By affirming the grant of habeas relief for Cooper under § 2254(d), the Court appears to have assumed that its foregone-plea doctrine was “clearly established” at least as far back as 2005, when the Michigan Court of Appeals rejected Cooper’s claim of ineffective assistance. That is undoubtedly surprising news to the divided judges of the Tenth Circuit, to the justices of the Utah Supreme Court, and to those who believed that under § 2254(d), habeas corpus would “guard against extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems,” not “substitute for ordinary error correction through appeal.”27 But it is welcome news for any petitioner whose foregone-plea claim was rejected by a state court in the past seven years.
Nancy J. King is the Lee S. and Charles A. Speir Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School.
Preferred citation: Nancy J. King, Lafler v. Cooper and AEDPA, 122 Yale L.J. Online 29 (2012), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/lafler-v-cooper-and-aedpa.
28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) (2006).
Lafler, slip op. at 14-15 (majority opinion) (citations omitted).
Id. at 9 (Scalia, J., dissenting).
Harrington v. Richter, 131 S. Ct. 770, 786-87 (2011).
Id. at 777 (emphasis added).
130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010).
28 U.S.C. § 2255 (2006) (governing collateral review of convictions of federal prisoners).
See Padilla, 130 S. Ct. at 1478.
People v. Cooper, No. 250583, 2005 WL 599740, at *1 (Mich. Ct. App. Mar. 15, 2005) (footnote omitted) (citations omitted).
Id. at 14 (quoting Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 405 (2000) (opinion of O’Connor, J.)) (internal quotation marks omitted).
See Williams, 529 U.S. at 406 (opinion of O’Connor, J.) (“Assume, for example, that a state-court decision on a prisoner’s ineffective-assistance claim correctly identifies Strickland as the controlling legal authority and, applying that framework, rejects the prisoner’s claim. Quite clearly, the state-court decision would be in accord with our decision in Strickland as to the legal prerequisites for establishing an ineffective-assistance claim [and thus would not be “contrary to” Strickland] even assuming the federal court considering the prisoner’s habeas application might reach a different result applying the Strickland framework itself.”).
It takes a holding by the Supreme Court to clearly establish federal law under § 2254(d). See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) (2006) (requiring the “clearly established federal law” be “determined by the Supreme Court of the United States”); see also Thaler v. Haynes, 130 S. Ct. 1171, 1175 (2010) (“[N]o decision of this Court clearly establishes the categorical rule on which the Court of Appeals appears to have relied.”); Knowles v. Mirzayance, 556 U.S. 111, 122 (2009) (“With no Supreme Court precedent establishing a ‘nothing to lose’ standard for ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims, habeas relief cannot be granted pursuant to § 2254(d)(1) based on such a standard.”); Wright v. Van Patten, 552 U.S. 120, 125 (2008) (“No decision of this Court, however, squarely addresses the issue in this case or clearly establishes [a new standard] in this novel factual context.” (citation omitted)).
See Williams, 529 U.S. at 391-93; Lockhart v. Fretwell, 506 U.S. 364, 369-372 (1993); Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U.S. 157, 186-87 (1986); Weatherford v. Bursey, 429 U.S. 545, 561 (1977).
State v. Greuber, 165 P.3d 1185, 1189 (Utah 2007) (concluding that “a fair trial for the defendant generally negates the possibility of prejudice” under Strickland).
See Williams v. Jones, 583 F.3d 1254 (10th Cir. 2009) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc) (“[N]o decision from the United States Supreme Court has ever held (or even hinted) that a lawyer’s bad advice to reject a plea offer gives rise to a violation of the Sixth Amendment, or any other provision of federal law. Neither does a conventional Strickland analysis compel such a novel result.”). The Seventh Circuit also appeared to anticipate that the question was a close one. See Kerr v. Thurmer, 639 F.3d 315 (7th Cir. 2011) (“We think it best to move forward now, recognizing that if the Court rules that the later trial erases any possible claim relating to potential plea bargains, then it is likely that Kerr’s case will have to be dismissed at that time.”), vacated, 132 S. Ct. 1791 (remanding the case for further consideration in light of Lafler).
I do not mean to suggest here that Lafler will actually prompt more state courts to “withhold explanations for their decisions.” Richter, 131 S. Ct. at 784. I agree with the Richter Court that “[o]pinion-writing practices in state courts are influenced by considerations other than avoiding scrutiny by collateral attack in federal court.” Id.
See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) (prohibiting relief from a state decision that rejected the merits of a federal claim unless the decision was contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established Supreme Court precedent); Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989) (permitting no retroactive application of “new rules” of constitutional criminal procedure, with two narrow exceptions). See generally Wayne R. LaFave, Jerold H. Israel, Nancy J. King & Orin S. Kerr, Criminal Procedure § 28.6 (3d ed. 2007 & Supp. 2011).
See, e.g., Danielle M. Lang, Note, Padilla v. Kentucky: The Effect of Plea Colloquy Warnings on Defendants’ Ability To Bring Successful Padilla Claims, 121 Yale L.J. 944, 965-75 (2012).
See Chaidez v. United States, 655 F.3d 684 (7th Cir. 2011), cert. granted, 2012 WL 1468539 (U.S. Apr. 30, 2012) (No. 11-820).
See Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406 (2007) (holding Crawford, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), to not be retroactive).
See Schriro v. Summerlin, 542 U.S. 348 (2004) (refusing to find that the rule of Ring, 536 U.S. 584 (2002), entitling a defendant to a jury determination of facts that state law requires must be found before a death sentence may be imposed, would fit within an exception to Teague). The Court has yet to address whether the rule in Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004), applies retroactively. See Burton v. Stewart, 549 U.S. 147 (2007) (declining to reach the question).
Harrington v. Richter, 131 S. Ct. 770, 786 (2011) (quoting Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 332 n.5 (1979) (Stevens, J., concurring)).

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