Opinion ID: 2801073
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Last Reasoned Decision

Text: Even if we were to consider the state trial court’s decision as both a procedural ruling and a ruling on the merits, however, we would still need to review Barton’s claim de novo, because we would be bound by another Supreme Court decision—Ylst. In Ylst, petitioner Nunnemaker raised a Miranda claim in both his direct appeal and in his petition for collateral relief. Ylst v. Nunnemaker, 501 U.S. at 799–800. His petition for collateral relief was denied without opinion by the California Superior Court, the California Court of Appeal, and the California Supreme Court. Id. at 800. The California Court of Appeal issued the last reasoned opinion in Nunnemaker’s case, on direct appeal. There, the state court of appeal affirmed his conviction, relying on “the state procedural rule that an objection based upon a Miranda violation cannot be raised for the first time on appeal” as “[t]he sole basis for its rejection of [Nunnemaker’s] Miranda claim.” Id. at 799. Although Nunnemaker insisted that the state courts’ subsequent denials of his petition for collateral relief “lifted the procedural bar arising from the [California Court of Appeal’s] decision on direct review,” id. at 801, the Supreme Court disagreed. Instead, the Court instructed federal courts to “look through” and defer to the “last reasoned state-court opinion” that addressed the matter. Id. at 804. Thus, “where, as here, the last reasoned opinion No. 12-4003 Barton v. Warden, Southern Ohio Corr. Facility Page 12 on the claim explicitly imposes a procedural default, [the federal courts must] presume that a later decision rejecting the claim did not silently disregard that bar and consider the merits.” Id. at 803. Applied to this case, this rule requires us to examine the reasoning behind the decision of the Ohio Court of Appeals, not the decision of the Ohio Court of Common Pleas. The decision of the Ohio Court of Appeals expressly declined to adjudicate Barton’s claim on the merits, opting instead to apply Ohio’s res judicata doctrine. Under Ylst, this “last explained state-court judgment” governs. Id. at 805 (emphasis in original). In arriving at this conclusion, we rely entirely on the Supreme Court’s decision in Ylst. However, we observe in passing that our own case law and precedent from our sister circuits are in accord. In Payne v. Bell, 418 F.3d 644 (6th Cir. 2005), for example, petitioner also raised a Brady claim for the first time in post-conviction relief. The Shelby County Criminal Court considered the claim on the merits and issued an order denying the petition for post-conviction relief, which the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed. Id. at 652. The Tennessee Supreme Court denied further review. Id. On review before our court, we examined the decision not of the Shelby County Criminal Court nor the Tennessee Supreme Court, but of “[t]he Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, the last state court to issue a reasoned opinion on the issue,” and ultimately determined that its “affirmance was not an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law.” Id. at 660–61. We have cited and applied Ylst in a number of other cases. See Loza v. Mitchell, 766 F.3d 466, 473 (6th Cir. 2014) (“We review the decision of the last state court to issue a reasoned opinion on the issues raised in a habeas petition.”) (internal quotation marks and emphasis omitted); Haliym v. Mitchell, 492 F.3d 680, 691 (6th Cir. 2007) (“[I]n determining whether a claim is procedurally defaulted, this Court must look to the last explained state court judgment.”); Couch v. Jabe, 951 F.2d 94, 96 (6th Cir. 1991) (“Where the last explained state court judgment rejected petitioner’s claims on procedural grounds, the presumption [that a later unexplained decision rested on the same grounds] is rebuttable only where the petitioner adduces strong evidence that one of the subsequent courts reached the merits of the federal claim.”) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted) (emphasis added). No. 12-4003 Barton v. Warden, Southern Ohio Corr. Facility Page 13 The last-reasoned-decision rule also applies separately to each claim within a case. In Joseph v. Coyle, 469 F.3d 441 (6th Cir. 2006), we applied the rule separately to each of Joseph’s claims, finding that some of them (e.g., sufficiency of the evidence) required us to review the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision, while others (e.g., prosecutorial misconduct) required us to review the Ohio Court of Appeals’ decision. Id. at 450. However, we must still defer to the last reasoned state-court opinion, rather than try to string together a series of state opinions piecemeal for each claim.6 As the Supreme Court made clear in Ylst, the core purpose of this rule is to improve “administrability” and “accuracy” amongst the lower federal courts. See Ylst, 501 U.S. at 803; see also Barker v. Fleming, 423 F.3d 1085, 1093 (9th Cir. 2005) (“[T]he Supreme Court describes AEDPA review as applying to a single state court decision, not to some amalgamation of multiple state court decisions.”). These objectives are contravened when a court attempts to combine various state-court decisions together for purposes of reviewing a single claim. Indeed, we have reviewed a single state-court decision to evaluate each of petitioner’s claims in a number of habeas cases. See, e.g., Joseph, 469 F.3d at 450; Loza, 766 F.3d at 474, 486 (examining some of Loza’s claims by reviewing decision of the Ohio Supreme Court on direct appeal and examining other claims by reviewing decision of the Ohio Court of Appeals on postconviction review). As a final point, we observe that our conclusion in this case is also supported by decisions from our sister circuits. See Thomas v. Horn, 570 F.3d 105, 115 (3d Cir. 2009) (finding that lower state-court decision was not subject to AEDPA deference, noting that “the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided Thomas’ claims on purely procedural, not substantive grounds. This decision stripped the PCRA court’s substantive determination of Thomas’ claims 6 This appears to be how this court handled a Joseph-style review of petitioner’s ineffective-assistance claims in Hoffner v. Bradshaw, 622 F.3d 487 (6th Cir. 2010). However, the Hoffner court made clear that its analysis was to be treated as dicta. After reviewing the claim’s procedural history, the Hoffner court discussed our circuit’s test for procedural default. 622 F.3d at 504. It then applied this test, “conclud[ing] that Hoffner ha[d] procedurally defaulted his claims of ineffective assistance of appellate counsel. Nevertheless, even if Hoffner’s claims were not defaulted, each [would] fail[] on the merits.” Id. at 595 (emphasis added). The court then undertook a brief merits analysis. Cf. Wellons v. Hall, 130 S. Ct. 727, 730 (2010) (remanding case to Eleventh Circuit because “[h]aving found a procedural bar, the Eleventh Circuit had no need to address whether petitioner was otherwise entitled to an evidentiary hearing and gave this [merits] question, at most, perfunctory consideration.”). Thus, we do not follow Hoffner’s dicta and instead rely on the Supreme Court’s holding in Ylst in finding that the last reasoned decision rejected Barton’s Brady claim on procedural grounds and did not adjudicate it on the merits. No. 12-4003 Barton v. Warden, Southern Ohio Corr. Facility Page 14 of preclusive effect.”); Barker, 423 F.3d at 1093 (“Thus, even when one state court adhered to federal law, if the last court to review the claim erred, the federal court should review the last decision in isolation and not in combination with decisions by other state courts.”); Liegakos v. Cooke, 106 F.3d 1381, 1385 (7th Cir. 1997) (declining to apply AEDPA deference to state trial court merits decision when state appellate court decided claim solely on procedural grounds). To summarize, while AEDPA requires us to defer to the state courts in situations where they have adjudicated an issue on the merits, no such adjudication was issued here. Although the state trial court discussed some of the substantive aspects behind Barton’s Brady claim, it did not ultimately arrive at a definitive conclusion, relying instead on a procedural bar to dispose of the claim at hand. Even if this discussion by the state trial court were considered an adjudication on the merits, it would have been stripped of any preclusive effect under the last-reasoned-decision rule, as developed and applied in Ylst, Haliym, and Payne. The last reasoned decision here was issued by the Ohio Court of Appeals on Barton’s petition for post-conviction relief, and was entirely based on a procedural bar. Thus, as noted above, we review Barton’s claim de novo.