Opinion ID: 4564881
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Ninth Circuit Panel Memorandum Disposition

Text: The State appealed to this court. The panel, like the federal district court, did not address the habeas claims as actually pled by Anderson—that jeopardy did not attach or that trial counsel should have known the Nevada Supreme Court would not find a double jeopardy violation. Instead, the panel joined the district court in concluding that the outcome on the double jeopardy claim likely would have changed under Nevada law if Anderson had gone to trial on the felony DUI charge. See Anderson v. Neven, 797 F. App’x 293, 294–95 (9th Cir. 2019). The panel explained that although “the ‘does any act or neglects any duty imposed by law’ element of the DUI offense” could have been established “through some predicate other than the failure-to-yield offense . . . . the record is devoid of any evidence regarding any other theory upon which the State could have satisfied this element at trial.” Id. Thus, “[t]he mere possibility that the State may have been able to rely on an alternate predicate offense does not negate Anderson’s showing of likely success” in his double jeopardy defense at or after trial. Id. at 295. Accordingly, the panel agreed with the federal district court that “no reasonable attorney would have advised Anderson” to plead guilty rather than go to trial because there was “a high likelihood that he would have been able to raise the 20 ANDERSON V. NEVEN double-jeopardy defense successfully” at trial. Id. at 294 (alteration marks omitted). The obvious problem with the panel’s conclusion that Anderson might have prevailed in the state trial court on his double jeopardy claim is, “so what?” Given the Nevada Supreme Court’s rejection of Anderson’s double jeopardy claim on direct appeal, there is no reason to think the Nevada Supreme Court would have reached a different conclusion if Anderson had gone to trial, if the prosecution had not amended the charges (a big “if,” given the trial court’s emphatic direction to do so), and if Anderson had prevailed in trial court. But the panel had a response: the Nevada Supreme Court was wrong. More specifically, the Nevada Supreme Court’s explanation about Nevada law was right generally, but not “in Anderson’s particular case.” Id. at 295 (emphasis in original). What the panel never explained is why this matters for the only claim that Anderson made in this federal habeas action: ineffective assistance of trial counsel. The panel’s inquiry into the merits of the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision resulted in an irreconcilable contradiction in its Strickland analysis: that trial counsel was ineffective because he predicted the Nevada Supreme Court would rule precisely the way the panel believed it should have ruled. Under the panel’s theory of the case, what actually stymied trial counsel’s able strategy was not any error by counsel, but rather the Nevada Supreme Court’s misunderstanding of how Nevada law worked “in Anderson’s particular case.” Id. (emphasis in original). And Anderson never challenged the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision. This inherent contradiction is never addressed in the panel’s decision or its concurrence in denial of rehearing en banc. ANDERSON V. NEVEN 21