Opinion ID: 2974878
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Supreme Court’s Holding in Halbert

Text: In Halbert v. Michigan, the Supreme Court held that “the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses require the appointment of counsel for defendants, convicted on their pleas, who seek access to first-tier review in the Michigan Court of Appeals.” 125 S. Ct. at 2586. The Court noted that its decision was “framed by two prior [Supreme Court] decisions concerning state-funded appellate counsel,” Douglas v. California, 372 U.S. 353 (1963), and Ross v. Moffitt, 417 U.S. 600 (1974). In Douglas, the Court had held that states are required to appoint counsel for an indigent defendant’s “first-tier” appeal as of right, reasoning that such an appeal involved the merits of the case and differs from subsequent levels of review where another appellate court has already reviewed the claims. In Ross, the Court declined to extend Douglas to require appointed counsel for “secondlevel” discretionary appeals filed with the North Carolina Supreme Court. The Ross Court distinguished Douglas by reasoning that “both the opportunity to have counsel prepare an initial brief in the Court of Appeals and the nature of discretionary review in the Supreme Court of North Carolina make this relative handicap [of proceeding pro se] far less than the handicap borne by the indigent defendant denied counsel on his initial appeal as of right in Douglas.” 417 U.S. at 616. In Halbert, the Court addressed Michigan’s rule governing appeals from pleas of guilty or nolo contendere, which unlike most appeals from criminal convictions are not heard as of right, but only after the discretionary grant of a convicted defendant’s application for leave to appeal. 125 S. Ct. at 2587-88. The Michigan Constitution was amended to include this provision in 1994, so as to reduce the workload of the Michigan Court of Appeals, which had previously “adjudicated appeals as of right from all criminal convictions.” Id. After the enactment of this provision, the Michigan Supreme Court determined that the Federal Constitution did not require the state to appoint appellate No. 03-2609 Simmons v. Kapture Page 5 counsel for indigent defendants seeking review in the state Court of Appeals. Id. (citing People v. Bulger, 462 Mich. 495, 511 (Mich. 2000)). Like Simmons, Halbert sought appointed counsel to file an application for leave to appeal his guilty plea. Id. at 2589-90. His requests were denied, as were his applications for leave to appeal by both the state Court of Appeals and the Michigan Supreme Court. Id. at 2590. The Supreme Court granted certiorari of the state supreme court’s decision, and vacated the state courts’ judgments. At the outset of its opinion, the Court in Halbert noted that although the Federal Constitution did not require states to provide any appellate review of criminal convictions whatsoever, “having provided such an avenue, [] a State may not ‘bolt the door to equal justice’ to indigent defendants.” Id. at 2586. The Court stated that its holding was based both on the Equal Protection concern regarding “the legitimacy of fencing out would-be appellants based solely on their inability to pay core costs,” as well as the Due Process concern of “the essential fairness of the state-ordered proceedings.” Id. The state argued that because an appeal from a guilty plea is discretionary pursuant to state law, the case should be governed by Ross. Halbert contended that Douglas required the state to appoint counsel for an application for leave to appeal with the Michigan Court of Appeals, because it amounted to a first-tier appellate proceeding. The Court agreed with Halbert, finding the situation more analogous to that in Douglas because “in determining how to dispose of an application for leave to appeal, Michigan’s intermediate appellate court looks to the merits of the claims made in the application [and because] indigent defendants pursuing first-tier review in the Court of Appeals are generally ill equipped to represent themselves.” Id. at 2590. The Court distinguished Ross by noting that unlike the North Carolina (or Michigan) Supreme Court, which granted leave to hear appeals on matters other than the commission of error by a lower court, such as matters of significant public interest, “the Michigan Court of Appeals, because it is an error-correction instance, is guided in responding to leave to appeal applications by the merits of the particular defendant’s claims, not by the general importance of the questions presented.” Id. at 2591. Further, “the Court of Appeals’ ruling on a plea-convicted defendant’s claims provides the first, and likely the only, direct review the defendant’s conviction and sentence will receive.” Id. Given these similarities between the Michigan procedure for appeals from guilty pleas and the issue presented in Douglas, the Court held that the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses required Michigan to appoint counsel for applications for leave to appeal from guilty pleas filed in the Michigan Court of Appeals. Thus, although there are no constitutional problems with a state’s decision to make certain criminal appeals discretionary, state courts are required to provide appointed counsel for indigent defendants who seek leave to appeal their guilty pleas. B. Application of Halbert to Simmons’s petition for habeas relief There is no dispute that under the rule from Halbert, were Simmons’s plea to be entered today, the state would be required to appoint an attorney to represent him in filing an application for leave to appeal. The question we must address is whether the rule applies retroactively to affect Simmons’s habeas claim. Both parties recognize that Simmons’s conviction was final at the time of the Halbert decision, and that the applicability of Halbert turns on the Supreme Court’s holding in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1988), that new rules of criminal procedure do not generally apply retroactively to cases proceeding on collateral habeas review, unless they meet one of two specific exceptions. Simmons contends that Halbert applies retroactively because it did not create a new rule, but simply applied the existing rule from Douglas. In the alternative, Simmons argues that the Halbert rule falls under the Teague exception regarding “watershed rules of criminal procedure.” The state disagrees with both of these contentions, and argues that Teague’s general rule against retroactivity bars the application of Halbert to Simmons’s habeas petition. No. 03-2609 Simmons v. Kapture Page 6 The Teague Court explained what amounted to a “new rule” of criminal procedure as follows: “a case announces a new rule when it breaks new ground or imposes a new obligation on the States or the Federal Government. To put it differently, a case announces a new rule if the result was not dictated by precedent existing at the time the defendant’s conviction became final.” 489 U.S. at 301 (internal citations omitted). The Court has also noted that a decision does not announce a new rule where it “simply applie[s] a well-established constitutional principle to govern a case which is closely analogous to those which have been previously considered in the prior case law.” Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302, 314 (1989) (quoting Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. 667, 695 (1971) (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part)). Under this approach, Simmons argues convincingly that Halbert did not announce a new rule at all, but merely applied the forty-year-old rule from Douglas that in a first-level appeal from a criminal conviction, a state must provide appointed counsel for indigent defendants. The Supreme Court explicitly noted in Halbert that “Douglas provides the controlling instruction.” 125 S.Ct. at 2590. Even though Ross arguably represented analogous authority with its ruling that discretionary second-level appeals do not require appointed counsel, the Supreme Court has also explained that “the mere existence of conflicting authority does not necessarily mean that a rule is new.” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 410 (2000) (quoting Wright v. West, 505 U.S. 277, 304 (1992) (O’Connor J., concurring)). Moreover, the opinion in Ross emphasized that its holding was distinguishable from Douglas not because it involved discretionary appeals as opposed to appeals of right, as the state contends, but because it involved a second level of appellate review. The Ross Court explained that a defendant seeking leave to appeal in the North Carolina Supreme Court has already “received the benefit of counsel in examining the record of his trial and in preparing an appellate brief on his behalf for the state Court of Appeals, [and t]hus prior to his seeking discretionary review in the State Supreme Court, his claims had ‘once been presented by a lawyer and passed upon by an appellate court.’” Ross, 417 U.S. at 614 (quoting Douglas, 372 U.S. at 365). Further, the Ross Court explained that the North Carolina Supreme Court is primarily concerned with whether cases involve matters of significant public interest or legal principles of major significance, and unlike the firstlevel Court of Appeals, is not primarily concerned with “whether there has been a correct adjudication of guilt in every individual case.” Id. at 615. The state actually points to this part of the analysis in Ross to argue that its holding rests on whether review is discretionary or as of right, and that Halbert thus created a new rule by extending Douglas to discretionary appeals. Appellee’s Br. at 21. In fact the opposite is likely true. The relevant distinction identified by the Ross Court was that the North Carolina Supreme Court’s discretion to grant leave to appeal turned on the importance of the subject matter of the legal issue presented, and that it was not used to correct errors at the trial court level. See Ross, 417 U.S. at 615 (“The Supreme Court [of North Carolina] may deny certiorari even though it believes that the decision of the Court of Appeals was incorrect.”). It is the “error correction” role of the Michigan Court of Appeals (as opposed to the “deciding matters of public interest” role) that dictated the result in Halbert — not, as the state contends, whether the appeal in question was as of right or discretionary. Because the Michigan Court of Appeals acts to correct errors, even if it first exercises its discretion in deciding which potential errors to address, the result in Halbert is really an application of the “old rule” from Douglas. The legal regime framed by Douglas and Ross thus required appointed appellate counsel at the first level of appellate review, but not at the second level. Significantly, when the Halbert Court examined the combined precedential value of Douglas and Ross, it followed the same distinction that the Ross Court did, recognizing a stronger claim for appointed appellate counsel in first-tier appellate review than in second-tier review. Under this view, it was simply a tangentially related circumstance that most first-level appeals in state courts happen to be as of right, while second-level No. 03-2609 Simmons v. Kapture Page 7 appeals tend to be discretionary, despite the state’s current argument that this is the critical distinction. It necessarily follows that Halbert was dictated by Douglas, and therefore does not create a new rule under Teague. The state also relies on the Court’s statement in Halbert that its decision was framed by Ross and Douglas to argue that this means it “broke new ground.” This argument is unconvincing. First, the simple fact that Halbert presented an issue that fell between two precedential cases with different results does not mean that the application of one of the prior holdings to the new situation created a new rule. Moreover, while the results in Ross and Douglas were opposite and may have formed bookends to the issue in Halbert, the analysis in Ross does nothing to refute the application of the holding in Douglas to first-tier appellate review. The critical distinction prior to Halbert — and before Simmons’s guilty plea was entered — that in fact dictated the result in Halbert was that appointed appellate counsel is required for first-tier, but not second-tier appellate review. Halbert simply clarified this pre-existing distinction. Thus, although the results of Ross and Douglas may have “framed” the issue in Halbert, the holding of Halbert was virtually compelled by the analysis in both of the two prior cases, and cannot be said to represent a new rule. Interestingly, before the Supreme Court’s decision in Halbert, this Court addressed en banc the very same question in Tesmer v. Granholm, 333 F.3d 683, 701 (6th Cir. 2003) (en banc), and declared that Michigan’s denial of appointed counsel for first-level applications of leave to appeal was unconstitutional: Michigan’s statute creates unequal access even to the first part of the appellate system. Though the judge-appellants argue that any distinctions in Michigan’s appellate system stem from the fact the indigent pleads guilty, or that the appeal is merely discretionary, the effect is to create a different opportunity for access to the appellate system based upon indigency. As applied, the statute violates the due process provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and is thus unconstitutional. That decision was later reversed by the Supreme Court, which held, without reaching the merits, that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring suit. Kowalski v. Tesmer, 543 U.S. 125 (2004). Although the Supreme Court’s reversal rendered this Court’s decision unenforceable and without precedential value, the opinion from this Court, which followed Douglas, offers persuasive support for the proposition that the decision in Halbert was dictated by Douglas, and that Halbert therefore did not announce a new rule. At a minimum, a majority of the active judges of this Court — who, unlike the Supreme Court, lacked the authority to extend Douglas — believed that the result in Halbert was commanded by Douglas. The Halbert decision later confirmed this reading of Douglas in a case where standing was deemed appropriate. While non-binding for present purposes, our preHalbert belief that Halbert was dictated by Douglas reinforces the same reading of these cases that we outline today.