Opinion ID: 2827463
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: AEDPA Review of the Washington Supreme Court’s

Text: Prejudice Determination The Washington Supreme Court’s conclusion that Crace’s attorney’s failure to request an instruction on unlawful display of a weapon did not prejudice Crace was based on the court’s holding in an earlier case, State v. Grier, 246 P.3d 1260 (Wash. 2011). In Grier, a defendant convicted of second-degree murder argued on appeal that her trial counsel had been ineffective by failing to request a jury instruction on the lesser included offense of manslaughter. Id. at 1266. The court rejected this claim on the grounds that the defendant could not show any prejudice caused by her attorney’s failure. Id. at 1274. The Grier court quoted Strickland for the proposition that, when analyzing prejudice, a reviewing court “should presume, absent challenge to the judgment on grounds of evidentiary insufficiency, that the judge or jury acted according to law.” Id. at 1272 (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694). The court interpreted this language to mean that it 12 CRACE V. HERZOG was required to presume that the defendant’s jury had convicted her of murder because the jury found that the elements of murder had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The court then concluded that, given that presumption, it could also assume that “the availability of a compromise verdict would not have changed the outcome” of the trial, id. at 1274; if the jury had thought the defendant guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt, it necessarily would have reached the same verdict even if it had been instructed on lesser included offenses. In Crace’s case, the Washington Supreme Court applied both of the presumptions “recognized in Grier.” It first presumed that Crace’s jury must have found that each of the elements of attempted second-degree assault had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt when it convicted him. It then determined that the evidence was sufficient to support such a verdict and presumed, on that basis, that an instruction on the lesser included offense of unlawful display of a weapon would have made no difference to the outcome of the trial; the jury would still have convicted Crace of attempted second-degree assault even if it had been instructed on another lesser included offense. The Washington Supreme Court’s methodology is a patently unreasonable application of Strickland, and its decision in this case is thus unworthy of deference under AEDPA. Strickland did instruct reviewing courts to presume that trial juries act “according to law,” but the Washington Supreme Court (both in Grier and in this case) has read far more into that instruction than it fairly supports and, as a result, has sanctioned an approach to Strickland that sidesteps the reasonable-probability analysis that Strickland’s prejudice prong explicitly requires. CRACE V. HERZOG 13 In counseling reviewing courts to presume that juries act according to law, the Strickland Court sought to prohibit lower courts from basing findings of prejudice on the possibility of freak acts of “lawless[ness]” by judges and juries that are outside the ordinary course of criminal justice. The passage immediately following the language quoted in Grier explains this point: An assessment of the likelihood of a result more favorable to the defendant must exclude the possibility of arbitrariness, whimsy, caprice, “nullification,” and the like. A defendant has no entitlement to the luck of a lawless decisionmaker, even if a lawless decision cannot be reviewed. 466 U.S. at 695. In other words, a court may not find Strickland prejudice by concluding that a different choice of tactics by defense counsel could have persuaded the judge or jury to make an arbitrary and improper decision in the defendant’s favor. Rather, “[t]he assessment of prejudice should proceed on the assumption that the decisionmaker is reasonably, conscientiously, and impartially applying the standards that govern the decision.” Id. The Washington Supreme Court’s decisions in Grier and in this case overextended the foregoing principle. That principle forbids a reviewing court from finding prejudice by speculating that, if the defendant is permitted to roll the dice again, the jury might convict on a lesser included offense merely as a means of jury nullification, without regard for whether that verdict is consistent with the evidence. But it does not require a court to presume—as the Washington Supreme Court did—that, because a jury convicted the 14 CRACE V. HERZOG defendant of a particular offense at trial, the jury could not have convicted the defendant on a lesser included offense based upon evidence that was consistent with the elements of both. To think that a jury, if presented with the option, might have convicted on a lesser included offense is not to suggest that the jury would have ignored its instructions. On the contrary, it would be perfectly consistent with those instructions for the jury to conclude that the evidence presented was a better fit for the lesser included offense. The Washington Supreme Court thus was wrong to assume that, because there was sufficient evidence to support the original verdict, the jury necessarily would have reached the same verdict even if instructed on an additional lesser included offense. As the Supreme Court has recognized in a related context, a jury presented with only two options—convicting on a single charged offense or acquitting the defendant altogether—“is likely to resolve its doubts in favor of conviction” even if it has reservations about one of the elements of the charged offense, on the thinking that “the defendant is plainly guilty of some offense.” Keeble v. United States, 412 U.S. 205, 212–13 (1973) (construing the Major Crimes Act of 1885 not to preclude lesser-includedoffense instructions, in order to avoid constitutional concerns); see also Hopper v. Evans, 456 U.S. 605, 611 (1982). It is therefore perfectly plausible that a jury that convicted on a particular offense at trial did so despite doubts about the proof of that offense—doubts that, with “the availability of a third option,” could have led it to convict on a lesser included offense. See Keeble, 412 U.S. at 213. Making this observation does not require us to speculate that the jury would have acted “lawless[ly]” if instructed on an additional, lesser included offense or to question the validity CRACE V. HERZOG 15 of the actual verdict. Rather, it merely involves acknowledging that the jury could “rationally” have found conviction on a lesser included offense to be the verdict best supported by the evidence. See id. In Grier (and, implicitly, in this case), the Washington Supreme Court brushed Keeble aside as “inapposite in the context of ineffective assistance of counsel.” Grier, 246 P.3d at 1272. In that court’s view, applying Keeble’s reasoning in a Strickland case requires a court to posit that “the jury would not hold the State to its burden in the absence of a lesser included offense instruction”—the kind of jury “lawless[ness]” that Strickland precludes a court from considering. Id. Not so. Keeble’s logic does not rest on the proposition that juries deliberately and improperly choose to convict in the absence of reasonable doubt. What Keeble teaches us is that a lesser-included-offense instruction can affect a jury’s perception of reasonable doubt: the same scrupulous and conscientious jury that convicts on a greater offense when that offense is the only one available could decide to convict on a lesser included offense if given more choices.3 3 The dissent is thus mistaken in claiming that “there is some tension” between Strickland and Keeble and that fairminded jurists could reasonably “resolve[]” this tension “in favor of Strickland.” Dissenting Op. at 31–35 (citing Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86, 103, 105 (2011)). Properly understood, Strickland and Keeble are entirely harmonious: Strickland requires courts to presume that juries follow the law, and Keeble acknowledges that a jury—even one following the law to the letter—might reach a different verdict when presented with additional options. Our conviction on this point is not shaken by the dissent’s observation that sixteen state-court judges, including the eight Washington judges who ruled against Crace at various stages below, have agreed with its view of 16 CRACE V. HERZOG Nothing in Strickland, therefore, forbids courts from considering the possibility that a jury would have convicted on a lesser included offense if given the option to do so. Indeed, just the opposite is true: in ineffective-assistance cases involving a failure to request a lesser-included-offense instruction, Strickland requires a reviewing court to assess the likelihood that the defendant’s jury would have convicted only on the lesser included offense. Cf. Keeble, 412 U.S. at 213 (“We cannot say that the availability of a third option . . . could not have resulted in a different verdict.”). Only by performing that assessment can a court answer the question expressly posed by Strickland: whether there is a reasonable probability that, if the defendant’s lawyer had performed adequately, the outcome of the proceeding would have been different. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694.4 Strickland and Keeble. Id. at 36 n.8. Although we do not impugn either the character or the abilities of those judges, their rulings do not automatically establish that “fairminded disagreement” on this question is possible. The assessment of whether a question admits of fairminded disagreement among jurists is not simply a matter of counting noses; after all, in every federal habeas corpus case, there must be at least a few statecourt judges who have decided an issue adversely to the petitioner in order for the case to come before us. Rather, a federal habeas court must decide whether the applicable Supreme Court law leaves the issue raised by the petitioner open or resolves it conclusively. We hold that Strickland and Keeble demonstrate beyond doubt that the Washington Supreme Court’s decision was wrong and that the requirements of AEDPA have therefore been met. 4 Nothing we have said here affects a defense attorney’s ability to make a strategic decision to forgo a lesser-included-offense instruction in order to force the jury into an “all-or-nothing” decision. The reasonableness of that decision would be examined under the performance prong of Strickland. CRACE V. HERZOG 17 The Washington Supreme Court in essence converted Strickland’s prejudice inquiry into a sufficiency-of-theevidence question—an entirely different inquiry separately prescribed by Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 324 (1979). This is so because, under the Washington Supreme Court’s approach, a defendant can only show Strickland prejudice when the evidence is insufficient to support the jury’s verdict—a circumstance in which the defendant does not need to rely on Strickland at all because Jackson already provides a basis for habeas relief. See id. (a petitioner “is entitled to habeas corpus relief if it is found that upon the record evidence adduced at the trial no rational trier of fact could have found proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”). And conversely, if the evidence is sufficient to support the verdict, there is categorically no Strickland error, according to the Washington Supreme Court’s logic. By reducing the question to sufficiency of the evidence, the Washington Supreme Court has focused on the wrong question here—one that has nothing to do with Strickland. In the only other reported court of appeals decision on this issue that we have found, the Third Circuit came to the same conclusion that we do. Breakiron v. Horn, 642 F.3d 126 (3d Cir. 2011). In that case, a defendant convicted of robbery raised an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim based on his attorney’s failure to request an instruction on the lesser included offense of theft. Id. at 136. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected that claim, reasoning that no prejudice occurred because sufficient evidence supported the jury’s conviction on the robbery charge. Id. at 139. The Third Circuit held that this decision was an unreasonable application of Strickland, explaining that Strickland required a court to “weigh all the evidence of record . . . to determine whether there was a reasonable probability that the jury 18 CRACE V. HERZOG would have convicted [the defendant] only of theft if it had been given that option. Merely noting that the evidence was sufficient to convict does not accomplish that task.” Id. at 140. So too here. By pronouncing as a matter of law that, as long as there is sufficient evidence to support the jury’s verdict, no prejudice results from a defense attorney’s failure to request a lesser-included-offense instruction, the Washington Supreme Court has licensed Washington courts to avoid analyzing prejudice in the way that ?Strickland requires.5 This approach to Strickland is not merely wrong, but “objectively unreasonable” under AEDPA.