Opinion ID: 70479
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: standard of review

Text: Our standard of review in an AEDPA case is well-established: deference must be given to factual findings of the state court in the absence of clear and convincing evidence to the contrary. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e)(1). Because the Batson claims were adjudicated in state court, the district court, as well as our court, must defer to the state court’s resolution unless its determination was “contrary to” or an “unreasonable application of” clearly established federal law as determined by the United States Supreme Court. § 2254(d); see also Hill v. Johnson, 210 F.3d 481, 485 (5th Cir. 2000). A state court decision is contrary to clearly established federal law if it “applies a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth in [Supreme Court] cases,” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 405 (2000), or “if the state court confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of [the Supreme Court] and nevertheless arrives at a result different from [the Court’s] precedent.” Id. at 406. A state court decision involves an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law if the state court “correctly identifies the governing legal rule but applies it unreasonably to the facts of a particular prisoner’s case . . . .” Id. at 407-08. The Supreme Court has articulated the governing standards for evaluating whether peremptory strikes were race-based in several cases, including Batson and Miller-El v. Dretke (Miller-El II), 545 U.S. 231 (2005). The most recent Supreme Court pronouncement on this subject was Snyder v. Louisiana, 128 S. Ct. 1203 (2008). While AEDPA review is highly deferential, we note that it is not perfunctory. The Supreme Court has stressed that “[e]ven in the context of federal habeas, deference does not imply abandonment or abdication of judicial review. Deference does not by definition preclude relief.” Miller-El v. Cockrell (Miller-El I), 537 U.S. 322, 340 (2003); see also Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930, 953 (2007) (AEDPA does not “prohibit a federal court from finding an 4 Case: 08-10057 Document: 00511007241 Page: 5 Date Filed: 01/19/2010 No. 08-10057 application of a principle unreasonable when it involves a set of facts different from those of the case in which a principle is announced. The statute recognizes, to the contrary, that even a general standard may be applied in an unreasonable manner.”) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); Taylor, 529 U.S. at 377 (AEDPA “directs federal courts to attend to every state-court judgment with utmost care, but it does not require them to defer to the opinion of every reasonable state-court judge on the content of federal law.”). Mindful of these precedents, our court addressed the application of Batson in a § 2254 proceeding in Reed v. Quarterman, 555 F.3d 364 (5th Cir. 2009) and Haynes v. Quarterman, 561 F.3d 535 (5th Cir. 2009). These cases further inform our analysis.