Opinion ID: 856487
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Retroactivity in federal habeas proceedings

Text: In federal habeas proceedings, the retroactivity of a new rule of criminal procedure is governed by the twin Supreme Court cases of Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314 (1987), and Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989).3 In 1987, the Court settled a long debate about retroactivity by holding that “a new rule for the conduct of criminal prosecutions is to be applied retroactively to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final.” Griffith, 479 U.S. at 326. Two years later, in Teague, the Court 3 “Although Teague was a plurality opinion that drew support from only four Members of the Court, the Teague rule was affirmed and applied by a majority of the Court shortly thereafter.” Danforth v. Minnesota, 552 U.S. 264, 266 n.1 (2008). No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 17 laid down the modern rule of retroactivity for federal habeas proceedings: “[u]nless they fall within an exception to the general rule, new constitutional rules of criminal procedure will not be applicable to those cases which have become final before the new rules are announced.” Id. at 310 (plurality opinion). The Teague rule thus “prevents a federal court from granting habeas corpus relief to a state prisoner based on a rule announced after his conviction and sentence became final.” Danforth v. Minnesota, 552 U.S. 264, 281 (2008) (quoting Caspari v. Bohlen, 510 U.S. 383, 389 (1994)). A federal court applies the Teague non-retroactivity rule by proceeding in three steps: First, the court must ascertain the date on which the defendant’s conviction and sentence became final for Teague purposes. Second, the court must survey the legal landscape as it then existed, and determine whether a state court considering the defendant’s claim at the time his conviction became final would have felt compelled by existing precedent to conclude that the rule he seeks was required by the Constitution. Finally, even if the court determines that the defendant seeks the benefit of a new rule, the court must decide whether that rule falls within one of the two narrow exceptions to the nonretroactivity principle. Caspari, 510 U.S. at 390 (citations and alterations omitted). In Lovins’s case, we do not need to proceed to the third step of the Teague analysis because it is apparent from the parties’ arguments about the first two steps that Teague does not bar consideration of Lovins’s Blakely claim in this federal habeas proceeding. In the first step, we consider when Lovins’s conviction and sentence became final. A defendant’s conviction is “final” for the purposes of Griffith and Teague when the time elapses for filing a petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court from the state’s highest court’s denial of the defendant’s application for review on direct appeal. See Danforth, 552 U.S. at 267 (citing Caspari, 510 U.S. at 390). Lovins argues, and the State does not contest, that Lovins’s case became final on June 3, 2007, ninety days after the Tennessee Supreme Court denied his application for permission to appeal on direct review. See Lovins Br. 20–23; State Br. 13. No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 18 The second prong of the test is dispositive in Lovins’s case. If Lovins’s direct appeal became final nearly three years after the Supreme Court decided Blakely, then it also became final four months after the Court decided Cunningham and three months after the Court vacated the Tennessee Supreme Court’s ruling in Gomez I—in which the Court plainly rejected the premise that Tennessee’s sentencing scheme did not violate Blakely. Because Lovins’s direct appeal was still pending at this time, Griffith mandated that all of these decisions be applied retroactively to his sentencing. The legal landscape at the time Lovins’s direct appeal became final thus left nothing to the imagination. A court considering Lovins’s claim “at the time his conviction became final would have felt compelled by existing precedent to conclude that the rule he seeks was required by the Constitution.” Caspari, 510 U.S. at 390. In other words, “Teague’s rule of non-retroactivity . . . applies only ‘to those cases which have become final before the new rules are announced.’” United States v. Becker, 502 F.3d 122, 129 (2d Cir. 2007) (emphasis added) (quoting Teague, 489 U.S. at 310). Teague does not, as the State seems to suggest here, bar collateral relief for a petitioner whose direct appeal became final after the date on which a new rule of constitutional law was announced. See Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406, 416 (2007) (considering first whether respondent’s conviction had already become final on direct review when Crawford was announced, and only proceeding to the rest of the Teague analysis after determining that it had). To understand why the State’s preferred reading would be incorrect, one need not look any further than Teague itself, where the Supreme Court expressly adopted the view of retroactivity in collateral proceedings that Justice Harlan had advanced in a series of dissents: Given the “broad scope of constitutional issues cognizable on habeas . . . [it is] sounder, in adjudicating habeas petitions, generally to apply the law prevailing at the time a conviction became final than it is to seek to dispose of the [habeas] cases on the basis of intervening changes in constitutional interpretation.” No. 11-5545 Lovins v. Parker Page 19 Teague, 489 U.S. at 306 (quoting Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. 667, 689 (1971) (Harlan, J. dissenting)). Justice Harlan envisioned that habeas courts would apply “the law prevailing at the time a conviction became final,” id., and the Supreme Court in Teague expressly adopted this understanding of retroactivity, id. at 310. (“[W]e now adopt Justice Harlan’s view of retroactivity for cases on collateral review.”). As Justice Souter helpfully noted in Wright v. West, a post-Teague but preAEDPA case, “[t]he crux of the analysis when Teague is invoked, then, is identification of the rule on which the claim for habeas relief depends.” 505 U.S. 277, 311 (1992) (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment). “To survive Teague, it must be ‘old’ enough to have predated the finality of the prisoner’s conviction . . . .” Id. The consideration of whether the rule at issue is “old” enough such that its application is not Teague-barred begins with a bare review of the calendar and comparison of dates. In Lovins’s case, we are not barred from considering Blakely in this collateral proceeding because Blakely was announced before Lovins’s conviction became final.