Opinion ID: 2598
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Musladin

Text: In Musladin, a habeas petitioner convicted of murder in California state court claimed that he had been denied his right to a fair trial because his victim's family had been permitted to wear buttons bearing a photograph of the victim in the courtroom gallery throughout the proceedings. The district court denied habeas relief but granted a certificate of appealability. The Ninth Circuit reversed. See Musladin v. Lamarque, 427 F.3d 653 (9th Cir. 2005). The court concluded that the state court's test for the inherent prejudice caused by the inflammatory buttons was contrary to clearly established federal law and constituted an unreasonable application of that law under AEDPA. Id. at 659-60. The Ninth Circuit first noted that the appropriate inherent prejudice test is derived from the Supreme Court's watershed decisions in Estelle v. Williams, 425 U.S. 501, 96 S.Ct. 1691, 48 L.Ed.2d 126 (1976), and Holbrook v. Flynn, 475 U.S. 560, 106 S.Ct. 1340, 89 L.Ed.2d 525 (1986). Id. at 656-57. The court went on to observe, however, that its own decision in Norris v. Risley, 918 F.2d 828 (9th Cir.1990), has persuasive value in an assessment of the meaning of the federal law that was clearly-established by Williams and Flynn.  Musladin, 427 F.3d at 657. Grafting its own Norris decision onto the Supreme Court's jurisprudence proved critical to the Ninth Circuit's analysis, as Norris dealt with prejudicial conduct by private courtroom spectators, as opposed to the state-sponsored conduct at issue in the Supreme Court's decisions. Compare Norris, 918 F.2d at 829-31 (Women Against Rape buttons on private spectators in gallery), with Williams, 425 U.S. at 502, 96 S.Ct. 1691 (court compelled defendant to wear prison clothes at trial), and Flynn, 475 U.S. at 562, 106 S.Ct. 1340 (state troopers sat behind defendant at trial). Given the striking factual similarities between the victim buttons in Musladin and the anti-rape buttons found inherently prejudicial in Norris, the Ninth Circuit had little trouble finding that the California courts had violated clearly established federal law by not ordering the spectators to remove the buttons. Musladin, 427 F.3d at 658, 661. In December 2006, the Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit's decision. See Musladin, 127 S.Ct. at 654. The Supreme Court first reiterated the bedrock principle of habeas law in the AEDPA universe: [C]learly established Federal law ... refers to the holdings, as opposed to the dicta, of this Court's decisions as of the time of the relevant state-court decision. Id. at 653 (quoting Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 412, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000)). It then noted that, in contrast to warring decisions among the federal circuits, the effect on a defendant's fair-trial rights of  spectator conduct ... is an open question in our jurisprudence. Id. at 653-54 (emphasis added) (comparing Billings v. Polk, 441 F.3d 238, 246-47 (4th Cir.2006) (no violation of right to a fair trial based on spectator's clothing), with Norris but noting no Supreme Court decision on the issue). In so doing, the Court gave a narrow reading to its holdings in Williams and Flynn  essentially concluding that the two cases provided a rule for assessing only the prejudice of state-sponsored courtroom practices. Id. at 653. [1] Thus, the Court concluded that [n]o holding of this Court required the California Court of Appeal to apply the test of Williams and Flynn to the spectators' conduct at issue in Musladin and thus held that the state court's decision was not contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law. Id. at 654. Rodriguez's petition now returns to us for reconsideration in light of the teachings of Musladin.