Court Opinion

ID: 9493991
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:25:27.733364+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:08.890942
License: Public Domain

RYMER, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I write separately to note that my concurrence on the merits of the McKenna issues1 is not without reservation. I concur because it is not unreasonable to hold that McKenna controls; after all, McKenna does say that the Nevada Supreme Court has discretion to review anything for plain constitutional error anytime, therefore perhaps it follows that nothing it ever does is an adequate state ground. I don’t agree that this is correct, but McKenna is the law of the circuit. Arguably, we could limit McKenna to counsel’s failure to object to constitutional error in an instruction as a procedural bar to review of a constitutional claim in a death penalty case. We seemed to suggest this was all McKenna held in Moran v. McDaniel, 80 F.3d 1261 (9th Cir.1996), yet this does not seem quite right because the procedural default at issue in McKenna was the failure to raise the claim of instructional error on appeal. Or we could say that Bargas v. Burns, 179 F.3d 1207 (9th Cir.1999), is more on point, for it held that the Nevada Supreme Court has consistently applied a rule barring consideration on the merits of claims that were raised and denied in a state post-conviction proceeding which are not raised in an appeal from denial of that claim in the first state post-conviction proceeding. On this view, McKenna would apply to failures to raise a claim of constitutional error on direct appeal (not an adequate state ground) and Bargas, to issues not raised in a prior petition for collateral relief (adequate state ground). But Bargas does not mention McKenna, and is not a capital case. In sum, no effort at reconciliation is really satisfactory. That McKenna, Moran and Bargas are all on the books is bound to cause problems for all concerned with habeas petitions from Nevada. Sooner or later we will have to go en banc to straighten out our law.