Court Opinion

ID: 9498535
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:19:57.377709+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:53.220272
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge, dissenting.
The majority’s decision achieves the unfortunate trifecta of misapplying the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), gutting the Article III judicial power while “suspending” the writ of habeas corpus, and stranding a probably innocent inmate in prison for life. This Court does so by construing § 2254(d)(1) and its “clearly established law” requirement to preclude federal habeas relief except where Supreme Court precedent with indistinguishable facts counsels otherwise. There seems little doubt that prior to the enactment of § 2254(d)(1) of AEDPA, and my colleagues’ interpretation of it, the writ of habeas corpus would have issued in this case to require a new trial in which Davis would be allowed to put before the jury Jourdan’s exculpatory testimony.
I. The Requirements of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1)
Notwithstanding the majority’s contention to the contrary, the Supreme Court had set forth “clearly established law” both under the Sixth Amendment Compulsory Clause and the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination privilege prior to the Michigan Court of Appeals’ decision, from which the Michigan Supreme Court denied leave to appeal. The Michigan Court’s brief per curiam, opinion was contrary to that clearly established law because it failed to mention or apply the relevant governing legal principles under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. Thus, our Court should have issued the writ in this case to correct the conviction’s constitutional infirmity.
A. “Clearly Established Law”
28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) empowers an Article III court to grant the writ of habeas corpus where a state court judgment “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” The Supreme Court has defined “clearly established law” as the holdings, not dicta, of its decisions. Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 412, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000). The *292term “holding” for purposes of § 2254(d)(1) is not limited to bright-line rules and narrow statements like “judgment for defendant” but instead refers to “the governing legal principle or principles set forth by the Supreme Court.” See Loekyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63, 71, 123 S.Ct. 1166, 155 L.Ed.2d 144 (2003).
The Supreme Court has adopted the spectrum of abstraction of Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989), to determine whether a particular legal principle was clearly established at the relevant time. See Williams, 529 U.S. at 412, 120 S.Ct. 1495 (With the caveat that the source of clearly established law is Supreme Court jurisprudence, “whatever would qualify as an old rule under our Teague jurisprudence will constitute ‘clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States’ under § 2254(d)(1).”). At one end of the spectrum lie legal principles with such a high level of generality, like the Eight Amendment principle of reliability in sentencing, whose application does not necessarily lead to a “predictable development” in the relevant law and therefore can not be considered clearly established. See Sawyer v. Smith, 497 U.S. 227, 236, 110 S.Ct. 2822, 111 L.Ed.2d 193 (1990). On the other end are narrowly drawn bright-line rules with little application beyond factually indistinguishable situations. In the middle of the spectrum lie those general principles of law crafted by the Supreme Court to constitute clearly established law in a wide range of factual situations. It was the middle of the spectrum that Justice Kennedy described while concurring in Wright v. West, 505 U.S. 277, 308-09, 112 S.Ct. 2482, 120 L.Ed.2d 225 (1992):
If the rule in question is one which of necessity requires a case-by-case examination of the evidence, then we can tolerate a number of specific applications without saying that those applications themselves create a new rule ... Where the beginning point is a rule of this general application, a rule designed for the specific purpose of evaluating a myriad of factual contexts, it will be the infrequent case that yields a result so novel that it forges a new rule, one not dictated by precedent.
A majority of the Supreme Court has adopted Justice Kennedy’s “case-by-case” view. See Williams, 529 U.S. at 391, 120 S.Ct. 1495 (“That the Strickland test ‘of necessity requires a case-by-case examination of the evidence’ obviates neither the clarity of the rule nor the extent to which the rule must be seen as ‘established’ by this Court.”)(internal citation omitted); Rompilla v. Beard, - U.S. -, 125 S.Ct. 2456, 2471, 162 L.Ed.2d 360 (2005) (O’Connor, J., concurring) (noting the “ ‘case-by-case examination of the evidence’ called for under our cases”); Williams, 529 U.S. at 382, 120 S.Ct. 1495 (Stevens, J., dissenting in part) (“In the context of this case, we also note that, as our precedent interpreting Teague has demonstrated, rules of law may be sufficiently clear for habeas purposes even when they are expressed in terms of a generalized standard rather than as a bright-line rule.”); Graham v. Collins, 506 U.S. 461, 506, 113 S.Ct. 892, 122 L.Ed.2d 260 (1993) (Souter, J., dissenting) (“One general rule that has emerged under Teag-ue is that application of existing precedent in a new factual setting will not amount to announcing a new rule.”).
Broad rules whose application to new factual situations have constituted clearly established law include Strickland’s ineffective assistance of counsel standard, see Williams, 529 U.S. at 391, 120 S.Ct. 1495; Rompilla, 125 S.Ct. at 2460, and Jackson v. Virginia’s sufficiency of the evidence *293standard, see Wright, 505 U.S. at 308-09, 112 S.Ct. 2482 (Kennedy, J., concurring). The Courts of Appeals have followed suit by finding clearly established law even where Supreme Court case law does not rest “on all fours.” Lewis v. Johnson, 359 F.3d 646, 655 (3d Cir.2004); Hart v. Attorney Gen. of the State of Florida, 323 F.3d 884, 893 n. 16 (11th Cir.2003); Burdine v. Johnson, 262 F.3d 336, 354 (5th Cir.2001); Torres v. Prunty, 223 F.3d 1103, 1110 (9th Cir.2000).
In the instant case, my colleagues have identified, but incorrectly applied, the overriding legal principle applicable to this case in part V of their opinion:
Washington v. Texas clearly established that, under the Sixth Amendment, a state may not arbitrarily deny a defendant the right to call a witness whose testimony is relevant and material to the defense. Washington, 388 U.S. at 19, 87 S.Ct. 1920.
This principle of general application has been clearly established since 1967, decades before the state judgment at issue here. This principle interprets the Sixth Amendment’s Compulsory Process Clause (the right of “the accused ... to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor”), which, as described by Blackstone, catechized in the Bill of Rights this well-established and fundamental right of English law. See Peter Westen, The Compulsory Process Clause, 73 Mich. L.Rev. 71, 90-101 (1974). The Washington v. Texas principle, though perhaps narrower than Strickland, fits comfortably within the middle of Teague’s spectrum of abstraction in that the principle both provides sufficient content for predictable legal development and applies to a varied range of factual situations. Moreover, the principle clearly applies here because the testimony of the witness Jourdan is “relevant and material,” and if believed by the jury — which seems likely to me — would have entirely exonerated Davis of the murder for which he is now imprisoned for life.
A second clearly established legal principle applicable to this case is that a witness like Jourdan may not invoke the self-incrimination privilege unless the danger is “real and probable,” not “imaginary and unsubstantial,” Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591, 608, 16 S.Ct. 644, 40 L.Ed. 819 (1896); see also Ohio v. Reiner, 532 U.S. 17, 21, 121 S.Ct. 1252, 149 L.Ed.2d 158 (2001) (describing the Supreme Court’s pre-2000 Fifth Amendment precedent). And “where there can be no further incrimination, there is no basis for the assertion of the privilege,” Mitchell v. United States, 526 U.S. 314, 326, 119 S.Ct. 1307, 143 L.Ed.2d 424 (1999). A witness cannot establish that the danger is “real and probable” by a blanket assertion because “[t]he witness is not exonerated from answering merely because he declares that in sq doing he would incriminate himself — his say-so does not of itself establish the hazard of incrimination.” Hoffman v. United States, 341 U.S. 479, 486, 71 S.Ct. 814, 95 L.Ed. 1118 (1951). Rather, the witness should take the stand and give “a responsive answer to the question or an explanation of why it cannot be answered” without self-incrimination. Id. at 487, 71 S.Ct. 814.
Once again, these Fifth Amendment principles fall well within the Supreme Court’s “case-by-case” approach to its clearly established law jurisprudence and are clearly applicable to the instant case. Jourdan had given three statements before he was called as a witness. He gave two of his statements to the police, each of which was given almost a year before trial, and one to a private investigator. It was clear from his statements that he had nothing to do with the murder and neither did Davis whose behavior Jourdan observed. Jour-*294dan was not threatened with prosecution, and, even if he were to be criminally prosecuted for these murders, his post-Miranda statement to the police, which included an admission that he was present during the beating of Jones, would clearly be admissible against him, just as properly Mirandized confessions are admissible in subsequent prosecutions against the defendants who made them. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 476-77, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). As the Supreme Court foresaw in Walker and Mitchell, there reaches a point where a piece of evidence — in this case Jourdan’s presence at the scene of the crime — which all parties agree is only incriminating in the most minimal and remote way, is so overwhelmingly and definitively established that it cannot be constitutionally used to stonewall introduction of other evidence that is highly exculpatory of a criminal defendant. The Fifth Amendment may not be so prompted and used as a shield for the flaw in the state’s case, used in such a mechanistic way that it subsumes a criminal defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to present a defense.
The majority cites the following quotation from Washington v. Texas for the proposition that its legal principle is inapplicable to this case: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as disapproving testimonial privileges, such as the privilege against self-incrimination ..., which [is] based on entirely different considerations from those underlying the common-law disqualifications for interest.” Washington v. Texas, 388 U.S. 14, 23 n. 21, 87 S.Ct. 1920, 18 L.Ed.2d 1019 (1967). A holding that a witness should be compelled to testify where there is no real and probable danger of incrimination and where there can be no further incrimination does not “disapprove” the- privilege against self-incrimination. I do not argue that the Sixth Amendment’s Compulsory Clause trumps the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination privilege, but only that where the two meet and the self-incrimination privilege is hardly, if at all, implicated, the accused should be able to compel exculpatory testimony.
In direct ■ contrast to the Supreme Court’s “case-by-case” interpretation of clearly established law] the majority’s narrow approach in the instant case finds no clearly established law “[b]ecause the Supreme Court has never held that permitting a witness to assert his or her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination without taking the witness stand violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial .... ” This approach apparently looks first at the facts of the case,-extracts the narrowest possible legal rule to fit that situation, and then, upon predictably finding no Supreme Court precedent resting on all fours, uncovers no clearly established law. This novel jurisprudence marks an abrupt departure from traditional notions of stare decisis and violates the dictates of Teague and its progeny.
B. “Contrary to” and “Unreasonable Application”
The Michigan Court of Appeals’ brief per curiam opinion was contrary to the above-discussed clearly established law. A state court decision is contrary to clearly established Supreme Court precedent “if the state court applies a rule that contradicts the governing law set forth in [the Supreme Court’s] cases” 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 [its] precedent.” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 405-06, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000). An example of the former situation occurs where a court applies the preponderance of the evidence standard *295when Supreme Court precedent dictates application of the reasonable probability standard. Id. at 406,120 S.Ct. 1495.
The state court’s decision in the instant case neither identified nor applied the governing legal principle of Washington v. Texas that a state may not arbitrarily deny a defendant the right to call a witness whose testimony is relevant and material to the defense. With such an oversight, it is not difficult to conclude that the state court’s determination that “the trial court did not err in refusing to compel Jordan to testify” was contrary to the clearly established mandate of Washington v. Texas.
Neither did the state court’s decision identify or apply the Fifth Amendment principles that a witness may not invoke the self-incrimination privilege where there is not a “real and probable” danger of incrimination or “where there can be no further incrimination.” Although the state court did discuss the self-incrimination privilege with respect to Jourdan, it observed that “the trial court also found that there was a reasonable basis for Jourdan to fear self-incrimination” without any analysis of the above-discussed clearly established Fifth Amendment principles relevant to this case. Because, as discussed above, Jourdan’s fear of self-incrimination was not “real and probable” and there was no danger of “further incrimination” due to his three previous statements, the state court’s decision was contrary to clearly established Supreme Court precedent.
The state court’s discussion of the relevance of the self-incrimination privilege to Jourdan, however, raises the possibility that this Court should review the Fifth Amendment issue under the “unreasonable application” prong of § 2254(d)(1). A state court unreasonably applies clearly established Supreme Court precedent “if the state court identifies the correct governing legal rule from this Court’s cases but unreasonably applies it to the facts of the particular state prisoner’s case” or “if the state court either unreasonably extends a legal principle from our precedent to a new context where it should not apply or unreasonably refuses to extend that principle to a new context where it should apply.” Williams, 529 U.S. at 407, 120 S.Ct.. 1495. To the extent that the state court could be deemed to have identified the correct legal principle by merely discussing the self-incrimination privilege, the state court’s decision unreasonably applied the above-discussed Fifth Amendment principles because, as demonstrated above, Jourdaris fear of self-incrimination was simply not “real and probable” and there was no danger of “further incrimination.” Likewise, the state court did not extend these relevant and clearly established Fifth Amendment' principles to the facts of this case and, therefore, engaged in an unreasonable application of clearly established Supreme Court precedent.
A final observation on the reasonableness of the state court’s decision is warranted in light of the Supreme Court’s statement that “[t]he more general the rule, the more leeway courts have in reaching outcomes in case by case determinations.” Yarborough v. Alvarado, 541 U.S. 652, 124 S.Ct. 2140, 2149, 158 L.Ed.2d 938 (2004). The legal principles involved here, although principles of general application, lie much closer to the middle than the end of Teague’s spectrum of abstraction where broad principles offer little guidance to applying courts. The principles of general application relevant in this case appropriately cabin state court discretion and provide little leeway for the state court’s manifestly erroneous refusal to compel Jourdan to testify.
II. Constitutional Concerns
It seems to me that the Court’s reading of AEDPA both unconstitutionally refuses *296to exercise the “judicial power” required under Article III in a case “arising under this constitution” and “suspends” the writ of habeas corpus in violation of Article I, Section 9. The result — life imprisonment for .a probably innocent accused — so undermines both the “the judicial power” and the great writ that it leaves the federal courts without the authority to correct constitutional errors that lead to serious injustice.
A. The “Judicial Power” to Interpret the Constitution
The majority’s narrow view of § 2254(d)(1) unconstitutionally obstructs Article Ill’s mandate to exercise the judicial power in cases over which the court properly has jurisdiction. The notion that AEDPA’s § 2254(d)(1) raises grave constitutional concerns by impinging on the judicial power and “suspending” the writ of habeas corpus is far from new. See, e.g., Irons v. Carey, 408 F.3d 1165 (9th Cir. 2005) (ordering parties to file briefs on the constitutionality of § 2254(d)(1)); Lindh v. Murphy, 96 F.3d 856, 885 (7th Cir.1996), rev’d 521 U.S. 320, 117 S.Ct. 2059, 138 L.Ed.2d 481 (1997) (Ripple, J., dissenting) (concluding that § 2254(d)(1) violates Article III); Randy Hertz & James S. Lieb-man, Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure §§ 32.4, 7.2(d) (4th ed.2001) (discussing constitutionality of § 2254(d)(1)); Brief of Amicus Curiae Marvin E. Frankel et al., Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000) (No. 98-8384) (brief of fiye former Article III judges arguing that § 2254(d)(1) violates Article III); Brief of Amicus Curiae ABA, Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000)(No. 98-8384) (arguing that a court of appeals’ interpretation of § 2254(d)(1) violates Article III). The majority’s approach exacerbates these concerns and recasts the judicial power as only a faint shadow of Chief Justice Marshall’s vision that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 5 U.S. 137, 177, 2 L.Ed. 60 (1803).
The following provisions of the Constitution describe the judicial power:
Article III, Section 1. “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish ... Section 2. The judicial Power shall extend to'all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution ... —to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls .... In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls ... the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
Article VI. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. (Emphasis added.)
The Federalist Papers No. 78 by Hamilton explains the “judicial power” in the following way:
Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in- a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution
*297.... The judiciary ... has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society ....
The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority .... Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing ....
It is far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law.
In interpreting the judicial power, the Supreme Court has jealously guarded against undue encroachment, especially from Congress and state courts. Once providing jurisdiction, Congress may not “prescribe rules of decision” that prohibit an Article III court from giving “the effect to evidence which, in its own judgment, such evidence should have” or that leave “the court no adjudicatory function to perform.” United States v. Klein, 13 Wall. 128, 80 U.S. 128, 146-47, 20 L.Ed. 519 (1871); United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371, 392, 100 S.Ct. 2716, 65 L.Ed.2d 844 (1980); see also Yakus v. United States, 321 U.S. 414, 468; 64 S.Ct. 660, 88 L.Ed. 834 (1944) (Rutledge, J., dissenting). This Court has jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(a) to decide the constitutional issues in this case. Congress may not say to the federal courts “clearly established law” means a case in the Supreme Court directly in point on the facts, just exactly like the case you have before you. It may, however, say, as the Supreme Court has already said in Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989), and its progeny, you should follow constitutional language and the principles and standards established by the Supreme Court and in existence at the time the state court completed its case. In the present case, my colleagues have said rather, there is no case in the Supreme Court just like the present case — no case directly in point on the facts — and hence the habeas petition must be dismissed. They say that Supreme Court precedent must be defined in its narrowest sense. Such a reading of § 2254(d)(1) renders it unconstitutional by preventing our Court from giving our independent judgment on the legal effect of the evidence before us and by leaving us “no adjudicatory function to perform.”
Likewise, Congress cannot require Article III courts to defer to state courts’ reading of federal law by preventing the federal judiciary from independently interpreting and applying federal law. See Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1, 18, 78 S.Ct. 1401, 3 L.Ed.2d 5 (1958) (describing “the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” as “a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system”). Justice Stevens has cautioned against interpretations of § 2254(d)(1) that provide undue deference to state court judgments:
At the core of [the judicial] power is the federal courts’ independent responsibility — independent from its coequal *298branches in the Federal Government, and independent from the separate authority of the several States — to interpret federal law. A construction of AEDPA that would require the federal courts to cede this authority to the courts of the States would be inconsistent with the practice that federal judges have traditionally followed in discharging their duties under Article III of the Constitution.
Williams, 529 U.S. at 378-79, 120 S.Ct. 1495 (Stevens, J., dissenting in part). Using § 2254(d)(1) as a crutch, the majority-simply defers- to the state court’s decision in which the state court neither identifies nor applies the relevant governing legal principles under either the Compulsory Process Clause or the Self-Incrimination Clause. The majority defers by concluding that there is no Supreme Court case with indistinguishable facts. As explained above, this is not.the correct interpretation of § 2254(d)(1). Such an interpretation would withdraw from the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, the judicial power to interpret independently the Constitution in most cases and would make the state court’s decision the rule we must follow. Such an application of the federal judicial power established in Article III would render § 2254(d)(1) unconstitutional, as Justice Stevens suggests and Klein holds.
B. Suspension of the Writ
In the Federalist Papers No. 8k by Hamilton, we find the following statement of the Founders’ original intent: “The most considerable of the remaining objections [to the 1787 Constitution] is that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights.” Hamilton then gives an answer to these objections. He says that the structure of the government itself providing only for enumerated powers and for checks and balances is one of the answers to these objections. Beyond that, he answers the objections as follows:
Independent of those [answers] which relate to the structure of the government, we find the following: .... Section 9 [Article I] clause 2 — “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it ....”• [T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital: . “confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten,, is a less public, a less striking, and, therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.” And as a remedy for this fatal evil he [Blackstone] is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas-corpus act, which in one place he calls “the Bulwark of the British Constitution.”
The writ of habeas corpus is the only writ named in the Constitution. So great was its importance for the preservation of liberty that the members of the Constitutional Convention equated it, along with the structural provisions, with a Bill of Rights. Had not some state ratification conventions insisted on a Bill of Rights, the federal courts would have had to create an unwritten Bill of Rights using the writ of habeas corpus and the doctrine that the elected branches are limited to the enumerate powers named in the Constitution. Because of the importance of the clause forbidding the suspension of the writ, the Supreme Court has refused to allow Congress, the executive or the lower courts seriously to reduce its coverage and protections. For example, in INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 300, 121 S.Ct. 2271, 150 *299L.Ed.2d 347 (2001), the Supreme Court refused to adhere to an interpretation of an immigration statute and AEDPA that “would give rise to substantial constitutional questions” under the Suspension Clause.1
A reading of AEDPA § 2254(d)(1) that so broadly circumscribes the writ of habe-as corpus that we cannot reach the full merits of the constitutional issue before us violates the Suspension Clause. We should hold that the Compulsory Process Clause, as interpreted in Washington v. Texas, provides the constitutional rule of decision and that its full application here does not conflict with any decision of the Supreme Court interpreting the Self-Incrimination Clause.
For the foregoing reasons, I dissent.

. See the discussion of the history and meaning of the Constitution’s Suspension Clause in the dissenting opinion of Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Stevens, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 124 S.Ct. 2633, 2660-74, 159 L.Ed.2d 578 (2004), and their admonition that:
The Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which carefully circumscribes the conditions under which the writ can be withheld, would be a sham if it could be evaded by congressional prescription of requirements other than the common-law requirement of committal for criminal prosecution that render the writ, though available, unavailing.
Id. at 2672 (emphasis in original).