Court Opinion

ID: 9498835
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:29:31.361867+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:06.274668
License: Public Domain

KING, Circuit Judge,
dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:
The Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury has been long recognized as “fundamental to our system of justice.” Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 153, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968). Described as “inherent and invaluable” by the First Congress of the American Colonies, and as a “great and inestimable privilege” by the First Continental Congress, the right to an impartial jury stands among those fundamental rights most revered by the founding generation. Id. at 152, 88 S.Ct. 1444; see also The Declaration of Independence para. 20 (listing among the grievances against George III that he “den[ied] us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.”). Given their distrust of governmental power, the veneration in which our forebears held the jury trial right is not surprising, for “[t]he primary purpose of the jury in our legal system is to stand between the accused and the powers of the State.” Lewis v. United States, 518 U.S. 322, 335, 116 S.Ct. 2163, 135 *231L.Ed.2d 590 (1996) (Kennedy, J., concurring in the judgment). A trial jury, of course, can only serve this purpose if it is impartial. Thus, where a trial jury’s deliberations have been contaminated by an improper external influence that threatens its impartiality, its tainted verdict must not be enforced. See Remmer v. United States, 347 U.S. 227, 229-30, 74 S.Ct. 450, 98 L.Ed. 654 (1954).
According to Robinson’s allegations, a trial juror, during sentencing-phase deliberations on whether he should be punished by execution, requested and received a Bible from the court bailiff without authorization by the court. The juror then read aloud to the deliberating jury a passage concerning the Biblical mandate of “an eyé for an eye,” in an effort to persuade fellow jurors to recommend the death sentence that Robinson ultimately received. The state court determined that these allegations failed to constitute an improper and unconstitutional external influence under the applicable Supreme Court precedents. As explained in my opinion dissenting from the panel majority’s opinion, see Robinson v. Polk, 438 F.3d 350, 368-76 (4th Cir.2006) (King, J., dissenting in part), the state court’s decision plainly “involved an unreasonable application of [] clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,” under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (“AEDPA”). 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). I write again to supplement and emphasize the view I earlier expressed.
In a series of decisions, the Supreme Court has recognized and held that the contamination of a jury’s deliberations by an improper external influence contravenes a defendant’s right to an impartial jury. See Parker v. Gladden, 385 U.S. 363, 87 S.Ct. 468, 17 L.Ed.2d 420 (1966); Turner v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 466, 85 S.Ct. 546, 13 L.Ed.2d 424 (1965); Remmer v. United States, 347 U.S. 227, 74 S.Ct. 450, 98 L.Ed. 654 (1954). The external influences recognized by the Court in those decisions are factually diverse, but they share a single, constitutionally significant characteristic: they are external to the evidence and law in the case, and carry the potential to bias the jury against the defendant. This legal principle unifies the bailiff’s remarks disparaging the defendant in Parker, the relationship of confidence between the jury and key prosecution witnesses in Turner, and the effort to bribe a juror in Remmer. And it plainly applies to the circumstances here.
The Supreme Court has struggled for decades to structure the law of capital sentencing so as to assure that a defendant facing a possible death sentence receives the individualized consideration that the Constitution mandates. Such individualized consideration is essential because the Constitution does not abide death as a punishment for all those convicted of murder; it reserves the ultimate penalty for “those offenders who commit a narrow category of the most serious crimes and whose extreme culpability makes them the most deserving of execution.” Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 568, 125 S.Ct. 1183, 161 L.Ed.2d 1 (2005) (internal quotation marks omitted). In order to minimize the risk that an individual defendant who falls outside of that “narrow category” may be sentenced to death, a deliberating jury must first find the existence of at least one precisely defined aggravating circumstance that applies only to a subclass of defendants convicted of murder. See Tuilaepa v. California, 512 U.S. 967, 971-72, 114 S.Ct. 2630, 129 L.Ed.2d 750 (1994). If it finds the presence of such an aggravating circumstance, the jury must then make “an individualized determination on the basis of the character of the individual and the circumstances of the crime,” considering *232all relevant mitigating evidence that the defendant has mustered in support of his plea for mercy. See Zant v. Stephens, 462 U.S. 862, 879, 103 S.Ct. 2733, 77 L.Ed.2d 235 (1983).
If Robinson’s allegations are true, one of his jurors, employing a Bible provided by the court’s bailiff without court authorization, exhorted his fellow jurors to supplant the capital sentencing law prescribed by the Supreme Court with the divine command expressed in the Bible’s mandate of “an eye for an eye.” In effect, this juror requested that his fellow jurors throw the individualized consideration required by the Constitution to the wind, for while the Constitution requires that the death penalty be imposed through structured discretion on only a narrow class of the worst murderers, the principle of “an eye for an eye” licenses death as a punishment for any murder, a position rejected by the Supreme Court as contrary to the Constitution. See Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 303, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976) (opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.). Simply put, the trial juror, by appealing to a text introduced into the jury room without court authorization, sought to persuade the jury to decide Robinson’s fate by reference to a dictate that is contrary to what our Constitution mandates, and that derives from what many consider to be a divinely inspired source of law.
My good friend Judge Wilkinson has written — with characteristic eloquence — in support of the denial of en banc consideration here, and he suggests that the state-court determination at issue was not unreasonable because the Supreme Court has not specifically considered “whether the use of a Bible in jury deliberations could create a bias of constitutional proportions.” Ante at 229. The scope of our review for unreasonableness under AED-PA, however, is defined not simply by the factual similarity between the relevant Court precedents and the case on review, but by whether the legal principle embodied in those precedents reasonably must control in the factual context of the case on review. See Williams (Terry) v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 407, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000) (observing that a state court decision involves an unreasonable application of Supreme Court precedent when it “unreasonably refuses to extend [a legal] principle to a new context where it should apply”). A legal principle, by definition, applies to diverse factual scenarios. And those factual scenarios can differ in innumerable ways, so long as they are analogous on the point to which the legal principle applies. See Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 510, 520, 123 S.Ct. 2527, 156 L.Ed.2d 471 (2003) (observing that “a federal court may grant relief when a state court has misapplied a governing legal principle to a set of facts different from those of the case in which the principle was announced” (internal quotation marks omitted)).*
In these circumstances, the governing legal principle- — -the prohibition against improper external influences on a jury’s de*233liberations — applies to any set of facts that shares a common characteristic: an intrusion on the jury’s deliberations that is external to the evidence and law in the case, and that carries the potential to bias the jury against the defendant. That single principle unites the divergent facts in Parker, Ttimer, and Remmer. And it was plainly unreasonable for the North Carolina state court to decline to apply it here, where a trial juror received an unauthorized text from the court bailiff and invoked from it what many consider to be divine commands, in order to convince his fellow jurors to apply a principle that is not only inconsistent with the law the jury was charged to apply, but that the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional.
If the Supreme Court principle prohibiting an external influence on a jury’s deliberations does not apply in this case, it is difficult to imagine any state habeas corpus proceeding, absent one with facts identical to the pertinent Court cases, in which the principle would apply. While I entirely agree that our review under AEDPA must be deferential, to read and apply AEDPA’s provisions so narrowly is essentially to abdicate our responsibility to utilize the Great Writ when a state court has unreasonably applied clearly established federal law as determined by the Supreme Court.
I dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc.

 Indeed, to require strict factual parity under the "unreasonable application” clause of § 2254(d)(1) would conflate the "unreasonable application" clause with the "contrary to” clause. See Williams, 529 U.S. at 406, 120 S.Ct. 1495 (observing that state-court decision is contrary to Supreme Court precedent "if the state court confronts a set of facts that are materially indistinguishable from a decision of th[e] Court and nevertheless arrives at a result different from [Supreme Court] precedent”). Such a requirement would read the "unreasonable application” clause out of § 2254 and would be inconsistent with the Court's admonition that the two clauses must be accorded "independent meaning.” Id. at 405, 120 S.Ct. 1495.