Court Opinion

ID: 9432725
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:36:05.771479+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:35.576223
License: Public Domain

Justice O’Connor,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion and concur in its judgment. I write separately only to point out that today’s decision will, in the vast majority of cases, have no effect on the prejudice inquiry under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668 (1984). The determinative question — whether there is “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different,” id., at 694 — remains unchanged. This case, however, concerns the unusual circumstance where the defendant attempts to demonstrate prejudice based on considerations that, as a matter of law, ought not inform the inquiry. As we explained in Strickland, certain factors, real though they may be, simply cannot be taken into account:
“An assessment of the likelihood of a result more favorable to the defendant must exclude the possibility of arbitrariness, whimsy, caprice, ‘nullification,’ and the like. *374A defendant has no entitlement to the luck of a lawless decisionmaker, even if a lawless decision cannot be reviewed. The assessment of prejudice should proceed on the assumption that the decisionmaker is reasonably, conscientiously, and impartially applying the standards that govern the decision. It should not depend on the idiosyncracies of the particular decisionmaker, such as unusual propensities toward harshness or leniency.” Id., at 695.
Since Strickland, we have recognized that neither the likely effect of perjured testimony nor the impact of a meritless Fourth Amendment objection is an appropriate consideration in the prejudice inquiry. Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U. S. 157 (1986) (failure to put on perjured testimony); Kimmelman v. Morrison, 477 U. S. 365, 382 (1986) (where the defendant claims that the deficient performance was failure to make a suppression motion, “a meritorious Fourth Amendment issue is necessary to the success of a Sixth Amendment claim” (emphasis added)).
Today the Court identifies another factor that ought not inform the prejudice inquiry. Specifically, today we hold that the court making the prejudice determination may not consider the effect of an objection it knows to be wholly merit-less under current governing law, even if the objection might have been considered meritorious at the time of its omission. That narrow holding, of course, precisely disposes of this case as it appeared before the Eighth Circuit. The omitted objection of which respondent complained very well may have been sustained had it been raised at trial. But by the time the Eighth Circuit reviewed respondent’s ineffective assistance claim, on-point Circuit authority bound that court to hold the objection meritless; the Arkansas Supreme Court had rejected the objection as well. Perry v. Lockhart, 871 F. 2d 1384, 1392-1394 (CA8), cert. denied, 493 U. S. 959 (1989); O’Rourke v. State, 295 Ark. 57, 63-64, 746 S. W. 2d 52, 55-56 (1988). Consequently, respondent’s claim of *375prejudice was based not on the allegation that he was denied an advantage the law might permit him. It was predicated instead on the suggestion that he might have been denied “a right the law simply does not recognize,” Nix, supra, at 186-187 (Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment), namely, the right to “have the state court make an error in his favor,” ante, at 371 (opinion of the Court) (internal quotation marks omitted). It seems to me that the impact of advocating a decidedly incorrect point of law, like the influence of perjured testimony, is not a proper consideration when assessing “the likelihood of a result more favorable to the defendant.” Strickland, supra, at 695. I therefore join the Court in holding that, in these somewhat unusual circumstances, the Court of Appeals should have concluded that respondent suffered no legally cognizable prejudice.
Justice Thomas,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion in its entirety. I write separately to call attention to what can only be described as a fundamental misunderstanding of the Supremacy Clause on the part of the Court of Appeals.
In concluding that respondent had been prejudiced by his attorney’s failure to make an objection based upon Collins v. Lockhart, 754 F. 2d 258 (CA8), cert. denied, 474 U. S. 1013 (1985), the Court of Appeals said the following: “[S]ince state courts are bound by the Supremacy Clause to obey federal constitutional law, we conclude that a reasonable state trial court would have sustained an objection based on Collins had Fretwell’s attorney made one.” 946 F. 2d 571, 577 (CA8 1991). I do not understand this statement to mean that there is a reasonable probability that the Arkansas trial court would have found Collins persuasive, and therefore would have chosen to follow it. Instead, the Court of Ap-. peals appears to have been under the impression that the Arkansas trial court would have been compelled to follow Collins by the Supremacy Clause.
*376It was mistaken. The Supremacy Clause demands that state law yield to federal law, but neither federal supremacy nor any other principle of federal law requires that a state court’s interpretation of federal law give way to a (lower) federal court’s interpretation. In our federal system, a state trial court’s interpretation of federal law is no less authoritative than that of the federal court of appeals in whose circuit the trial court is located. See Steffel v. Thompson, 415 U. S. 452, 482, n. 3 (1974) (Rehnquist, J., concurring); United States ex rel. Lawrence v. Woods, 432 F. 2d 1072, 1075-1076 (CA7 1970), cert. denied, 402 U. S. 983 (1971); Shapiro, State Courts and Federal Declaratory Judgments, 74 Nw. U. L. Rev. 759, 771, 774 (1979). An Arkansas trial court is bound by this Court’s (and by the Arkansas Supreme Court’s and Arkansas Court of Appeals’) interpretation of federal law, but if it follows the Eighth Circuit’s interpretation of federal law, it does so only because it chooses to and not because it must.
I agree with the Court’s holding that the Court of Appeals misinterpreted the Sixth Amendment. I wish to make it clear that it misinterpreted the Supremacy Clause as well.