Category: Habeas Corpus

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning once again reversed a federal court of appeals, this time the Sixth Circuit, for exceeding the limits placed on its authority in Congress’s landmark 1996 reform of federal habeas corpus. Mays v. Hines, 20-507, involves a Tennessee murder case where the defendant was convicted on overwhelming evidence of stabbing to death an employee in a motel and stealing the motel cash, along with the employee’s car.

In state collateral review, the witness who discovered the body finally admitted that he had lied about the reason he was at the motel. He was there for an illicit rendezvous. But this had very little to do with the strength of the evidence that Hines was the murderer, and so the state courts left the judgment intact. Continue reading . . .

This post concludes the series on the U.S. Supreme Court case of Edwards v. Vannoy, No. 19-5807, argued December 2. The question presented is whether the Court’s decision last term in Ramos v. Louisiana is retroactive to overturn judgments that were already final on direct appeal when the decision came down. On the well-established body of law under Teague v. Lane, the answer is very clearly no, yet the Court seemed to have a surprising amount of difficulty with it during the argument.

The previous two posts (see index at the end) demonstrated that the conditions for the Teague rule to come into play were met. Ramos is certainly a “new rule” within the meaning of the Teague cases. It is a rule of procedure and not substantive law. The remaining question is whether it qualifies for an exception that no new rule in the three decades since Teague has qualified for. The answer, again, is clearly no. Continue reading . . .

In the previous post in this series, I noted that the Supreme Court has stated clearly that any decision that overrules a prior decision is necessarily a “new rule” for the purpose of Teague v. Lane. The 1972 cases that upheld non-unanimous 12-person juries in state criminal cases, Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404 (1972) and Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356 (1972), were decisions for the purpose of this rule, even if neither contained one opinion that expressed a rationale agreed to by a majority.

Nonetheless, in Ramos v. Louisiana, three Justices opined that these cases were not precedents, and therefore the Supreme Court did not need to go through the usual analysis of whether to overrule a precedent in order to strike down Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury law. If we assumed that the view of these three was correct for the sake of argument, would it follow that Ramos is not a “new rule” for the purpose of retroactivity under Teague? No. Continue reading . . .

One year ago this Friday, Judge Carlos Bea of the Ninth Circuit warned his colleagues they were headed for reversal in Kayer v. Ryan, No. 09-99027: “Like clockwork, practically on a yearly basis since the Millennium, we have forced the Supreme Court to correct our inability to apply the proper legal standards under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (‘AEDPA’”).”

Sure enough, yesterday the Supreme Court summarily reversed, saying “the Court of Appeals clearly violated this Court’s AEDPA jurisprudence.” Continue reading . . .

Before getting to the oral argument of December 2 in Edwards v. Vannoy, a basic explanation of the rule of Teague v. Lane is in order. To understand the rule, and to understand why it has an exception that is never met, one needs to know the background.

Before Teague, the Warren Court had established a three-prong test for when a rule would be applied retroactively to earlier cases. The Court was making up new rules at a brisk pace, so this question was important. The majority that created this approach to retroactivity, initially, was a coalition of the more pragmatic members of the liberal wing of the Court, including Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan, who saw non-retroactivity as a way to reduce resistance to changes they thought were needed, and the relatively conservative justices who saw it “as a way of limiting the reach of decisions that seemed to them fundamentally unsound,” as Justice Harlan put it in his separate opinion in Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. 667, 676 (1971). Continue reading . . .

Last April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Ramos v. Louisiana that juries must be unanimous in state criminal trials, contrary to the result reached by a splintered Court in 1972 in a pair of cases, Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404 and Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356. Those two states continued to allow convictions by juries split 10-2 or 11-1 in reliance on those decisions for many years, although the voters of Louisiana changed to a unanimity requirement for future trials in the 2018 election.

What about cases tried before Ramos ? On the day of the decision, this seemed like an easy question. Under well-established Supreme Court precedent, those cases of nonunanimous verdicts still pending their initial appeal would be reversed, but that would not be a ground for a collateral attack (i.e., habeas corpus or an equivalent procedure) for old cases that were tried and became final in accordance with what had been the law at the time. Indeed, the several opinions in Ramos itself either said or clearly implied as much. Continue reading . . .