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Author: Steve Vladeck

By on Mar 22, 2016 at 10:42 am
Screen Shot 2016-03-21 at 10.56.24 AM No one will confuse Ross v. Blake for one of the more high-profile cases of the Supreme Court’s October 2015 Term. But hiding behind a technical dispute over what it means for administrative remedies to be “available” under the exhaustion requirement of Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 (PLRA) is a far more interesting dispute between the parties over what the case is actually about – with the added baggage of a state taking a different position in its briefs about its own laws than what case law appears to reveal those laws to provide. And the more daylight there appears to be between those two things, the more the Justices may be inclined to either affirm the decision below, dismiss certiorari as improvidently granted, or, at the very least, send the case back to the court of appeals to let it clean up the mess.

By on Jan 13, 2016 at 1:54 pm
Thanks to the highly deferential review mandated by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), it is the rare case today in which a state prisoner is able to convince the Supreme Court that his conviction was based upon such an egregious constitutional error by the state courts that he is entitled to post-conviction habeas relief. And given the tenor of yesterday’s oral argument, it is difficult to believe that Duncan v. Owens is going to be one of those cases. Instead, perhaps the more interesting question is whether an opinion siding with the state of Illinois rests on the ground that the trial court’s error was not “clearly established” because it is not clear what the error actually was, or, more narrowly, that any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, as the state appellate court concluded.

By on Jan 5, 2016 at 5:17 pm
Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 5.13.33 PM At first blush, Duncan v. Owens, a case in which the Supreme Court is set to hear oral argument next Tuesday, looks like just another example of a federal appeals court giving insufficient deference under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) to a state trial court in reviewing a state prisoner’s habeas conviction — a sin for which the Sixth Circuit alone has already been chastised by the Justices twice this Term. But this is not your routine habeas case. Instead, the real question this case raises is just how specific the Supreme Court’s “clearly established” law must be in order to provide the basis for post-conviction relief under AEDPA. Needless to say, how the Justices answer that question could have significant implications for all federal habeas review.
  1. Background
In November 2000, respondent Lawrence Owens was convicted for the murder of Ramon Nelson after a bench trial outside of Chicago. Although two eyewitnesses testified at the trial, there were serious inconsistencies in their testimony, and at the end of the parties’ closing arguments, the trial judge concluded that:

By on Nov 4, 2015 at 11:24 am
If yesterday’s second argument in Lockhart v. United States was, as Evan Lee put it, “The Battle of the Canons,” the first argument in Torres v. Lynch might best be remembered as “A Battle Without Canons,” as the Justices all-but ignored the competing statutory interpretation doctrines relied upon by the parties in trying to divine the meaning of two words buried in a hyper-specific provision of federal immigration law. To some observers, the relative paucity of references to canons in the hour-long session might suggest that the case is a “very close call.” But the Court’s near-exclusive focus on Congress’s purpose in defining as an “aggravated felony” any offense “described in” a particular federal statute appears to bode ill for Jorge Torres — and to portend a ruling that state law convictions are “described in” federal statutes even when they lack jurisdictional elements that the federal statute includes. If that is the ultimate result in this case, it will only increase the range of criminal convictions that will render immigrants categorically ineligible for cancellation of their removal from the United States.

By on Oct 29, 2015 at 9:37 am
Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement_(US)_badge_-_Special_AgentInstead of identifying an exhaustive list of every state and federal criminal offense for which a conviction renders a non-citizen subject to removal (or ineligible for relief from removal), Congress has historically identified categories of convictions that will trigger removability and left it to federal immigration authorities — and the courts — to sort out whether particular state-law convictions do or do not fall within the identified categories. This, in turn, has led the courts generally to pursue a “categorical” approach, under which “[t]he state conviction triggers removal only if, by definition, the underlying crime falls within a category of removable offenses defined by federal law.” But what about when the federal law definition includes a (constitutionally motivated) interstate commerce element that the state law offense lacks, such that a conviction under the state law offense would not necessarily establish the facts necessary for a conviction under the federal statute? That is the question the Justices will confront Tuesday morning, when they hear oral argument in Torres v. Lynch. And although this case is only about whether a specific New York arson conviction is for the offense “described in” a particular federal arson statute, how the Court answers that question could significantly either expand or contract the class of state-law convictions that render non-citizens subject to removal going forward.

By on Jun 18, 2015 at 2:33 pm
In a ruling perhaps more noteworthy for an unusually testy exchange between two of the Justices in the majority, a five-to-four Supreme Court on Thursday sided with California in Davis v. Ayala, holding that the Ninth Circuit failed to give enough deference to the California Supreme Court’s determination that any Batson error at a criminal defendant’s capital trial was harmless. In the process, the Justices reiterated not only that, in federal habeas cases, petitioners have a high bar to overcome in showing that a state court’s harmless error determination was incorrect, but also that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) mandates deference to that determination. Put another way, when a state appellate court holds that a trial court’s constitutional error was harmless, a federal habeas court can only disrupt that holding when the harmless error determination, and not the error itself, was “contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law.”

By on Jun 15, 2015 at 11:59 am
In an eight-to-one ruling handed down on Monday, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the distinction between jurisdiction to entertain an appeal and the merits of the appeal, holding in Reyes Mata v. Lynch that the Fifth Circuit wrongly ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to consider an immigrant’s appeal of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA’s) denial of his untimely motion to reopen his removal proceedings. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, “Whether the BIA rejects the alien’s motion to reopen because it comes too late or because it falls short in some other respect, the courts have jurisdiction to review that decision.” Although the majority sidestepped the underlying substantive question raised by Mata’s appeal — whether the ninety-day timeline for filing motions to reopen is subject to equitable tolling — its affirmation that the courts of appeals have jurisdiction to answer that question cleans up a ten-to-one circuit split, and opens the door for immigrants in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to pursue that argument on the merits.

By on May 18, 2015 at 4:45 pm
In an opinion that is surprising in both its brevity and unanimity, the Supreme Court on Monday sided with the Sixth and Seventh Circuits (and against the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and D.C. Circuits) in holding that the dismissal of an in forma pauperis (“IFP”) prisoner’s prior suit counts as a “strike” for purposes of the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s “three strikes” provision even while an appeal of that dismissal remains pending. As a result, petitioner André Lee Coleman was not entitled to IFP status for lawsuits he filed while he appealed his “third” strike. But whereas Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the Court in Coleman v. Tollefson purported to duck the harder question of whether Coleman would also have been barred from obtaining IFP status to appeal the third strike itself, it is difficult to see how the Court’s statutory analysis in Coleman’s case wouldn’t apply to those facts, as well.

By on Apr 30, 2015 at 9:59 am
After Tuesday’s marathon session in the marriage cases and Wednesday’s first (and tense) argument in Glossip, one can understand if the Justices’ attention was focused elsewhere when WilmerHale partner Mark Fleming stepped to the podium representing the petitioner in Mata v. Lynch. After all, as we noted in our argument preview, the government had already conceded that the Fifth Circuit was on the wrong end of a ten-to-one circuit split on the hypertechnical question presented: “Whether [it] erred in this case in holding that it has no jurisdiction to review petitioner’s request that the Board of Immigration Appeals equitably toll the ninety-day deadline on his motion to reopen as a result of ineffective assistance of counsel.” Moreover, the only lawyer defending the decision below was Beck Redden LLP associate William Peterson — whom the Court appointed as an amicus to do exactly that. So it was that, when Fleming concluded his opening remarks by suggesting to the Justices that there is a “short way” to decide this case, Justice Anthony Kennedy replied that Fleming “know[s] the way to our hearts.”

By on Apr 27, 2015 at 11:38 am
For the better part of twenty years, the jurisdiction of the federal courts of appeals to review different decisions by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) has been something of a minefield. That morass returns to the Court on Wednesday in Mata v. Lynch, the final oral argument of the current Term. But whereas the question presented in this case – whether courts of appeals have jurisdiction to review the BIA’s denial of an immigrant’s motion to reopen his removal proceedings based upon a claim that his original counsel was ineffective – may sound difficult, not even the federal government is defending the Fifth Circuit precedent at issue (which answered that question in the negative and thereby created a ten-to-one circuit split). Thus, the last hour of argument before the Justices until October may be entirely anticlimactic – and not just because of the contrast with the other cases the Court is set to hear this week.