Supreme Court vacates habeas finding in murder case

The last resort for many convicted felons is to file a habeas corpus petition in federal court to overturn the conviction in the basis that the conviction was unconstitutional, usually because there was an unfair trial or the prosecutor did something that violated the Constitution. These petitions are very difficult to win, and Congress made it even more difficult in the 1990s when it passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). This guy won his habeas petition in the Sixth Circuit, but the Supreme Court has reversed and the defendant remains in jail.

The case is Brown v. Davenport, issued by the Supreme Court on April 21. This is a first-degree murder case. During his criminal trial, defendant was shackled at a table with a "privacy screen." Davenport said the privacy screen was unnecessary and thus rendered the trial unconstitutional. As the Sixth Circuit saw it, a new trial was warranted because it thought the privacy screen had a substantial and injurious effect on the trial's outcome, drawing from a Supreme Court case, Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619 (1993). 

Habeas doctrine goes back to the days of the nation's founding. A lot of people have gotten new trials through their federal habeas petitions. The Brecht ruling reflected federal efforts to reign in these petitions to ensure that these petitions are not simply another way of appealing a criminal conviction. The idea was that you can't win the habeas motion unless the trial court error was not harmless and it made a difference at trial. But in 1996, Congress went even further, enacting the AEDPA, which said the habeas petition cannot be granted unless the state court trial error violated clearly-established Supreme Court precedent, was an unreasonable application of Supreme Court precedent, or was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts. The AEDPA made these petitions even harder to win.

The issue posed in this case was the interplay between Brecht and the AEDPA. How does the latter affect the former? The Court says that to win a habeas petition, the defendant must clear both Brecht and the AEDPA tests. It is not enough to show the trial court was not harmless under Brecht. You also have to show the trial court error violated clearly-established Supreme Court precedent, which provides inmates with a narrow body of case law to draw from, as the Court has not resolved every constitutional trial error that might be available to inmates. Since the Sixth Circuit did not factor the AEDPA into resolving Davenport's case, and since the Supreme Court finds that the trial error did not violate clearly-established Supreme Court precedent, the conviction stands.