By: Robert D. Sloane
The modern law of federal habeas corpus is a labyrinth of
counterfactuals and arcane procedural hurdles that few state
petitioners manage to navigate—as Justice Blackmun once wrote less
charitably in dissent, “a Byzantine morass of arbitrary,
unnecessary, and unjustifiable impediments to the vindication of
federal rights.” The convoluted inquiries required arise from
the need to reconcile three developments of the past four decades
that remain in tension with one another: first, the Warren
Court’s expansion of federal habeas relief, identified with Fay
v. Noia and its progeny; second, the Burger and Rehnquist
Courts’ curtailment of that expansion, identified with
Wainwright v. Sykes, which partially overruled Fay,
and Coleman v. Thompson, which fully overruled it; and third,
the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
(AEDPA). AEDPA to a certain extent codified, and to another
extent modified, judicial developments of the preceding four
decades. By common consensus, it did a poor job in both
respects. Because it “bears the influence of various bills
that were fiercely debated for nearly forty years,” its “arcane
verbiage” frequently generates difficult questions of statutory
interpretation. Federal judges increasingly find themselves
engaged in correspondingly tortuous exercises of statutory
construction. Justice Souter, writing for the Court in
Lindh v. Murphy, captured the nucleus of the
problem: “All we can say is that in a world of silk purses
and pigs’ ears, [AEDPA] is not a silk purse of the art of statutory
drafting.”
In this Comment, I suggest an answer to one of the multiple
questions of AEDPA statutory interpretation: What does it
mean for a state court to have “adjudicated” a habeas petitioner’s
federal claim “on the merits”? AEDPA directs federal habeas
courts to extend a curious form of deference to decisions that
resulted from state-court adjudications on the merits. Title
28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1) divests federal courts of authority to issue
a writ of habeas corpus unless a state-court adjudication on the
merits culminated “in a decision that was contrary to, or involved
an unreasonable application of, clearly established [f]ederal law
as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.”
This text, to say the least, resists coherent exposition.
Even after Williams v. Taylor, which sought to clarify the
“contrary to” and “unreasonable application” clauses, federal
courts struggle to understand precisely what § 2254(d)(1) requires,
to invest it with a meaning distinct from the catalogue of familiar
standards of appellate review. For example, an unreasonable
decision, the Second Circuit has suggested, must contain “[s]ome
increment of incorrectness beyond error[, but] the increment need
not be great; otherwise, habeas relief would be limited to state
court decisions ‘so far off the mark as to suggest judicial
incompetence.’”
. . . .
Part I explores the origins of habeas corpus, reviews its
development relative to the states following the Civil War, and
briefly notes the countervailing trends that culminated in
AEDPA. Part II canvasses and appraises the competing
interpretations of “adjudicated on the merits.” Part III
argues that the “manifest adjudication” construction of 28 U.S.C. §
2254(d) exhibits greater fidelity to the jurisprudential integrity
of habeas corpus. It then distinguishes the four scenarios
presented by cursory state-court judgments and considers which
construction of § 2254(d) better serves the federalism, comity, and
judicial efficiency concerns that, at least nominally, motivated
AEDPA’s habeas reforms. Habeas corpus remains a vital
safeguard of personal liberty within our legal system; one of the
paramount constitutional mechanisms by which, as Madison wrote, “a
double security arises to the rights of the people.” We
should acknowledge and seek to ameliorate problems raised by the
Great Writ’s abuse by persons incarcerated pursuant to state
judgments. But the integrity of habeas corpus need not be
compromised by judicial construction of an ambiguous statutory
provision in a manner arguably inconsistent with the writ’s
jurisprudential import and status within our constitutional
framework.
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