In Frye v. Broomfield, the Ninth Circuit today overturned a district court order granting the habeas corpus petition of a condemned prisoner who was convicted of a 1985 double murder in Amador County. The Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence over a quarter century ago. (People v. Frye (1998) 18 Cal.4th 894, disapproved by People v. Doolin (2009) 45 Cal.4th 390.)
The lower court’s habeas grant was based on a claim — that the defendant’s due process rights were violated when jurors saw him shackled during trial — that wasn’t raised on direct appeal. The claim was made in a state habeas petition the Supreme Court denied on the merits, but without opinion, in 2001.
The Ninth Circuit panel said it was “a very close call,” but held habeas relief was unavailable “in light of the substantial deference that [the federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act] requires us to give to an unreasoned state court merits decision.” The court found it dispositive that “we cannot say that every fairminded jurist would conclude that the state court’s [presumed] determination [that the shackling was harmless] was objectively unreasonable.”
A concurring judge wrote separately “to register my frustration with the deference that we owe the perfunctory, two-sentence denial at issue in this capital case.” The judge continued, “we defer to state-court reasoning that never was. That boggles my mind. And I regret that Frye will remain on death row because a hypothetical fair-minded jurist could think that an imaginary harmlessness analysis is reasonable.”
The defendant made other arguments besides the shackling claim, but the district court didn’t rule on them, so the Ninth Circuit sent the case back for further proceedings.
The Ninth Circuit usually, but not always, refuses to overturn Supreme Court death penalty decisions.
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