The Supreme Court issued an order list today. No cert. grants in any habeas cases.
And one very notable denial. It occurred in Williams v. Hobbs. Sotomayor dissented from the denial of cert. in an opinion joined by Ginsburg.
I had previously talked about Williams here as it was one of the Relisted cases and it had the amicus filed by the Scholars of Habeas Corpus Law. As I mentioned in the prior post, the issue in the case was whether it was appropriate for the 8th Circuit to raise a procedural defense sua sponte that the State did not raise in the district court? The procedural defense was whether it was appropriate to order an evidentiary hearing. The State did not object to the hearing in the district court, and the district court held one. The district court then granted habeas relief after the hearing.
In my prior post, I was trying to think of a way that the relist could possibly mean a summary reversal -- the Eighth Circuit's ruling seemed pretty absurd to me. But even there I had my doubts. So the cert. denial is not surprising, but it is still very, very disappointing.
Sotomayor's dissent is a pleasure to read. She effectively takes down the Eighth Circuit's reasoning and credibly shows that the State made a strategic decision in going forward with the hearing. Essentially, the State thought the hearing would help them show that habeas relief should not be granted. They ended up being wrong. But only after taking that risk and losing did the State say that the hearing shouldn't have been held in the first place. She concluded that the State should not be allowed "to manipulate federal habeas proceedings to their own strategic advantage at an unacceptable cost to justice." Strong words -- and her opinion backs them up. Her opinion is so effective that I find it really surprising that she couldn't get four votes for cert. (I am looking at you Breyer and Kagan).
While this cert. denial smarts a little for habeas petitioners (at least for those in the Eighth Circuit), it is nice to see Sotomayor coming out so strongly, once again, in favor of the habeas petitioner/criminal defendant.
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