Retroactivity: due process violation: habeas relief:
under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA),
Lancaster may obtain federal habeas relief only if the Michigan Court of
Appeals, in rejecting his due process claim, unreasonably applied “clearly
established Federal law, as determined by this Court.” 28 U. S. C. §2254(d)(1).
This standard is “difficult to meet”: Lancaster must show that the Michigan
Court of Appeals’ decision rested on “an error well understood and
comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fairminded
disagreement.” Harrington v. Richter, 562 U. S. ___, ___; Held:
Lancaster is not entitled to federal habeas relief; in Rogers, the
petitioner contested the Tennessee Supreme Court’s retroactive abolition of the
common-law “year and a day rule,” which barred a murder conviction “unless the
victim had died by the defendant’s act within a year and a day of the act.”
532 U. S., at 453. This Court found no due process violation. “Judicial
alteration of a common law doctrine of criminal law,” the Court held, “violates
the principle of fair warning, and hence must not be given retroactive effect,
only where the alteration is ‘unexpected and indefensible by reference to the
law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue.’ ” Id., at
462. Judged by this standard, the retroactive abolition of the year and a day
rule encountered no constitutional impediment. The rule was “widely viewed as
an outdated relic of the common law,” had been routinely rejected by modern
courts and legislators, and had been mentioned in reported Tennessee decisions
“only three times, and each time in dicta.” Id., at 462–464; this Court
has never found a due process violation in circumstances remotely resembling
Lancaster’s case—i.e., where a state supreme court, squarely addressing
a particular issue for the first time, rejected a consistent line of lower
court decisions based on the supreme court’s reasonable interpretation of the
language of a controlling statute. Fairminded jurists could conclude that a
state supreme court decision of that order is not “ ‘unexpected and
indefensible by reference to existing law.’ ” Id., at 462 (U.S. S. Ct.,
20.05.13, Metrish v. Lancaster, J. Ginsburg, unanimous).
Monday, May 20, 2013
Metrish v. Lancaster
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