Clark v. Sweeney (No. 25.-52)

In Clark v. Sweeney (No. 25.-52), a unanimous Court chastised the Fourth Circuit for straying from the principle of party presentation in ordering a new trial for a habeas petitioner on grounds he hadn't raised in his appeal.

Jeremiah Sweeney was charged with second-degree murder after allegedly shooting a bystander during an argument with neighbors about stolen drugs. His defense at trial was that he could not have been the shooter, given the relative locations of himself and the victim and the angle of the bullet wound. After the prosecution rested its case, Juror 4 decided to visit the crime scene himself, to get a better sense of what had only been presented to the jury via a diagram. The next day, as the jury began deliberating, the rogue juror told the others about his field trip, and they promptly reported it to the judge. After briefly questioning Juror 4 (but not the others) and discussing the situation with the prosecutor and Sweeney's counsel, the judge decided to dismiss Juror 4 and allow the remaining 11 jurors to proceed with their deliberations, rather than declare a mistrial. Not long thereafter, the remaining 11 returned a conviction.

After unsuccessfully exhausting his direct appeals, Sweeney filed a petition for postconviction relief in state court. He argued that his lawyer was constitutionally ineffective for failing to question the entire jury to ensure that none of the remaining 11 were tainted by Juror 4's excursion. The state court rejected the claim, and Sweeney proceeded to file a federal habeas petition, now with the assistance of appointed counsel. Once again, he focused his petition on the narrow IAC claim concerning his lawyer's failure to voir dire the entire jury. The District Court denied the petition, concluding the state court's application of Strickland v. Washington (1984) was not objectively unreasonable. The Fourth Circuit, however, reversed. In its (unpublished, 46-page) opinion, the Fourth Circuit majority held that Sweeney's trial was marred by a "combination of extraordinary failures from juror to judge to attorney," which deprived Sweeney of his right to be confronted with witnesses against him and to be tried by an impartial jury. The Fourth Circuit ordered a new trial, over a dissent that criticized the majority for "flout[ing]" the principle of party presentation.

The State's petition for certiorari struggled to identify a circuit split on a significant legal question, and directly called on the Supreme Court to summarily reverse the Fourth Circuit. And that is what the Court did. In a brief per curiam order, the Court held that the Fourth Circuit had "transgressed the party-presentation principle by granting relief on a claim that Sweeney never asserted and that the State never had the chance to address." This "radical transformation of Sweeney's simple ineffective-assistance claim departed so drastically from the principle of party presentation as to constitute an abuse of discretion," warranting summary reversal.

Not all is lost for Sweeney, as the Court ordered the Fourth Circuit to squarely address his actual IAC claim (under the deferential habeas standard) on remand. That said, having poked around in the record below, there may be a reason the Fourth Circuit majority shied away from that claim. It appears that Sweeney and his lawyer made a strategic decision to go forward, believing that anything Juror 4 might have shared with the remaining jurors was just as likely to benefit Sweeney as to harm him, and that they had a better chance with the remaining eleven than with a new jury at a new trial. That may explain not only why the Fourth Circuit majority felt compelled to introduce some additional errors into the analysis, but also why all nine Justices were on board with what would otherwise appear to be an unusual and unnecessary excursion into error correction.

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