| Venue: | SCOTUS |
| Facts: | Teague is black, and is convicted by an all-white IL jury. The prosecutor used all 10 peremptory challenges to exclude black jury candidates. Timely objections were raised. |
| Posture: | Motion for mistrial denied. Rejection affirmed on appeal. IL SC denies leave to appeal, SCOTUS denies cert. Petition for habeas in federal district court. Denied. Ct. App. agrees with petitioner, then the court votes to rehear en banc and vacates the earlier Ct. App. opinion. |
| Issue: | Should the 6A "fair cross-section" requirement be extended to petit juries? |
| Holding: | Maybe we'll decide that some other time; we're not going to take this new rule on habeas. |
| Rule: | New constitutional rules of criminal procedure will not be applicable
in cases that hve become final before the new rules are announced
unless either:
|
| Reasoning: | Batson actually did announce a rule that allows challenges to
the fairness of a trial based on jury composition. But that
rule was announced 2.5 years after Teague's conviction became
final, so he can't benefit from that rule.
Teague failed to raise his Equal Protection claim in state court, so he has defaulted there, because there's no showing of sufficient cause and prejudice. So he's left with the hope that his claim that 6A mandates something about petit jury composition. This would be a new rule, so we're not going to actually address whether 6A does so or not. A case announces a new rule, by the way, if its result was not dictated by the cases that came before it. On direct review, we'd apply new rules to criminal cases, because we want to treat all similarly situated defendants the same. But habeas is collateral, and that has implications here. Specifically, habeas serves as an incentive to trial courts to get things right-- in order to perform that deterrence function, review needs to concern itself with the standards in place at the time the court acted. There are interests of comity and finality as well. If we apply rules not in existence at the time of conviction, we upset both of those things, with little benefit. So, does this fit in either of the exceptions? Well, it's not according constitutional protection to any particular action. And habeas isn't about guilt or innocence-- it's about whether the procedure employed created an impermissibly large risk that an innocent person would be convicted. We agree that the jury venire can't be composed only of special segments of the population, because the purpose of the jury is to guard against arbitrary abuses of power. But the absence of a suitable cross-section doesn't necessarily mean the trial was unfair, so we fail the second exception as well-- remember, those are really rare. So habeas can't be used to creat new constitutional rules of criminal procedure, unless they'd be applied retroactively to all defendants on collateral review through one of the two exceptions. |
| Dicta: | Brennan (dissenting): so wait, we're going to bar meritorious claims just because it's not direct review? The habeas statute was enacted to guard against deprivations of liberty-- that jurisdiction is intentionally very broad. Finality isn't sacred enough to justify trashing individual liberty. |