In PREMO v. MOORE, No. 09-658 (Jan. 19, 2011), and in HARRINGTON v.
RICHTER, No. 09-587 (Jan 19, 2011), the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed petitions for writs of habeas corpus seeking relief for ineffective assistance of trial counsel. In both cases the Court examined proper implementation of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), as amended by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. [Editor's note: 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) provides that federal habeas corpus relief may not be granted with respect to any claim a state court has adjudicated on the merits unless adjudication of the claim by a state court either "(1) resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States; or (2) resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding." Under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e), "a determination of a factual issue made by a State court shall be presumed to be correct. The applicant shall have the burden of rebutting the presumption of correctness by clear and convincing evidence." The rule in Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668, 694 (1984), requires both deficient performance of counsel and prejudice for a court to find ineffective assistance. To find deficient performance, a court must conclude that counsel made errors so fundamental that a defendant was not afforded the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. Prejudice requires demonstrating a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.]
In MOORE the Court held that federal habeas corpus relief may not be granted with respect to any claim a state court has adjudicated on the merits unless, among other exceptions, the state-court decision denying relief involves an unreasonable application of clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court. The relevant federal law is the standard for ineffective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington, which requires a showing of both deficient performance by counsel and prejudice. The Court expressly required "strict adherence" to the Strickland standard, holding: "The Court of Appeals was wrong to accord scant deference to counsel's judgment, and doubly wrong to conclude it would have been unreasonable to find that the defense attorney qualified as counsel for Sixth Amendment purposes."
Slip opinion at 7.
In RICHTER the Court held that even when a state-court decision denying post-conviction relief has no explanation, the habeas corpus petitioner must still show there was no reasonable basis for the state court to deny relief. When a state court has denied relief, adjudication on the merits can be presumed absent any contrary indication or state-law procedural principles. The presumption may be overcome by a more likely explanation for the state court's decision, which was absent here.
In MATHIS v. STATE, No. 2D09-1117 (Fla. 2d DCA Jan. 21, 2011), the Defendant was found to be in violation of his probation for committing a burglary as a principal. The DCA held: "In order to be a principal in a crime, one must have a conscious intent that the crime be done and must do some act or say some word which was intended to and does incite, cause, encourage, assist, or advise another person to actually commit the crime." Slip opinion at 2. "A person cannot be convicted under the principal theory where the "evidence does not exclude the reasonable inference that the defendant had no knowledge of the crime until it actually occurred, and thus that he did not intend to assist in its commission." Slip opinion at 2. Here there was no evidence showing that the Defendant had knowledge of the burglary until after it had occurred or that he intended to assist in the commission of the crime.
Therefore the trial court abused its discretion in finding him guilty under a principal theory.
In STATE v. HARRIS, No. 1D09-4520 (Fla. 1st DCA Jan. 19, 2011), police officers had the defendant under surveillance for suspected drug activity, but they stopped her vehicle because they knew she was driving with a suspended license. After the officers had handcuffed the defendant and secured her in a patrol car, they searched her purse, which had been in the passenger compartment of her vehicle, and found contraband. The search was valid under the bright-line rule in New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981), the controlling precedent at the time of the search. However the U.S. Supreme Court receded from Belton and adopted a new procedure in Arizona v. Gant, 129 S. Ct. 1710 (2009), several weeks later. The Gant Court held that the search incident to arrest exception to the warrant requirement does not apply to the search of a defendant's vehicle following his arrest for driving with a suspended license, where the defendant and two other suspects were handcuffed and secured in police vehicles before the officers searched defendant's car. The police could not reasonably have believed either that the defendant could have accessed his car at the time of the search or that evidence of the offense for which he was arrested might have been found therein.
In Harris the DCA held that the good-faith exception of United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984), applies to such "pipeline" cases. The Harris court reasoned that the Supreme Court has made it clear that the exclusionary rule is intended to deter police misconduct, not to remedy the prior invasion of a defendant's constitutional rights. Therefore application of the exclusionary rule in the case at bar would not deter future police misconduct. The Harris court concluded that in situations like this, when the permissibility of a search was clear under precedent that has since been overturned, that application of the good-faith exception makes sense.
