The saga of AEDPA goes on
on Jul 9, 2007 at 6:02 pm
The long-running inquiry into the constitutionality of the major federal habeas law — the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 — moved a step further Monday as a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court rejected the challenge in a full-scale opinion seeking to lay the issue to rest. This came even as the en banc Ninth Circuit is weighing petitions for full-bench review in another case where the validity of AEDPA was put in issue. There is no split in the Circuit Courts yet on the question, but it appears that prison inmates will continue to press the constitutional challenge and thus it may eventually reach the Supreme Court. (Thanks to Howard Bashman of How Appealing blog for the alert to the new panel decision Monday; the opinion can be found here.)
The Supreme Court has never ruled directly on whether Congress acted unconstitutionally in laying down a standard in AEDPA for federal court review in habeas cases of state criminal convictions and sentences. In Monday’s decision, in Crater v. Galaza (Ninth Circuit docket 05-17027), the three-judge panel noted the absence of a square Supreme Court precedent, but added that “for the past eleven years the Court has consistently applied AEDPA’s standard of review to appellate habeas petitions….We consider the Court’s longstanding application of the rules set forth in AEDPA to be strong evidence of the Act’s constitutionality.”
The panel also noted that it was the “settled law of this circuit” that AEDPA’s rules of decision are valid. It cited the Circuit decision in 2000 in Duhaime v. Ducharme as the precedent. While noting that the precedent “offered only a cursory analysis of the constitutionality” of the AEDPA rules, the panel said “its holding binds us today.” At this point in the opinion, Circuit Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain dropped a footnote to take account of possible “confusion” about where the Ninth Circuit stood on the point. That, of course, was a reference to the somewhat strange history of the case of Irons v. Carey (Circuit docket 05-15275).
The Irons case has been covered extensively on this blog, most recently in this post on March 7. At that time, the Ninth Circuit panel ended a peculiar process of inquiring into AEDPA’s validity, only to close that process by a routine reliance upon the Circuit’s Duhaime precedent. Since then, both sides in the Irons case have sought rehearing en banc, and the Court has asked for responses; the matter is still pending.
The new opinion in the Crater case goes deeply into the question of AEDPA’s constitutionality, seemingly to shore up the Circuit position on the question. While suggesting that the final opinion that emerged in the Irons panel “leaves no doubt that Duhaime settles our law” on the question, the breadth of the new opinion’s analysis of all of the strands of the challenge suggests that the panel was not content to brush them off.
