U.S. Supreme Court Rules Texas Death-Row Prisoner Cannot Challenge Ineffectiveness of His Appeal Lawyer

In a 5 – 4 deci­sion released June 26, the United States Supreme Court upheld the deci­sion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, deny­ing review of Texas death-row pris­on­er Erick Daniel Davila’s claim that he had been pro­vid­ed inef­fec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion by his state appeal lawyer. The case, Davila v. Davis, raised the ques­tion of whether two ear­li­er Supreme Court deci­sions (Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler) per­mit­ted a fed­er­al court to review a pris­on­er’s claim that his direct appeal coun­sel had been inef­fec­tive, if — because of his state post-con­vic­tion lawyer’s inef­fec­tive­ness — the appel­late inef­fec­tive­ness claim had nev­er been pre­sent­ed to the state courts. 

Davila’s fed­er­al habeas cor­pus lawyer chal­lenged an improp­er jury instruc­tion to which his tri­al lawyer had object­ed at tri­al, but both his direct appeal and his state habeas lawyers failed to raise the issue. When his state habeas lawyer also failed to chal­lenge the ade­qua­cy of his appel­late lawyer’s per­for­mance in fail­ing to raise the issue, the fed­er­al habeas court ruled that the claim was pro­ce­du­ral­ly default­ed and would not be reviewed. Justice Clarence Thomas, writ­ing for the major­i­ty, said that Martinez is lim­it­ed to claims of tri­al coun­sel’s inef­fec­tive­ness and does not apply to appellate-ineffectiveness claims. 

“Because a pris­on­er does not have a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to coun­sel in state post­con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings, inef­fec­tive assis­tance in those pro­ceed­ings does not qual­i­fy as cause to excuse a pro­ce­dur­al default,” Thomas wrote. He said grant­i­ng pris­on­ers like Davila fed­er­al review of mer­i­to­ri­ous claims of con­sti­tu­tion­al error ​“could flood the fed­er­al courts with default­ed claims of appel­late inef­fec­tive­ness,” call­ing that ​“espe­cial­ly trou­ble­some because those claims could serve as the gate­way to fed­er­al review of a host of trial errors.” 

Justice Breyer dis­sent­ed, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, argu­ing that the major­i­ty had inter­pret­ed Martinez too nar­row­ly. “[E]ffective tri­al coun­sel and appel­late coun­sel are inex­tri­ca­bly con­nect­ed ele­ments of a fair tri­al,” Breyer wrote. He added, “[t]he fact that … near­ly a third of con­vic­tions or sen­tences in cap­i­tal cas­es are over­turned at some stage of review sug­gests the prac­ti­cal impor­tance of the appeal right, par­tic­u­lar­ly in a cap­i­tal case such as this one.” The dis­sent also said the majority’s con­cern was unfound­ed that grant­i­ng review of the type of con­sti­tu­tion­al vio­la­tion in Davila’s case would over­bur­den fed­er­al habeas cor­pus courts. He wrote, ​“there is no evi­dence before us that Martinez has pro­duced a greater-than-expect­ed increase in courts’ workload.”