Whether the state court's post-conviction process was adequate to ascertain the truth and lacked critical components of an adjudication on the merits

QUESTIONS PRESENTED The post-conviction state court process in Batiste’s case was inadequate for ascertaining the truth and lacked critical components of an adjudication on the merits. Batiste’s fact-intensive, extra-record ineffective assistance claim—based on trial counsels’ failure to discover and present evidence of his organic brain damage— raised disputes of material fact that were improperly resolved without affording Batiste a meaningful opportunity to be heard, despite his repeated requests to depose trial counsel and/or hold an evidentiary hearing. Instead, the convicting court ceded its judicial decision-making power to the State, allowing an assistant district attorney (“ADA”) to make every credibility determination, resolve every contested material fact, and decide every legal issue by adopting that ADA’s proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law verbatim—without so much as removing the words “State’s Proposed” from the title. State-authored factual findings and legal conclusions were subsequently held to preclude habeas relief by the federal district court, whose decision the Fifth Circuit refused to hear an appeal from. Three courts have now failed to fulfill their core responsibility to conduct an independent and meaningful review of Batiste’s constitutional claims and preserve the appearance of impartiality, which is particularly important in the case of an individual sentenced to death by jurors who never knew he suffers frontal lobe brain damage or learned what bearing that brain damage might have on the criminal acts he was found guilty of committing. This case therefore presents the following questions: 1. Whether, in the course of denying an appeal, the Fifth Circuit misapplied the procedural bar contained in 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) by failing to scrutinize the state court’s decision for whether its reasoning was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, federal law; or was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts. 2. Whether the Fifth Circuit should have concluded that the intervening decision in Wilson v. Sellers, 138 S. Ct. 1188 (2018), meant reasonable jurists could disagree about the district court’s preWilson application of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), wherein the district court did not scrutinize the state court’s reasoning in the reasoned decision below. 1