Did the Ninth Circuit's order denying a COA violate this Court's mandate that a circuit court must issue a COA if a habeas petition makes 'a substantial showing of the denial of a constitutional right'?

QUESTION PRESENTED This non-capital habeas case arises from Jose Osvaldo Arteaga’s 2003 California state conviction for an attempted murder that took place one year earlier. Arteaga is serving an indeterminate life sentence. He has always maintained his innocence. There is no video of the crime, no physical evidence of the crime, and no confession. The only evidence against Arteaga came from the eyewitness identifications of the shooting victim, Richard Carlyle, and his boyfriend, Sergio Ulloa, who was with Carlyle when someone shot him. At various points in the police’s investigation, the police gave Carlyle and Ulloa several opportunities to identify Arteaga as the shooter—and both did not. At trial, defense counsel called Bayron Peres in support of a misidentification defense. Peres observed the crime take place and testified that Arteaga was not the shooter. Counsel called no other witnesses. But there was someone else counsel could have called: Mauro Ortega. Ortega would have testified that Arteaga could not have committed this crime because Arteaga was with him in a different part of Los Angeles when the shooting was taking place. Ortega’s testimony would have been the difference maker, yet the jury never heard it. Below, Arteaga challenged his conviction under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, alleging that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to present Ortega i as an alibi witness. After the district court denied his petition, he sought a certificate of appealability (COA) from the Ninth Circuit, which denied his request. The question presented is: Did the Ninth Circuit’s order denying a COA violate this Court’s mandate that a circuit court must issue a COA if a habeas petition makes “a substantial showing of the denial of a constitutional right”? See Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322, 327 (2008) (quoting 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c)(2)). ii