Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that courts consider the aggregate effect of multiple legal errors

QUESTIONS PRESENTED The courts below identified more than five legal errors that impacted Petitioner’s capital trial and sentencing. They examined each error in isolation, found none that individually affected the verdict, and then dismissed them, one-by-one, as “harmless.” The federal courts found nothing wrong with that approach. According to their logic, nothing prevents a state from executing someone following a trial during which every piece of evidence was introduced in violation of the Constitution, so long as no single piece of evidence, considered in isolation, could be said to have rendered the trial fundamentally unfair. That cannot be correct. See Grant v. Trammell, 727 F.3d 1006, 1026 (10th Cir. 2013) (Gorsuch, J.) (cumulative error doctrine is rendered a “nullity” if prejudice not “considered additively”). This petition presents the following questions: (1) Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that courts consider the aggregate effect of multiple legal errors, as the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits have held, or whether the effect of each error may be considered in isolation, as the Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Circuits have held. (2) Whether the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment requires that courts consider the aggregate effect of multiple legal errors when reviewing a capital sentence. ii LIST OF ALL