Whether the district court must apply AEDPA deference to a state court decision that Anders review is not required in a Rule 32 proceeding

QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW Chavez’s appointed counsel in an “of right” Rule 32 proceeding determined there were no arguable issues and filed a two-page notice with the court, which did not conduct an independent review of the record pursuant to Anders v. California because “no Anders-type review is required in Rule 32 proceedings.” The district court granted a conditional writ of habeas corpus because the state court misapplied clearly established federal law by holding that Anders does not apply to “of right” Rule 32 proceedings. The Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that the district court was required to presume that the state court applied the law correctly. The Ninth Circuit then ignored the holding from Smith v. Robbins that any state court procedure must be “superior to, or at least as good as” the procedures established in Anders, and instead held that “a fairminded jurist could conclude that Arizona's of-right PCR procedure reasonably ensures that the appeal will be resolved on the merits,” despite the fact that Arizona’s procedures very clearly follow certain procedures held unconstitutional by Robbins. This Case presents the following two questions for review: 1. When a state court decision holds that “no Anders-type review is required” in an instance in which all parties concede that Anders applies, and no other language from the state court opinion indicates that it evaluated the case under Anders or applied the standard of Anders or its progeny, must the district court nonetheless apply an inference that the state court knows and applies the law in order to grant that decision AEDPA deference? 2. Did the court of appeals read Anders and Smith v. Robbins so narrowly as to effectively render it dead letter by: (A) requiring that state procedures need to be exactly the same as those already held unconstitutional by this court in order to be “contrary to” clearly established federal law under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1); and (B) ignoring the holding of Robbins, which requires that any state procedure for indigent appeals be “superior to, or at least as good as” those promulgated by this Court in Anders, and which clearly lays out certain procedures which do not satisfy this standard, and instead holding that “a fairminded jurist could conclude” a state procedure, which contains procedures that were held to be insufficient by Robbins, satisfies the requirements of Anders and Robbins, when evaluating whether a state procedure is “an unreasonable interpretation” of clearly established federal law under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(2)? i