Racial-discrimination-in-grand-jury-selection

QUESTIONS PRESENTED I. In Rose v. Mitchell, 443 U.S. 545 (1979), this Court unequivocally prohibited racial discrimination in the selection of the foreperson for a Tennessee grand jury, recognizing that such discrimination “destroys the appearance of justice and thereby casts doubt on the integrity of the judicial process.” Id. at 556. Since that decision, the State of Tennessee has refused to implement this Court’s mandate by declaring Rose and subsequent decisions “greatly exaggerated.” State v. Bondurant, 4 S.W.3d 662, 674 (Tenn. 1999). When Mr. Henderson sought to apply this Court’s decisions in this case, the Tennessee court found that, because the state does not recognize Rose and its progeny, Mr. Henderson did not meet the requirements for raising previously unavailable constitutional rights under state law. Paradoxically, the state court also asserted—without invoking, let alone relying on any state procedural rule—that he should have raised his claim earlier, despite Tennessee’s historical (and on-going) refusal to follow Rose. Simultaneously, the state court vitiated the independence of any putative state procedural bar by addressing the federal merits of the claim and holding that this Court’s precedent has no merit. Nonetheless, the District Court below refused to review the merits of the claim pursuant to the procedural default doctrine, a decision that Mr. Henderson was not permitted to seek appellate review. These facts present the following questions: 1s Consistent with the Supremacy Clause, may a state refuse to follow this Court’s holdings and permit indictment for a capital crime by a grand jury whose composition results from systematic exclusion of women and non-white persons? 2. Are federal courts precluded from reviewing the merits of a substantial federal constitutional claim when a state court failed to expressly invoke or rely on a state procedural rule as the basis of its il decision and, instead, issued a ruling that is intertwined with the federal constitutional question? IL. In Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52 (1985), this Court held that the standard for adjudicating ineffective assistance of counsel claims involving a guilty plea is the test set out in Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984). Instead of applying Strickland to Mr. Henderson’s claim, the Tennessee court applied a more stringent standard, manufactured by the First Circuit in United States v. Ortiz Oliveras, 717 F.2d 1 (1st Cir. 1983), two years before this Court’s decision in Hill, but subsequently adopted by the Tenth Circuit in Hatch v. Oklahoma, 58 F.3d 1447 (10th Cir. 1995), and Hoxsie v. Kerby, 108 F.3d 1239 (10th Cir. 1997), which requires a petitioner prove that trial counsel’s advice was “completely unreasonable not merely wrong, so that it bears no relationship to a possible defense strategy.” Hoxsie, 108 F.3d at 1246; Hatch, 58 F.3d at 1459. Below, the Sixth Circuit found that the Tennessee court’s application of the Hoxie-Hatch standard instead of this Court’s Strickland test was not contrary to Hill. The First, Sixth, and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeals are the only circuit courts to use the Hoxie-Haich standard, though its use is spreading among district courts of other circuits. Considering these facts, the following question is presented: 3. May a federal court ignore the express holding in Hill v. Lockhart that this Court’s Strickland standard governs ineffective assistance of counsel claims involving a guilty plea and instead require that a petitioner prove that counsel’s advice “bears no relationship to a possible defense strategy” to prevail on a Sixth Amendment claim?