Whether a jury's consideration and reliance on extrinsic evidence as part of a jury experiment violates the clearly established federal law requiring a verdict to be based only on the evidence presented at trial

QUESTION PRESENTED This Court has held that a jury’s verdict must rest on the evidence developed at the trial. Turner v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 466, 472-73 (1965). Yet during deliberations in this capital case, the jury—to test the Commonwealth’s theory of guilt—conducted an experiment in the jury room involving extrinsic evidence and then considered and relied on that extrinsic evidence to convict Samuel Fields. The extrinsic evidence went to the central issue in the case: whether someone other than Fields could have committed the murder of Bess Horton. Under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), a petitioner may obtain habeas corpus relief from a state-court judgment if the state court decision rejecting a constitutional claim was contrary to or unreasonable application of clearly established federal law. In this case, the warden concedes that “it is clearly established that jurors must decide a case based on the evidence at trial.” Warden’s CA6 Br. at 21. Every federal judge who has considered this habeas case, including the entire Sixth Circuit en banc panel, likewise has recognized that a jury’s verdict must rest on the evidence developed at the trial. Nonetheless, a majority of the en banc Sixth Circuit determined—in contrast to decisions of other courts of appeals—that this rule does not satisfy § 2254(d)(1)’s “clearly established law” requirement because (1) the rule is too general and (2) this Court has not applied the rule to a fact pattern involving a jury experiment. This case thus presents the following questions: Does this Court’s rule requiring that a verdict be based only on the evidence presented in the courtroom at trial satisfy 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1)’s “clearly established” requirement, and if so, can a jury’s consideration of and reliance on extrinsic evidence as part of a jury experiment violate this rule? i