U.S. Supreme Court strikes down habeas corpus grant based on double jeopardy clause

Anna Christensen and Stanford's Alex Harris at ScotusBlog, last Tuesday reported on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Renico v. Lett , No. 09-338.

"At issue in the case," they summarized, "was the trial judge's decision to declare a mistrial in respondent Reginald Lett's first trial on first-degree murder charges. Neither Lett nor the state had asked for a mistrial on the record; after four hours of deliberations, the jury had sent the judge a note asking what would happen if it could not agree. In his second trial, the jury found Lett guilty. He appealed, arguing that the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibited the state from trying him again. The Michigan Court of Appeals agreed and reversed his conviction, but it was then in turn reversed by the Michigan Supreme Court. Relying on the U.S. Supreme Court's holding nearly two hundred years ago in United States v. Perez, that court reasoned that a new trial after a mistrial does not violate the Double Jeopardy Clause as long as there was a 'manifest necessity' for the mistrial, as reflected by the trial judge's exercise of its 'sound discretion'; moreover, the Michigan Supreme Court noted, the U.S. Supreme Court has subsequently held that appellate courts must generally defer to the trial judge's determination that the jury is deadlocked."

The Supreme Court's answer… "In concluding that Lett is not entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, we do not deny that the trial judge could have been more thorough before declaring a mistrial. As the Court of Appeals pointed out, id.,she could have asked the foreperson additional follow-up questions, granted additional time for further deliberations, or consulted with the prosecutor and defense counsel before acting. Any of these steps would have been appropriate under the circumstances. None, however, was required—either under our double jeopardy precedents or, by extension, under AEDPA.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) "prevents defendants—and federal courts—from using federal habeas corpus review as a vehicle to second-guess the reasonable decisions of state courts," the majority's opinion said. "Whether or not the Michigan Supreme Court's opinion reinstating Lett's conviction in this case was correct, it was clearly not unreasonable. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion."

Justices Stevens, Sotomayor, and Breyer dissented, "providing historical anecdotes about the lengths to which common law courts would go to force juries to reach a verdict," as Christensen and Harris put it, "and reiterating the more pragmatic rationales for the Double Jeopardy Clause's guarantee that a mistrial will ‘be reserved for 'extraordinary and striking circumstances.''"


Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision