Will the Sixth Circuit Get a Summary Reversal in Another Habeas Case?

There was a time when the Supreme Court would reverse decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in habeas cases quite regularly, often summarily. This does not happen as much as it used to, but some justices remain concerned that some of the Sixth Circuit’s judges are too quick to grant habeas relief.

Chandler v. Brown looks like a potential candidate for summary reversal at One First Street. The original Sixth Circuit panel, consisting of Judges White, Stranch, and Davis, reversed the district court’s denial of Louis Chandler’s habeas petition. The full court granted en banc review, but only to have the panel amend its initial opinion. Now, the court has denied a subsequent petition for rehearing en banc, over the dissent of four judges.

On Thursday, Judges Thapar and Murphy authored a dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc in Chandler v. Brown, joined by Judges Griffin and Readler. Here is how Thapar and Murphy summarize the case and their objections.

Louis Chandler sexually abused his eight-year-old foster daughter. At trial, she told the jury in graphic detail about how Chandler molested her. She wasn’t the first one Chandler had sexually abused. Three other victims testified about the abuse they suffered at his hands. Even Chandler’s wife corroborated his foster daughter’s claims of sexual abuse by Chandler.

So how did Chandler convince a panel of this court to grant him habeas relief? He tells us that the state trial court wrongly prohibited a different foster couple from testifying that the victim had previously made false allegations against them soon after they proposed to adopt her. According to Chandler, their testimony could have shown that the victim had a motive to falsely accuse Chandler too, so that she could return to her birth parents. Never mind that, by the time of the victim’s testimony at trial, she had been adopted by another family and living with them for almost five years without accusing them of misconduct. Never mind that the victim did not make allegations of sexual abuse against the prior foster parents; she alleged that they did things like hit her with a wooden spoon, pull her by the ponytail, and give her ill-fitting clothes. And never mind that at least one of the victim’s accusations against the prior foster parents (that they put soap in her mouth) turned out to be true. (The parents are now on a child abuse registry.) Chandler still claims that his foster daughter’s alleged prior accusations against this other couple about these other events were central to his defense to the charged sexual abuse.

A Michigan appellate court held that the trial court committed various state-law errors in the process of excluding this evidence. Ultimately, though, that court held that these state-law errors did not rise to a federal constitutional violation. And it found the errors harmless after assuming (without deciding) that some of Chandler’s key evidence might have been admissible.

This federal habeas case thus asks: If a state appellate court concludes that a trial court’s exclusion of evidence misapplied an otherwise valid rule of evidence or procedure, when does that state-law violation infringe the federal Constitution? Always? Never? Sometimes? If so, when? The Supreme Court has yet to confront this question, let alone clearly establish the ground rules that should govern it. Cf. Nevada v. Jackson, 569 U.S. 505, 510 (2013) (per curiam). And even if the Court eventually extends its “balancing of interests” approach to this new context, the Michigan appellate court did not unreasonably apply that approach. Id. Indeed, it’s doubtful that the other foster couple’s testimony would have been admissible even under a proper interpretation of Michigan law. And the state court could reasonably find that Chandler did not have a “significant interest” in presenting this evidence anyway. United States v. Scheffer, 523 U.S. 303, 316–17 (1998). Unlike the excluded evidence in the Supreme Court cases that found a constitutional violation, the excluded evidence here did not concern “‘facts’ about the alleged crime at hand.” Id. at 317 & n.13. So we are hard-pressed to see how the rejection of Chandler’s claim “resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). This should foreclose Chandler’s claim under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA).

The panel’s contrary reasoning violates AEDPA in several ways. It improperly invokes evidence that the state court found forfeited or that was not in the state court record. And it fails to provide the great deference owed to state courts when a petitioner relies on general constitutional principles. The panel’s decision also undercuts AEDPA’s federalism and comity goals. For example, Chandler’s trial required four victims to testify about his abuse. Now these victims must relive their trauma by testifying again. Our full court should have prevented this result because the panel committed the types of errors that the Supreme Court has seen fit to summarily reverse. See Cassano v. Shoop, 10 F.4th 695, 696–97 (6th Cir. 2021) (Griffin, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc) (collecting 22 cases, including 12 summary reversals, in which the Court reversed the Sixth Circuit “for not applying the deference to state court decisions mandated by AEDPA”).

The substance of the decision, and the objecting judges, would seem to make Chandler a strong candidate for Supreme Court review, and perhaps even a summary reversal. The question will be whether Michigan files a petition for certiorari.

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