POSTED: Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 11:52 am

BY: SYLVIA HSIEH, Dolan Media Newswires

A federal court erred in granting habeas corpus to a defendant where the state’s witness was unavailable, because under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act a federal court cannot overturn a state court’s decision that the state took reasonable steps to find a witness merely because the federal court identified additional steps that might have been taken.