10-1156 Winston v. Boatwright

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Criminal Procedure
Equal protection; peremptory challenges

A criminal defense attorney may not use his peremptory strikes based on gender; but the law was not clear at the time, so habeas corpus relief can’t be granted to a state prisoner.

“[T]he state court erred in its evaluation of Winston’s Strickland claim. But as we acknowledged at the outset, more than error must be shown in order to obtain relief under section 2254. The state court’s resolution must be so far out of bounds that it is objectively unreasonable. The question is therefore whether the state court transgressed that outer perimeter when it failed to see the link between the analysis of prejudice in the structural error cases and the analysis of prejudice in the Strickland line of cases. That link would have been apparent, we believe, if the state court had not made the error of assuming that lawyers are permitted intentionally to violate the Constitution when they represent criminal defendants. The Supreme Court, as we have explained above, has emphatically rejected that proposition.”

“If this is a strong message from the Supreme Court, however, it must yield to an even stronger command: when federal courts are applying section 2254, they must respect the line between applications of existing principles to new situations and extensions of the law. While we are persuaded that prejudice automatically flows from a deliberate Batson violation, we recognize that the Supreme Court of the United States had not yet taken this step at any point while Winston’s case was before the Wisconsin courts. Indeed, our own decision in Boyd contains dicta that suggests that something like the Martinez-Salazar inquiry should apply here, 86 F.3d at 722.”

Affirmed.

10-1156 Winston v. Boatwright

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Callahan, Mag. J., Wood, J.

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