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Habeas Corpus — Right to present a defense

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//November 17, 2014//

Habeas Corpus — Right to present a defense

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//November 17, 2014//

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U.S. Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Habeas Corpus — Right to present a defense

It was not contrary to clearly established U.S. Supreme Court precedent for a state court to not allow expert testimony about the defendant’s mental state in a non-capital prosecution.

“That is why Keith invokes the generic ‘right to present a Defense’ rather than a concrete rule about expert testimony. Yet the Supreme Court has concluded that §2254(d)(1) forbids framing the theory at such a high level of generality. Nevada v. Jackson, 133 S. Ct. 1990 (2013), is particularly instructive, because a court of appeals proceeded exactly as Keith asks us to. A state court had excluded some evidence; the court of appeals issued a writ of habeas corpus after concluding that the state judiciary violated the right to present a defense; the Supreme Court reversed, observing that ‘[b]y framing our precedents at such a high level of generality, a lower federal court could transform even the most imaginative extension of existing case law into “clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court.”’ Id. at 1994. The right question, Jackson held, is whether decisions of the Supreme Court establish that the particular decision the state judiciary reached is forbidden. The Justices stated in Jackson that this meant decisions about the admissibility of the sort of evidence the defense had proffered. See also, e.g., Lopez v. Smith, No. 13–946 (U.S. Oct. 6, 2014), slip op. 5–6; Marshall v. Rodgers, 133 S. Ct. 1446, 1450–51 (2013); Parker v. Matthews, 132 S. Ct. 2148, 2155–56 (2012).”

Affirmed.

14-1657 Keith v. Schaub

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

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