Federal Review of State Criminal Convictions: A Structural Approach to Adequacy Doctrine

Michigan Law Review Volume 116 Issue 1 Article 2 2017 Federal Review of State Criminal Convictions: A Structural Approach to Adequacy Doctrine Eve Brensike Primus University of Michigan Law School, Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, and the Jurisprudence Commons Recommended Citation Eve B. Primus, Federal Review of State Criminal Convictions: A Structural Approach to Adequacy Doctrine, 116 MICH. L. REV. 75 (2017). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol116/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . FEDERAL REVIEW OF STATE CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO ADEQUACY DOCTRINE Eve Brensike Primus* Modern state postconviction review systems feature procedural labyrinths so complicated and confusing that indigent defendants have no realistic prospect of complying with the rules. When defendants predictably fail to navigate these mazes, state and federal courts deem their claims procedurally defaulted and refuse to consider those claims on their merits. As a result, systemic violations of criminal procedure rights—like the right to effective counsel—persist without judicial correction. But the law contains a tool that, if properly adapted, could bring these systemic problems to the attention of federal courts: procedural adequacy. Procedural adequacy doctrine gives federal courts the power to ignore procedural defaults and declare state procedural rules inadequate when those rules unduly burden defendants’ abilities to assert violations of their federal rights. And unlike the more commonly invoked cause and prejudice doctrine, which excuses default on the theory that a defendant’s unusual circumstances justify an exception to the rules, procedural adequacy doctrine allows courts to question the legitimacy of the state procedural regimes themselves. Procedural adequacy doctrine can therefore catalyze reform in a way that cause and prejudice cannot. For procedural adequacy litigation to catalyze reform, however, it must be adapted to modern circumstances in one crucial respect. Historically, procedural adequacy doctrine focused on cases involving the deliberate manipulation of individual rules. Today, what is needed is a structural approach to adequacy, one that would consider how the interaction of multiple procedural rules unfairly burdens federal rights. Such a structural approach to adequacy is consistent with the doctrine’s original purposes and is the most sensible way to apply procedural adequacy under current conditions. Litigants should accordingly deploy a structural approach to procedural adequacy doctrine and use it to stop states from burying systemic constitutional violations in complicated procedural labyrinths. * Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. I would like to thank Claire Madill, Meghan LeFrancois, and Eric Yff for excellent research assistance and Sarah Scheinman for Bluebooking assistance. I would also like to thank Daniel Crane, Richard Friedman, Daniel Halberstam, Scott Hershovitz, Aziz Huq, Jerry Israel, Joan Larsen, Leah Litman, Julian Mortenson, Margo Schlanger, Gil Seinfeld, and Kim Thomas for helpful comments in the early stages of this project. I am grateful for the wonderful feedback I received presenting these ideas at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Michigan Law School. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the William W. Cook Endowment of the University of Michigan. 75 76 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 116:75 Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 I. State Procedural Rules as Obstacles to the Adjudication of Criminal Defendants’ Federal Claims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 II. Structural Adequacy Doctrine as a Potential Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 A. The Origin and Purpose of Procedural Adequacy Doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 B. A Structural Approach to Procedural Adequacy . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 III. Structural Adequacy Doctrine Falls Dormant: How the Federal Courts Shifted to a Cause and Prejudice Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 IV. Why Structural Adequacy Is Better Than Cause and Prejudice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 A. Different Orientations: The Prisoner Versus the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 B. Different Relief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 C. Different Obstacles to Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 D. Doctrinal Coherence and Original Purposes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Introduction It is no secret that criminal justice is badly in need of reform.1 In state after state, criminal court systems violate defendants’ constitutional rights through prosecutorial misconduct,2 inadequate indigent defense delivery 1. See, e.g., Radley Balko, Here’s What Presidential Candidates’ Websites Say About Criminal Justice Reform, Wash. Post: Watch (Aug. 6, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/06/heres-what-presidential-candidates-websites-say-about-criminal-justice-reform/ [https://perma.cc/M4X3-M4A8] (“Criminal justice reform is the one issue that just about everyone seems to agree on right now. There are certainly disagreements over the details, but . . . nearly everyone agrees at least in principle that the system needs to be reformed.”). 2. See, e.g., Alex Kozinski, Preface, Criminal Law 2.0, 44 Geo. L.J. Ann. Rev. Crim. Proc. iii, xxii–xxvi (2015) (describing cases of serious prosecutorial misconduct); Jonathan Abel, Prosecutors’ Duty to Disclose Impeachment Evidence in Police Personnel Files: The Other Side of Police Misconduct, Wash. Post: Volokh Conspiracy (July 11, 2016), https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/11/prosecutors-duty-to-dis close-impachment-evidence-in-police-personnel-files-the-other-side-of-police-misconduct/ [https://perma.cc/EF2X-CLC7] (describing systematic and pervasive failures across states to disclose exculpatory impeachment material in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. (...truncated)