Cullen v. Pinholster

Cullen v. Pinholster, 563 U.S. 170, is a 2011 United States Supreme Court case concerning evidentiary development in federal habeas corpus proceedings. Oral arguments in the case took place on November 9, 2010, and the Supreme Court issued its decision on April 4, 2011. The Supreme Court held 5–4 that only evidence originally presented before the state court in which the claim was originally adjudicated on the merits could be presented when raising a claim under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1), and that evidence from a federal habeas court could not be presented in such proceedings. It also held that the convicted murderer Scott Pinholster, the respondent in the case, was not entitled to the habeas relief he had been granted by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Background
Scott Lynn Pinholster was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the fatal stabbing of two men in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 9, 1982. In 1992, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed his conviction and sentence. Pinholster filed a state habeas petition in 1993, which the California Supreme Court also unanimously denied.

In November 1997, Pinholster again petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, this time in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. This petition alleged that Pinholster had received ineffective assistance of counsel at the penalty phase of his trial, claiming that his lawyers during that trial had failed to adequately investigate and present mitigating evidence of his mental disorders. Pinholster also moved for an evidentiary hearing, which the District Court granted. After the hearing concluded, the District Court granted Pinholster habeas relief, but a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit subsequently reversed this decision.

The entire Ninth Circuit then reheard the case en banc, vacated the three-judge panel's opinion, and affirmed the District Court's decision to grant habeas relief. This decision was based on evidence presented to the District Court, and concluded that the California Supreme Court had unreasonably applied Strickland v. Washington when it decided to deny Pinholster habeas relief. Consequently, the en banc Ninth Circuit concluded that the California Supreme Court's decision to deny Pinholster such relief previously was "contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law" as per 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case on June 14, 2010.

Opinion
On April 4, 2011, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 opinion reversing the Ninth Circuit's decision to grant habeas relief. The Court held that only evidence from the state court record could be considered when hearing a claim under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). It also reinstated Pinholster's death sentence, concluding that insofar as he had received ineffective assistance of counsel, that there was "no reasonable probability" that the evidence that was not presented at trial due to ineffective assistance would have changed the jury's verdict.

The majority opinion was written by Clarence Thomas and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and (with the exception of part II) Samuel Alito. Justice Stephen Breyer joined only parts I and II of the majority opinion, and also filed his own opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. Alito filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. Sonia Sotomayor wrote the only dissenting opinion, in which she was joined by both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, but only in part II.

Impact
The Supreme Court's decision in Pinholster prevented federal courts from considering new evidence when evaluating claims previously adjudicated in state court. This created a problem for some defendants whose state court proceedings lacked an adequately developed factual record, as they could no longer turn to federal courts to supplement that record. A 2013 article in the Stanford Law Review criticized the reasoning underlying Pinholster, arguing that the decision "takes advantage of AEDPA’s textual ambiguities to pursue its preferred set of background principles in ways which are both incorrect, in that its decision does not serve the interests it purports to, and incomplete, in that it ignores both the countervailing interests in remedying violations of defendants’ constitutional rights and the norm of counterfactual acceptance." Similarly, a 2015 article in the Michigan Law Review criticized Pinholster for preventing federal courts from considering evidence outside of the state court record, given that some state court habeas defendants receive ineffective assistance of counsel, and thus do not sufficiently develop the evidentiary record in state court.