Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Page 4
Judge Lee Criticizes Expansion of Writ of Habeas Corpus
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kenneth K. Lee yesterday decried the extent to which the writ of habeas corpus has been expanded and questioned the wisdom of remanding a murder case to the District Court for an explanation by the prosecutor as to why he challenged a prospective juror who is Black when the trial took place 30 years ago.
The remand was required by the majority opinion authored by Judge Eric D. Miller and joined in by Judge William A. Fletcher. The issue was whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Batson v. Kentucky barring race-based peremptory challenges was properly applied in Nevada in the case of Antonio Lavon Doyle, an inmate in a state prison who was sentenced to death.
Miller wrote:
“[T]he Nevada Supreme Court unreasonably applied Batson in holding that when a court finds that certain prospective jurors were not excluded on the basis of their race, those jurors no longer count in assessing whether a defendant has established a prima facie case of discrimination with respect to other prospective jurors.”
Lee said:
“I ultimately disagree with the majority’s conclusion that the Nevada Supreme Court unreasonably applied Batson, given our deferential standard of review. But I mainly write to highlight how our habeas jurisprudence has gone astray once it became unmoored from its historical basis. Too often now, state prisoners (whose guilt is not in doubt) exploit federal habeas petitions to tinker with the machinery of the state criminal justice system—and ultimately delay or deny justice.”
He went on to say:
“In modern practice, habeas amounts to another bite at the apple for state criminal defendants, who use federal courts to second-guess decisions made by state courts. Not surprisingly, federal courts suffer from a major backlog of habeas petitions….
“As shown in our case, habeas petitions in death penalty cases too often become a device for delay or denial of justice. Doyle’s state murder trial occurred three decades ago. Given his confessions and forensic evidence, a jury found him guilty and state appellate courts repeatedly affirmed his conviction.
Yet thirty years later, we are now ordering a new evidentiary hearing to probe whether the deputy district attorney remembers his reason for striking a single juror. And it may lead to Doyle’s conviction and death sentence being vacated.
“Habeas has an honorable heritage: It is a powerful equitable writ to question improper and arbitrary detentions. But it is ill-suited, as are the federal courts, to relitigate matters first decided by state courts of competent jurisdiction decades ago. The Great Writ should not be reduced to a tactical tool of federal flyspecking even the most minute decisions made by state trial courts and imposing delays that tilt in favor of felons whose guilt is not in doubt.”
The prosecutor, David Schwartz, is now an adjunct professor at William S. Boyd School of Law in Las Vegas. Lee remarked:
“Any notes he may have had about the potential jurors are probably long gone. It is also not clear that Schwartz would recall many details of this three-decade-old case: He was admitted to the bar in 1976 and likely tried hundreds of cases during his long career as a deputy district attorney.”
The case is Doyle v. Royal, 20-99013.
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