WILSON v. SELLERS

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

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No. 16–6855

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MARION WILSON, PETITIONER v. ERIC SELLERS, WARDEN

on writ of certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the eleventh circuit

 Justice Gorsuch, with whom Justice Thomas and Justice Alito join, dissenting.

 After a state supreme court issues a summary order sustaining a criminal conviction, should a federal habeas court reviewing that decision presume it rests only on the reasons found in a lower state court opinion? The answer is no. The statute governing federal habeas review permits no such “look through” presumption. Nor do traditional principles of appellate review. In fact, we demand the opposite presumption for our work—telling readers that we independently review each case and that our summary affirmances may be read only as signaling agreement with a lower court’s judgment and not necessarily its reasons. Because I can discern no good reason to treat the work of our state court colleagues with less respect than we demand for our own, I would reject petitioner’s presumption and must respectfully dissent.

 Even so, some good news can be found here. While the Court agrees to adopt a “look through” presumption, it does so only after making major modifications to petitioner’s proposal. The Court tells us that the presumption should count for little in cases “where the lower state court decision is unreasonable” because it is not “likely” a state supreme court would adopt unreasonable reasoning. Ante, at 9. In cases like that too, the Court explains,  federal courts remain free to sustain state court convictions whenever reasonable “ground[s] for affirmance [are] obvious from the state-court record” or appear in the parties’ submissions in state court or the federal habeas proceeding. Ibid. Exactly right, and exactly what the law has always demanded. So while the Court takes us on a journey through novel presumptions and rebuttals, it happily returns us in the end very nearly to the place where we began and belonged all along.

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 To see the problem with petitioner’s presumption, start with the statute. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) governs federal review of state criminal convictions. It says a federal court may not grant habeas relief overturning a state court conviction “with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings” unless (among other things) the petitioner can show that the state court proceedings “resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law.” 28 U. S. C. §2254(d)(1). As the text and our precedent make clear, a federal habeas court must focus its review on the final state court decision on the merits, not any preceding decision by an inferior state court. See Greene v. Fisher, 565 U. S. 34, 40 (2011). Nor does it matter whether the final state court decision comes with a full opinion or in a summary order: the same deference is due all final state court decisions. Harrington v. Richter, 562 U. S. 86, 98 (2011); Cullen v. Pinholster, 563 U. S. 170, 187 (2011).

 The upshot of these directions is clear. Even when the final state court decision “is unaccompanied by an explanation, the habeas petitioner’s burden still must be met by showing there was no reasonable basis for the state court to deny relief.” Richter, 562 U. S., at 98 (emphasis added).  And before a federal court can disregard a final summary state court decision, it “must determine what arguments or theories . . . could have supporte[d] the state court’s decision; and then it must ask whether it is possible fairminded jurists could disagree that those arguments or theories are inconsistent with the holding in a prior decision of this Court.” Id., at 102 (emphasis added). Far from suggesting federal courts should presume a state supreme court summary order rests on views expressed in a lower court’s opinion, then, AEDPA and our precedents require more nearly the opposite presumption: federal courts must presume the order rests on any reasonable basis the law and facts allow.

 If this standard seems hard for a habeas petitioner to overcome, “that is because it was meant to be.” Ibid. In AEDPA, Congress rejected the notion that federal habeas review should be “a substitute for ordinary error correction.” Id., at 102–103. Instead, AEDPA “reflects the view that habeas corpus is a ‘guard against extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems.’ ” Id., at 102 (emphasis added). “The reasons for this approach are familiar. ‘Federal habeas review of state convictions frustrates both the States’ sovereign power to punish offenders and their good-faith attempts to honor constitutional rights.’ It ‘disturbs the State’s significant interest in repose for concluded litigation, denies society the right to punish some admitted offenders, and intrudes on state sovereignty to a degree matched by few exercises of federal judicial authority.’ ” Id., at 103 (citations omitted).

 Petitioner and the Court today labor to distinguish these authorities, but I don’t see how they might succeed. They point to the fact that in Richter no state court had issued a reasoned order, while here a lower state court did. See Brief for Petitioner 28–30; ante, at 8. But on what account of AEDPA or Richter does that factual distinction make a legal difference? Both the statute and our  precedent explain that federal habeas review looks to the final state court decision, not any decision preceding it. Both instruct that to dislodge the final state court decision a petitioner must prove it involved an unreasonable application of federal law. And to carry that burden in the face of a final state court summary decision, Richter teaches that the petitioner must show no lawful basis could have reasonably supported it. To observe that some final state court summary decisions are preceded by lower court reasoned opinions bears no more relevance to the AEDPA analysis than to say that some final state court summary decisions are issued on Mondays.¹

 Unable to distinguish Richter, petitioner seeks to confine it by caricature. Because that case requires a federal court to “imagine” its own arguments for denying habeas relief and engage in “decision-making-by-hypothetical,” he argues it should be limited to its facts. Brief for Petitioner 28–30, 33; Reply Brief 9. But the Court today does not adopt petitioner’s characterization, and for good reason: Richter requires no such thing. In our adversarial system a federal court generally isn’t required to imagine or hy pothesize arguments that neither the parties before it nor any lower court has presented. To determine if a reason-able basis “could have supported” a summary denial of habeas relief under Richter, a federal court must look to the state lower court opinion (if there is one), any argument presented by the parties in the state proceedings, and any argument presented in the federal habeas proceeding. Of course, a federal court sometimes may con-sider on its own motion alternative bases for denying habeas relief apparent in the law and the record, but it does not generally bear an obligation to do so. See Wood v. Mil-yard, 566 U. S. 463, 471–473 (2012) (discussing Day v. McDonough, 547 U. S. 198 (2006), and Granberry v. Greer, 481 U. S. 129 (1987)).

 Nor is that the end of the problems with petitioner’s “look through” presumption. It also defies traditional rules of appellate practice that informed Congress’s work when it adopted AEDPA and that should inform our work today. McQuiggin v. Perkins, 569 U. S. 383, 398, n. 3 (2013). Appellate courts usually have an independent duty to review the facts and law in the cases that come to them. Often they see errors in lower court opinions. But often, too, they may affirm on alternative bases either argued by the parties or (sometimes) apparent to them on the face of the record. See, e.g., SEC v. Chenery Corp., 318 U. S. 80, 88 (1943) (noting “the settled rule that, in reviewing the decision of a lower court, it must be affirmed if the result is correct ‘although the lower court relied upon a wrong ground or gave a wrong reason’ ”); Wood, supra, at 473. And a busy appellate court sometimes may not see the profit in devoting its limited resources to explaining the error and the alternative basis for affirming when the outcome is sure to remain the same, so it issues a summary affirmance instead. To reflect these realities, this Court has traditionally warned readers against presuming our summary affirmance orders rest on reasons articulated  in lower court opinions. Comptroller of Treasury of Md.  v. Wynne, 575 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2015) (slip op., at 16–17) (“ ‘[A] summary affirmance is an affirmance of the judgment only,’ and ‘the rationale of the affirmance may not be gleaned solely from the opinion below’ ”); Mandel v. Bradley, 432 U. S. 173, 176 (1977) (per curiam). The courts of appeals have issued similar warnings for similar reasons about their own summary orders. See, e.g., Rates Technology, Inc. v. Mediatrix Telecom, Inc., 688 F. 3d 742, 750 (CA Fed. 2012); DeShong v. Seaboard Coast Line R. Co., 737 F. 2d 1520, 1523 (CA11 1984). And respect for this traditional principle of appellate practice surely weighs against presuming a state court’s summary disposition rests solely on a lower court’s opinion. On what account could we reasonably demand more respect for our summary decisions than we are willing to extend to those of our state court colleagues?

 Petitioner and the Court offer only this tepid reply. They suggest that their “look through” presumption seeks to reflect “realistic[ally]” the basis on which the state summary decision rests. See Brief for Petitioner 44; ante, at 7. But to the extent this is a claim that their presumption comports realistically with longstanding traditions of appellate practice, it is wrong for the reasons just laid out. In fact, applying traditional understandings of appellate practice, this Court has refused to presume that state appellate courts even read lower court opinions rather than just the briefs before them. See Baldwin v. Reese, 541 U. S. 27, 31 (2004). And surely it is a mystery how the Court might today presume state supreme courts rely on that which it traditionally presumes they do not read.

 If the argument here is instead an empirical claim that the “look through” presumption comports realistically with what happened in this case and others like it, it is wrong too. Petitioner was convicted in Georgia. And during the pendency of this case in our Court, the Georgia Supreme  Court issued an order confirming that lower courts in that State may not “presum[e] that when this Court summarily denies an application to appeal an order denying habeas corpus relief, we necessarily agree with everything said in that order.” Redmon v. Johnson, 809 S. E. 2d 468, 472 (Ga. 2018). The court explained that it has long followed just this rule for all the reasons you’d expect. It independently reviews the facts and law in each habeas case. If it finds something it thinks might amount to a consequential error, the court sets the case for argument and usually prepares a full opinion. But “[o]n many occasions,” the court finds only “inconsequential errors.” Id., at 471.² And in these cases the court normally issues a  summary affirmance because the costs associated with full treatment of the appeal outweigh the benefits of correcting what is at most harmless error, especially given the court’s heavy caseload and the need to attend to more consequential matters.³ Petitioner’s presumption thus does not seek to reflect reality; it seeks to deny it.

 The presumption is especially unrealistic in another way. The Court and petitioner presume that a summary order by a state supreme court adopts all the specific reasons expressed by a lower state court. In doing so, they disregard a far more realistic possibility: that the state supreme court might have relied only on the same grounds for the denial of relief as did the lower court without necessarily adopting all its reasoning. Here, the lower state court denied petitioner’s Strickland claim on the grounds that counsel’s performance was not deficient and peti-tioner suffered no prejudice. And it gave several reasons for its conclusions: for example, the evidence petitioner sought to admit “would have been inadmissible on evidentiary grounds, cumulative of other testimony, or otherwise would not have, in reasonable probability, changed the outcome of the trial.” App. 61. In summarily denying  relief, the state supreme court might have reached the same conclusions (no deficient performance and no prejudice) without resting on the exact same reasons.

 While the “look through” presumption cannot be squared with AEDPA’s text, traditional rules, or Georgia’s actual practice, petitioner and the Court contend it is at least consistent with Ylst v. Nunnemaker, 501 U. S. 797 (1991). See Brief for Petitioner 38; ante, at 5–8. But it is not. In habeas review of state court convictions, federal courts may only review questions of federal law. So if a state court decision rejecting a petitioner’s federal law claim rests on a state procedural defect (say the petitioner filed too late under state rules), federal courts generally have no authority to reach the federal claim. Ylst simply teaches that, if a lower state court opinion expressly relied on an independent and adequate state ground, we should presume a later state appellate court summary disposition invoked it too. See 501 U. S., at 801, 803. The decision thus seeks to protect state court decisions from displacement and reaches a result consistent with the traditional rule that a summary order invokes all fairly presented bases for affirmance.

 Neither can Ylst be reimagined today as meaning anything more. The case came years before AEDPA’s new standards for habeas review and can offer nothing useful about them. The work of interpreting AEDPA’s demands was left instead to Richter. And, as we’ve seen, Richter forecloses petitioner’s presumption. Of course, and as petitioner stresses, Richter didn’t overrule Ylst. But that’s for the simple reason that Ylst continues to do important, if limited, work in the disposition of procedural default claims because “AEDPA did not change the application of pre-AEDPA procedural default principles.” B. Means, Federal Habeas Manual §9B:3 (2017).

 Uncomfortable questions follow too from any effort to reimagine Ylst. If we were to take Ylst as suggesting that  summary decisions presumptively rely only on the reasons found in lower court opinions, wouldn’t we have to overrule our many precedents like Wynne and Mandel that explicitly reject any such presumption? Wouldn’t circuit courts have to discard their own similar precedents? See supra, at 5–6. Consistency would seem to demand no less.

 The only answer petitioner and the Court offer is no answer at all. Consistency, they suggest, is overrated. Everywhere else in the law we should retain the usual rule that a summary affirmance can’t be read as presumptively resting on the lower court’s reasons. They encourage us to use Ylst only as a tool for making a special exception for AEDPA cases: here and here alone should we adopt petitioner’s “look through” presumption. Brief for Petitioner 18, 20; ante, at 10 (stating that “we ‘look through’ the silent decision for a specific and narrow purpose” under AEDPA). But just stating this good-for-habeas-only rule should be enough to reject it. Summary orders that happen to arise in state habeas cases should receive no less respect than those that arise anywhere else in the law. If anything, they should receive more respect, because federal habeas review of state court decisions “ ‘intrudes on  state sovereignty to a degree matched by few exercises of federal judicial authority.’ ” Richter, 562 U. S., at 103. 

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 Petitioner’s novel presumption not only lacks any provenance in the law, it promises nothing for its trouble. Consider the most obvious question it invites, one suggested by the facts of our own case: what happens when a state supreme court issues an order explaining that its summary affirmances do not necessarily adopt the reasons in lower court opinions? Should that be enough to rebut the “look through” presumption? After defending the presumption, even the dissent in the Eleventh Circuit decision under review recognized that a disclaimer along  these lines should suffice to rebut it. See Wilson v. Warden, 834 F. 3d 1227, 1263 (2016) (en banc) (opinion of J. Pryor, J.) (“The Georgia Supreme Court could simply issue a one-line order denying an application for a certificate of probable cause that indicates agreement with the result the superior court reached but not the lower court’s reasons for rejecting the petitioner’s claim”). And, of course, the Georgia Supreme Court has recently responded to the dissent’s invitation by issuing just such a disclaimer. So in the end petitioner’s presumption seems likely to accomplish nothing for him and only needless work for others—inducing more state supreme courts to churn out more orders restating the obvious fact that their summary dispositions don’t necessarily rest on the reasons given by lower courts. Along the way, too, it seems federal courts will have their hands full. For while the Eleventh Circuit dissent had no difficulty acknowledging that an order like Georgia’s suffices to overcome petitioner’s presumption, the Court today refuses to supply the same obvious  answer.

 Consider, too, the questions that would follow in the unlikely event a general order like the one from the Georgia Supreme Court wasn’t considered enough to overcome petitioner’s presumption. Quickly federal courts would be forced to decide: does the “look through” presumption survive even when a state supreme court includes language in every summary order explaining that its decision does not necessarily adopt the reasoning below? What if the state supreme court says something slightly different but to the same effect, declaring in each case that it has independently considered the relevant law and evidence before denying relief? And if we start dictating what state court disclaimers should look like and where they should appear, what exactly is left of Congress’s direction that our review is intended to guard only against “ ‘extreme malfunctions’ ” in state criminal justice systems? Richter, supra, at 102. Wouldn’t we be slipping into the business of “tell[ing] state courts how they must write their opinions,” something this Court has long said federal habeas courts “have no power” to do? Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U. S. 722, 739 (1991).

 Apart from whether a (general or case-specific) order from a state supreme court suffices to overcome petitioner’s presumption, there’s the question what else might. Say a lower state court opinion includes an error but the legal briefs or other submissions presented to the state supreme court supply sound alternative bases for affirmance. In those circumstances, should a federal habeas court really presume that the state supreme court chose to repeat the lower court’s mistake rather than rely on the solid grounds argued to it by the parties? What if a sound alternative basis for affirmance is presented for the first time in the parties’ federal habeas submissions: are we to presume that the state supreme court was somehow less able to identify a reasonable basis for affirmance than federal habeas counsel?

 Here at least the Court does offer an answer. Petitioner insists that federal courts should presume that state supreme court summary orders rest on unreasonable lower state court opinions even in the face of reasonable alternative arguments presented to the state supreme court or in federal habeas proceedings. But seeming to recognize the unreasonableness of this request, the Court opts to reshape radically petitioner’s proposed presumption before adopting it. First, the Court states that “it is more likely that a state supreme court’s single word ‘affirm’ rests upon alternative grounds where the lower state court decision is unreasonable.” Ante, at 9. Then, the Court proceeds to explain that “a federal habeas court may conclude that counsel has rebutted the presumption on the basis of convincing alternative arguments for affirmance made to the State’s highest court or equivalent evidence presented  in its briefing to the federal court similarly establishing that the State’s highest court relied on a different ground than the lower state court, such as the existence of a valid ground for affirmance that is obvious from the state-court record.” Ibid.

 The Court’s reshaping of petitioner’s presumption reveals just how futile this whole business really is. If, as the Court holds, the “look through” presumption can be rebutted “where the lower state court decision is unreasonable,” ibid., it’s hard to see what good it does. Peti-tioner sought to assign unreasonable lower court opinions to final state court summary decisions. To hear now that essentially only reasonable (and so sustainable) lower state court opinions are presumptively adopted by final state court summary decisions will surely leave him sour on this journey and federal habeas courts scratching their heads about the point of it all. And if, as the Court also tells us, a federal habeas court can always deny relief on a basis that is apparent from the record or on the basis of alternative arguments presented by the parties in state or federal proceedings, then the “look through” presumption truly means nothing and we are back where we started. With the Court’s revisions to petitioner’s presumption, a federal habeas court is neither obliged to look through exclusively to the reasons given by a lower state court, nor required to presume that a summary order adopts those reasons.

 All this is welcome news of a sort. The Court may promise us a future of foraging through presumptions and rebuttals. But at least at the end of it we rest knowing that what was true before remains true today: a federal habeas court should look at all the arguments presented in state and federal court and examine the state court record. And a federal habeas court should sustain a state court summary decision denying relief if those materials reveal a basis to do so reasonably consistent with this Court’s  holdings. Exactly what a federal court applying the statute and Richter has had to do all along. See supra, at 2–5. And exactly what the Eleventh Circuit correctly held it had to do in this case.

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 Today, petitioner invites us to adopt a novel presumption that AEDPA, traditional principles of appellate review, and Georgia practice all preclude. It’s an invitation that requires us to treat the work of state court colleagues with disrespect we would not tolerate for our own. And all to what end? None at all, it turns out. As modified by the Court, petitioner’s presumption nearly drops us back where we began, with only trouble to show for the effort. Respectfully, I would decline the invitation to this circuitous journey and just affirm.