Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996

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Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, AEDPA.

And AEDPA says that federal courts have to give enormous deference to state court decisions.

So if the state court decided your claim on the merits, you generally cannot prevail on a petition for writ of habeas corpus unless the state court's decision was, and, and here's the precise language, contrary to or involved an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.

There's a lot of qualifiers in there.

There was so much that I didn't know.

Absolutely.

And, um, and, and, and I think the, the other part that really stood out for me was that, uh, this was a story about how much of the law [laughs] lives in these, uh, you know, abstruse aspects of, of procedure, right? Like, w- whether a habeas petition gets past the AEDPA, right? Whether a tie vote affirms a lower court decision and lets it stand.

The appeal happened because I think prosecutors in that situation appeal without even thinking about why.

They're not sitting there thinking, "Well, the justice of the situation requires me to dial this back." They just think, "Under the law, can I win?" And un- unfortunately, as we're talking about, under AEDPA, you can always win if you're the attorney general.

You can win even if you shouldn't win.

Now, Timojin had to wait again for the state's appeal of Judge Hood's ruling to work its way through the system.

They did not conclude that Timojin got a fair trial.

They didn't say that Judge Hood's decision was wrong on the merits.

Instead, they focused on the new appellate deadline created by the federal law AEDPA.

Timojin had filed too late.

Pike contends that the state's concession of her history of child sexual abuse and rape erodes the foundation of her state court proceedings.

Pike ties this erosion to defects in the federal court proceedings because under the AEDPA, the district court was required to give strong deference to the state court's findings of fact.

Pike also cites scholarly authority supporting her argument that the state's representation about her history of sexual abuse tainted the state court proceedings and the subsequent federal ones by introducing damaging stereotypes of survivors of sexual assault.

Pike contends that her motion is an attack on the integrity of her habeas proceedings and thus properly considered a Rule 60 motion.

And you can't say that there wasn't a lack of due diligence on the part of previous counsel to explore these issues that she's trying to raise now.

The dissent continues.

In my view, petitioner's motion to reopen the judgment is clearly a second or successive motion subject to dismissal under the AEDPA.

No new facts are alleged in the motion.

There, the Florida Supreme Court had stated that, even without Ozio's testimony, the evidence against Witten was overwhelming.

Under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the Court of Appeals owed deference to that state court determination unless it was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented.

That meant the key question for the Court of Appeals was whether the Florida Supreme Court's determination about the rest of the evidence was a reasonable one.

To answer that question, the Court of Appeals did something peculiar.

Um, I mean, I think of two things.

When I'm thinking just generally for, for def- defendants in general, um, in 1996, they passed a law called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, A-E-D-P-A, AEDPA, and it really reformed the ability of a defendant to get access to federal habeas.

Um, so you only get one bite at the apple, they say, and you have to raise it through all of these different state appeals regardless of whether or not you had an attorney, regardless of whether that attorney did a good job.

Sometimes it still prevents you from being able to get into federal court.