Three new SCOTUS grants of potential interest

The most potentially relevant is McWilliams v. Dunn, No. 16-5294, involves a question regarding the degree of independence needed for appointed mental health experts under Ake v. Oklahoma.

Then there are:

Weaver v. Massachusetts, No. 16-240: The defendant claims his lawyer was ineffective for failing to object to a closure of the courtroom during empanelment of the jury. Violation of the right to a public trial, when considered directly, is a “structural” error that is reversible without a showing that it actually prejudiced the defendant, but an ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) claim requires a showing of prejudice under Strickland v. Washington. Does IAC require a showing of prejudice when the underlying error is “structural”? I believe Strickland is clear enough that the answer is “yes,” but there is enough of a circuit split for the high court to take it up.

Maslenjak v. United States, No. 16-309, involves a question of whether revocation of naturalized citizenship in a criminal proceeding for a false statement during naturalization requires a showing of materiality.

Davila v. Davis, No. 16-6219, involves the continuing fallout from Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler. In Coleman v. Thompson in1992, the Supreme Court limited the damage from ineffective assistance claims to prevent a never-ending spiral of every lawyer to take up a case claiming that he should be allowed to raise a new issue because the previous lawyer was ineffective in not raising it. Coleman drew the line at direct appeal. Ineffective assistance at trial or on direct appeal could be “cause” for raising an issue defaulted in those proceedings, but from state collateral review onward a claim would be defaulted if not raised in the proper proceeding regardless of counsel’s performance. As with other procedural default rules, a strong showing of actual innocence was an exception. In Martinez, the Supreme Court created a “narrow” exception for ineffective assistance by state collateral review counsel in failing to raise an issue of ineffective assistance of trial counsel under the circumstances of Arizona’s unusual system. In Trevino the Court said the exception was not as narrow as it said in Martinez, and it also applied to Texas’s not-unusual system.

Courtesy of Crime & Consequences blog.