SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
DEBORAH K. JOHNSON, WARDEN
v. DONNA KAY
LEE
on petition for writ of certiorari to the
united states court of appeals for the ninth circuit
No. 15–789. Decided May 31, 2016
Per Curiam.
Federal habeas courts generally refuse to hear
claims “defaulted . . . in state court pursuant to an
independent and adequate state procedural rule.”
Coleman v.
Thompson,
501 U.S.
722, 750 (1991). State rules count as “adequate” if they are
“firmly established and regularly followed.”
Walker v.
Martin,
562 U.S.
307, 316 (2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). Like all
States, California requires criminal defendants to raise available
claims on direct appeal. Under the so-called “
Dixon bar,” a
defendant procedurally defaults a claim raised for the first time
on state collateral review if he could have raised it earlier on
direct appeal. See
In re Dixon,
41 Cal. 2d 756, 759, 264 P.2d 513, 514 (1953). Yet, in this
case, the Ninth Circuit held that the
Dixon bar is
inadequate to bar fed- eral habeas review. Because California’s
procedural bar is longstanding, oft-cited, and shared by habeas
courts across the Nation, this Court now summarily reverses the
Ninth Circuit’s judgment.
I
Respondent Donna Kay Lee and her boyfriend
Paul Carasi stabbed to death Carasi’s mother and his ex-girlfriend.
A California jury convicted the pair of two counts each of
first-degree murder. Carasi received a death sentence, and Lee
received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. In
June 1999, Lee unsuccessfully raised four claims on direct appeal.
After the California appellate courts affirmed, Lee skipped state
postconviction review and filed the federal habeas petition at
issue. See 28 U. S. C. §2254(a). The petition raised
mostly new claims that Lee failed to raise on direct appeal.
Because Lee had not exhausted available state-court remedies,
however, the District Court temporarily stayed federal proceedings
to allow Lee to pursue her new claims in a state habeas petition.
The California Supreme Court denied Lee’s petition in a summary
order citing
Dixon.
Having exhausted state remedies, Lee returned to
federal court to litigate her federal habeas petition. The District
Court dismissed her new claims as procedurally defaulted. Then, for
the first time on appeal, Lee challenged the
Dixon bar’s
adequacy. In her brief, Lee presented a small sample of the
California Supreme Court’s state habeas denials on a single day
about six months after her default. Lee claimed that out of the 210
summary denials on December 21, 1999, the court failed to cite
Dixon in 9 cases where it should have been applied. The
court instead denied the nine petitions without any citation at
all. In Lee’s view, these missing citations proved that the
California courts inconsistently applied the
Dixon bar.
Without evaluating this evidence, the Ninth Circuit reversed and
remanded “to permit the Warden to submit evidence to the contrary,
and for consideration by the district court in the first instance.”
Lee v.
Jacquez, 406 Fed. Appx. 148, 150
(2010).
On remand, the warden submitted a study
analyzing more than 4,700 summary habeas denials during a nearly
2-year period around the time of Lee’s procedural default. From
August 1998 to June 2000, the study showed, the California Supreme
Court cited
Dixon in approximately 12% of all denials—more
than 500 times. In light of this evidence, the District Court held
that the
Dixon bar is adequate.
The Ninth Circuit again reversed.
Lee v.
Jacquez, 788 F.3d 1124 (2015). Lee’s 1-day sample proved the
Dixon bar’s inadequacy, the court held, because the “failure
to cite
Dixon where
Dixon applies
. . . reflects [its] irregular application.” 788
F. 3d, at 1130. The general 12% citation rate proved nothing,
the court reasoned, because the warden “d[id] not purport to show
to how many cases the
Dixon bar
should have been
applied.”
Id., at 1133. In the Ninth Circuit’s view, without
this “baseline number” the warden’s 2-year study was “entirely
insufficient” to prove
Dixon’s adequacy. 788 F. 3d, at
1133.
II
The Ninth Circuit’s decision profoundly
misapprehends what makes a state procedural bar “adequate.” That
question is a matter of federal law.
Lee v.
Kemna,
534 U.S.
362, 375 (2002). “To qualify as an ‘adequate’ procedural
ground,” capable of barring federal habeas review, “a state rule
must be ‘firmly established and regularly followed.’ ”
Martin,
supra, at 316 (quoting
Beard v.
Kindler,
558 U.S.
53, 60 (2009)).
California’s
Dixon bar satisfies both
adequacy criteria. It is “firmly established” because, decades
before Lee’s June 1999 procedural default, the California Supreme
Court warned defendants in plain terms that, absent “special
circumstances,” habeas “will not lie where the claimed errors could
have been, but were not, raised upon a timely appeal from a
judgment of conviction.”
Dixon,
supra, at 759, 264
P. 2d, at 514. And the California Supreme Court eliminated any
arguable ambiguity surrounding this bar by reaffirming
Dixon
in two cases decided before Lee’s default. See
In re
Harris,
5 Cal. 4th 813, 825, n. 3, 829–841,
855 P.2d 391, 395, n. 3, 398–407 (1993);
In re
Robbins,
18 Cal. 4th 770, 814–815, and n. 34,
959 P.2d 311, 340–341, and n. 34 (1998).
The California Supreme Court’s repeated
Dixon citations also prove that the bar is “regularly
followed.”
Martin recently held that another California
procedural bar—a rule requiring prisoners to file state habeas
petitions promptly—met that requirement because “[e]ach year, the
California Supreme Court summarily denies hundreds of habeas
petitions by citing” the timeliness rule. 562 U. S., at 318.
The same goes for
Dixon. Nine purportedly missing
Dixon citations from Lee’s 1-day sample of summary orders
hardly support an inference of inconsistency. See
Dugger v.
Adams,
489 U.S.
401, 410, n. 6 (1989) (holding that the Florida Supreme
Court applied its similar procedural bar “consistently and
regularly” despite “address[ing] the merits in several cases
raising [new] claims on postconviction review”). Indeed, all nine
orders in that sample were denials. None ignored the
Dixon
bar to
grant relief, so there is no sign of
inconsistency.
Nor is California’s rule unique. Federal and
state ha- beas courts across the country follow the same rule as
Dixon. “The general rule in federal habeas cases is that a
defendant who fails to raise a claim on direct appeal is barred
from raising the claim on collateral review.”
Sanchez-Llamas
v.
Oregon, 548 U.S. 331, 350–351 (2006). Likewise, state
postconviction remedies generally “may not be used to litigate
claims which were or could have been raised at trial or on direct
appeal.” 1 D. Wilkes, State Postconviction Remedies and Relief
Handbook §1:2, p. 3 (2015–2016 ed.). It appears that every
State shares this procedural bar in some form. See Brief for State
of Alabama et al. as
Amici Curiae 1, n. 2 (collecting
citations). For such well-established and ubiquitous rules, it
takes more than a few outliers to show inadequacy. Federal habeas
courts must not lightly “disregard state procedural rules that are
substantially similar to those to which we give full force in our
own courts.”
Kindler, 558 U. S., at 62. And it would be
“[e]ven stranger to do so with respect to rules in place in nearly
every State.”
Ibid. Nothing suggests, moreover, that
California courts apply the
Dixon bar in a way that
disfavors federal claims. The Court therefore holds that it
qualifies as adequate to bar federal habeas review.
III
The Ninth Circuit’s contrary reasoning is
unpersuasive and inconsistent with this Court’s precedents.
Applying the
Dixon bar may be a “straightforward” or
“mechanica[l]” task for state courts. 788 F. 3d, at 1130. But
simplicity does not imply that missing citations reflect
state-court inconsistency. To begin with, since the
Dixon
bar has several exceptions, see
Robbins,
supra, at
814–815, and n. 34, 959 P. 2d, at 340–341, and
n. 34, the California Supreme Court can hardly be faulted for
failing to cite
Dixon whenever a petitioner raises a claim
that he could have raised on direct appeal.
More importantly, California courts need not
address procedural default before reaching the merits, so the
purportedly missing citations show nothing. Cf.
Bell v.
Cone,
543 U.S.
447, 451, n. 3 (2005) (
per curiam) (declining
to address the warden’s procedural-default argument);
Lambrix v.
Singletary,
520 U.S.
518, 525 (1997) (explaining that “[ j]udicial economy
might counsel” bypassing a procedural-default question if the
merits “were easily resolvable against the habeas petitioner”).
Ordinarily, “procedural default . . . is not a
jurisdictional matter.”
Trest v.
Cain,
522 U.S.
87, 89 (1997). As a result, the appropriate order of analysis
for each case remains within the state courts’ discretion. Such
discretion will often lead to “seeming inconsistencies.”
Martin, 562 U. S., at 320, and n. 7. But that
superficial tension does not make a procedural bar inadequate. “[A]
state procedural bar may count as an adequate and independent
ground for denying a federal habeas petition even if the state
court had discretion to reach the merits despite the default.”
Id., at 311; see
Kindler,
supra, at 60–61.
The Ninth Circuit’s attempt to get around
Martin and
Kindler fails. The Court of Appeals
distinguished those cases on the ground that California’s
Dixon bar is “man- datory” rather than discretionary because
it involves a discretion-free general rule, notwithstanding
exceptions that might involve discretion. 788 F. 3d, at 1130.
The Court assumes, without deciding, that this description is
accurate and the
Dixon bar’s exceptions leave some room for
discretion. Even so, there is little difference between discretion
exercised through an otherwise adequate procedural bar’s exceptions
and discretion that is a part of the bar itself. In any event, the
Ninth Circuit’s reasoning ignores the state courts’ discretion to
assume, without deciding, that a claim is not procedurally
defaulted and instead hold that the claim lacks merit.
The Ninth Circuit was accordingly wrong to
dismiss the 500-plus summary denials citing
Dixon simply
because they do not reveal which cases potentially implicate the
bar. 788 F. 3d, at 1133.
Martin already rejected this
precise reasoning. There, the habeas petitioner unsuccessfully
argued that “[u]se of summary denials makes it impossible to tell
why the California Supreme Court decides some delayed petitions on
the merits and rejects others as untimely.” 562 U. S., at 319
(internal quotation marks omitted). So too here, “[w]e see no
reason to reject California’s [procedural] bar simply because a
court may opt to bypass the e see no reason to reject California’s
[procedural] bar simply because a court may opt to bypass the
[
Dixon] assessment and summarily dismiss a petition on the
merits, if that is the easier path.”
Ibid.
By treating every missing citation as a sign of
inconsistency, the Court of Appeals “pose[d] an unnecessary
dilemma” for California.
Kindler, 558 U. S., at 61. The
court forced the State to choose between the “finality of [its]
judgments” and a burdensome opinion-writing requirement.
Ibid.; see
Martin,
supra, at 312–313 (noting
that the California Supreme Court “rules on a staggering number of
habeas petitions each year”);
Harrington v.
Richter,
562 U.S.
86, 99 (2011) (discussing the advantages of summary
dispositions). “[F]ederal courts have no authority,” however, “to
impose mandatory opinion-writing standards on state courts” as the
price of federal respect for their procedural rules.
Johnson
v.
Williams, 568 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (slip op., at
9). The Ninth Circuit’s decision is thus fundamentally at odds with
the “federalism and comity concerns that motivate the adequate
state ground doctrine in the habeas context.”
Kindler,
supra, at 62.
* * *
“A State’s procedural rules are of vital
importance to the orderly administration of its criminal courts;
when a federal court permits them to be readily evaded, it
undermines the criminal justice system.”
Lambrix,
supra, at 525. Here, the Ninth Circuit permitted California
prisoners to evade a well-established procedural bar that is
adequate to bar federal habeas review. The petition for a writ of
certiorari and respondent’s motion to proceed
in forma
pauperis are granted. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further
proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.