Buck v. Davis

A habeas petitioner needs a certificate of appealability, or COA, before appealing the denial of federal habeas relief. At that stage, the court asks only whether reasonable jurists could disagree with the district court’s resolution of the constitutional claim or conclude that the issues deserve encouragement to proceed further. That limited inquiry is not the same as a final merits decision.

Although the Fifth Circuit used the language of debatability, it denied relief because Buck had supposedly failed to show extraordinary circumstances under Rule 60(b)(6). That was an ultimate merits conclusion. A court may not first resolve the appeal on the merits and then use that resolution to deny a COA; doing so imposes too high a burden at the preliminary COA stage.

Because the parties had fully litigated the merits before the Supreme Court, and because the COA statute did not limit the Supreme Court’s own review in this posture, the Court proceeded to decide both Buck’s ineffective-assistance claim and his Rule 60(b)(6) request.

Under Strickland v. Washington, Buck had to prove deficient performance and prejudice. Counsel’s performance was deficient because counsel knew that Quijano regarded Buck’s race as increasing the probability of future violence, nevertheless called Quijano as a witness, elicited his discussion of race, and introduced his written report. No competent defense lawyer would place before a capital-sentencing jury evidence suggesting that his client’s race made him more deserving of execution.

The testimony bore directly on the key issue in the penalty phase: future dangerousness. The jury was not simply deciding what Buck had done in the past; it was making a predictive and necessarily uncertain judgment about whether he would commit violence in the future. Quijano supplied what appeared to be expert statistical evidence that one immutable feature—Buck’s being Black—made future violence more likely.

The evidence was especially potent because it invoked the destructive stereotype that Black men are prone to violence. It also came from a court-appointed psychologist with substantial capital-case experience, a source jurors could reasonably view as authoritative. The jury’s request during deliberations for the psychologists’ reports confirmed the importance of this evidence to its deliberations.

The Court rejected the lower court’s characterization of the racial evidence as de minimis. The constitutional harm could not be measured by counting the two references to race or by tallying pages of transcript. Expert testimony tying race to the life-or-death sentencing decision can be deeply prejudicial even when stated briefly.

The fact that Buck’s own lawyer initially introduced the evidence did not eliminate prejudice. Jurors may discount a prosecutor’s arguments as advocacy, but evidence introduced by the defense can carry the force of an admission against the defendant’s interest. Despite the brutality of Buck’s crimes and evidence of his lack of remorse, there was a reasonable probability that at least one juror would have doubted future dangerousness absent Quijano’s race-based testimony.

Rule 60(b)(6) allows relief from a final judgment only in extraordinary circumstances, and such relief is rare in habeas cases. But the inquiry is equitable and may account for the risk of injustice to the parties and the risk of undermining public confidence in the judicial process.

Buck’s case was extraordinary because the ineffective assistance may have caused a death sentence to rest in part on race. Criminal punishment is imposed for what a person does, not for who the person is. Race-based decisionmaking is particularly corrosive in the justice system because it damages the defendant, the community, and public confidence in courts.

Texas’s own conduct confirmed the exceptional nature of the case. After Quijano gave analogous race-based testimony in other capital cases, the Texas Attorney General publicly declared that race should not be considered in the criminal justice system and confessed error in five similar cases. The State’s effort to distinguish Buck because defense counsel first elicited the testimony did not answer the central problem: race had been submitted to the jury as a factor bearing on punishment.

Texas’s interest in finality carried less force in these circumstances. Rule 60(b) itself creates a limited exception to finality, and Texas had effectively recognized that the public has little interest in enforcing capital sentences reached through the injection of race into the future-dangerousness determination.

Reopening the judgment would be futile unless Buck could invoke Martinez and Trevino. Under those decisions, a Texas prisoner may obtain federal review of a defaulted ineffective-assistance-of-trial-counsel claim if initial state habeas counsel was constitutionally ineffective in failing to raise a substantial claim.

Until briefing in the Supreme Court, both parties had assumed that Martinez and Trevino would apply if the case were reopened. Texas first argued before the Supreme Court that those decisions announced a new rule barred by Teague v. Lane from applying retroactively on collateral review.

The Court declined to decide the broader retroactivity question. A State may waive a Teague defense by failing to raise it in a timely manner, and Texas had not raised the issue in the District Court, the Fifth Circuit, or its opposition to certiorari. The Court therefore held only that Martinez and Trevino applied in Buck’s case.