Luis Mariano Martinez, Petitioner v. Charles L. Ryan, Director, Arizona Department of Corrections (566 U.S. 1)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided March 20, 2012 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 566 U.S. 1 · 132 S. Ct. 1309
- Docket
- No. 10-1001
- Argued
- October 4, 2011
- Decided
- March 20, 2012
- Term
- October Term 2011
- Vote
- 7–2
- Majority author
- Justice Kennedy
- Issue area
- Civil Rights
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
How the Justices voted
- Majority
- Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy (wrote), Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, Justice Alito, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan
- Dissenting
- Justice Scalia (wrote), Justice Thomas
Oral argument transcript and advocates · Opinion on Justia
Opinion excerpt
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court'. The State of Arizona does not permit a convicted person alleging ineffective assistance of trial counsel to raise that claim on direct review. Instead, the prisoner must bring the claim in state collateral proceedings. In the instant case, however, petitioner’s postconviction counsel did not raise the ineffective-assistance claim in the first collateral proceeding, and, indeed, filed a statement that, after reviewing the case, she found no meritorious claims helpful to petitioner. On federal habeas review, and with new counsel, petitioner sought to argue he had received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial and in the first phase of his state collateral proceeding. Because the state collateral proceeding was the first place to challenge his conviction on grounds of ineffective assistance, petitioner maintained he had a constitutional right to an effective attorney in the collateral proceeding. While petitioner frames the question in this case as a constitutional one, a more narrow, but still dispositive, formulation is whether a federal habeas court may excuse a procedural default of an ineffective-assistance claim when the claim was not properly presented in state court due to an attorney’s errors in an initial-review collateral proceeding. V — I A jury convicted petitioner, Luis Mariano Martinez, of two counts of…
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