{"id":640,"date":"2015-10-06T14:04:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T14:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/?p=640"},"modified":"2022-06-11T20:14:22","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T20:14:22","slug":"authority-for-maryland-v-kublicki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/2015\/10\/06\/authority-for-maryland-v-kublicki\/","title":{"rendered":"Authority for Maryland v. Kulbicki"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down its first opinion<\/a> of the 2015 Term,\u00a0Maryland v. Kulbicki. <\/em>In a per curiam opinion, the Court reversed a\u00a0Maryland Court of Appeals decision<\/a> that had ordered post-conviction relief for Kulbicki based on his counsel’s ineffective failure to challenge flawed Composite Bullet Lead Analysis (CBLA) testimony. Over at the Forensics Forum, Professor Brandon Garrett offers good analysis<\/a> on why the Court’s decision is flawed and unnecessarily stingy, especially when compared to last Term’s per curiam decision in Hinton v. Alabama.\u00a0<\/em>To facilitate further discussion, I offer two maps that\u00a0provide Kulbicki<\/em>‘s doctrinal context.<\/p>\n

\"Kulbicki_casetext\"<\/a>

Click to open full-sized image with links to underlying opinions<\/p><\/div>\n

As this first map shows, Kulbicki<\/em> only cites five other Supreme Court opinions to justify its analysis. Citation analysis shows\u00a0the cases form a tight family network.\u00a0Consider that\u00a0the earliest case Kulbicki<\/em> cites is\u00a01963’s Gideon v. Wainwright<\/a>, <\/em>the seminal right-to-counsel case. The next earliest case invoked\u00a0is\u00a0Strickland v. Washington<\/a><\/em>, which lay the foundation for modern Ineffective Assistance of Counsel (IAC) doctrine. Strickland<\/em> itself cites\u00a0Gideon<\/em>. Finally, Kulbicki<\/em> cites three more recent IAC cases, all of which cite\u00a0Strickland<\/em>, which cites Gideon<\/em>.\u00a0Thus, Kulbicki<\/em> connects every case in its network to Gideon<\/em> at a maximum of three degrees.<\/p>\n

\"Kulbicki_spaeth\"<\/a>

Click to open full-sized image with links to the SCDB<\/p><\/div>\n

Another way to visualize Kulbicki<\/em>‘s\u00a0network is pictured above. It uses a Spaeth Projection<\/a> that shows both votes for outcome for cases and whether the cases “liberal” or “conservative” according to Spaeth. \u00a0Interestingly, the average “degree of dissent” in this network is very low (0.29). For reference, a 9-0 case is said to have a 0 degree of dissent; a 8-1, a 0.25, a 7-2, a 0.5, a 6-3, 0.75, and a 5-4 a 1.0. Thus, this map shows the opinion largely cited uncontroversial authority in support of what the Court presumably hoped would be an uncontroversial conclusion.<\/p>\n

Of course, the Kulbicki<\/em> court does cite one 5-4 decision, 2005’s Rompilla v. Beard<\/a><\/em>. Yet this too is a savvy rhetorical choice. In granting<\/span> IAC relief, the Rompilla<\/em> majority observed<\/a> that failure to look at a file the prosecution says it will use is ineffective, unlike “looking for a needle in a haystack, when a lawyer truly has reason to doubt there is any needle there.” In Kulbicki<\/em>, the Court denies<\/span>\u00a0IAC relief and cites\u00a0Rompilla<\/em> for the affirmative proposition<\/a> that lawyers don’t have to look for needles. The message is: even in a close-call case not too long ago, the liberal majority agreed that lawyers don’t have to look for needles; that’s how today’s unanimous Court sees this case. One need not agree with the outcome in Kulbicki<\/em> to appreciate its doctrinal rhetoric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down its first opinion of the 2015 Term,\u00a0Maryland v. Kulbicki. In a per curiam opinion, the Court reversed a\u00a0Maryland Court of Appeals decision that had ordered post-conviction relief for Kulbicki based on his counsel’s ineffective … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":857,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/cstarger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}