SCOTUS scolds circuit panel for off-the-rails ruling

A circuit court panel “radically’ departed from the permissible scope of appellate review in ordering a new trial for a man convicted of second-degree murder, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a per curiam decision.

The case involved the conviction of Jeremiah Sweeney, who in 2010 was charged with the multiple counts in the shooting death of a man in Prince George’s County, Maryland. According to state prosecutors, the victim was an innocent bystander to a dispute between Sweeney and his neighbors over stolen marijuana which ended when Sweeney drew a gun and opened fire.

A Maryland jury found Jeremiah Sweeney guilty of second-degree murder and related crimes. After state courts affirmed his convictions on appeal and denied postconviction relief, the defendant petitioned for habeas relief in federal court.

A federal judge denied his petition, but in March 2025 a divided panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and ordered a new trial.

In seeking habeas relief, the defendant had argued ineffective assistance of counsel relating to his trial lawyer’s response to the revelation that one juror had made an unauthorized visit to the crime scene.

Rather than ruling for Sweeney on that ground, in a 96-page, unpublished decision the majority of the circuit panel found habeas relief was warranted due to a “combination of extraordinary failures from juror to judge to attorney” that deprived him of his Confrontation Clause rights as well as his right to trial by an impartial jury.

But the U.S. Supreme Court found that the majority below had “departed dramatically” from the principle of party presentation, which generally precludes courts from addressing issues which the parties themselves have not raised.

Click here to read the full text of the Nov. 24 decision in Clark v. Sweeney.

• “The Fourth Circuit transgressed the party-presentation principle by granting relief on a claim that Sweeney never asserted and that the State never had the chance to address. Sweeney asserted ‘one, and only one,’ claim in his federal habeas petition: that his counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate whether other jurors had been prejudiced by Juror 4’s crime-scene visit. Instead of ruling on that claim, the Fourth Circuit devised a new one, based on a ‘combination of extraordinary failures from juror to judge to attorney.’ The Fourth Circuit’s ‘radical transformation’ of Sweeney’s simple ineffective-assistance claim ‘departed so drastically from the principle of party presentation as to constitute an abuse of discretion.’”
  — opinion of the court