The US Supreme Court granted cert in three cases this morning, and one involved a cert petition from a defendant on Arizona’s death row. However, the issue on which SCOTUS granted cert in Cruz v. Arizona is likely only to excite collateral review and habeas fans:
Issue: Whether the Arizona Supreme Court’s holding that Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.1(g) precluded post-conviction relief is an adequate and independent state-law ground for the judgment.
But while this statement of the issue may not seem all that exciting, these paragraphs from this amicus brief in support of cert from Habeas Scholars suggests a lot is at stake here:
Amici urge this Court to grant certiorari — or summarily reverse — to stop Arizona’s use of collateral procedure to discriminate against established constitutional rights. “[S]tate courts have the solemn responsibility, equally with the federal courts ‘to guard, enforce, and protect every right granted or secured by the constitution of the United States.…’” Steffel v. Thompson, 415 U.S. 452, 460-61 (1974) (quoting Robb v. Connolly, 111 U.S. 624, 637 (1884)). They cannot selectively disregard particular constitutional rights….
This Court’s intervention is both necessary and appropriate. The Arizona decision results in the clear violation of a federal right, and the Arizona Supreme Court’s violation of the Supremacy Clause itself merits this Court’s intervention. Moreover, there is jurisdiction to review the judgment because the state ground is neither adequate to bar review nor independent of federal law. And because Arizona appears to be a singular outlier in its treatment on collateral review of the federal rights at issue here, correction of this error would not affect the practices of other states. Instead of being disruptive, reversal here would restore the appropriate federal-state balance, in accord with this Court’s Supremacy Clause precedents.