FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
FRANK TAYLOR, No. 09-15341
Petitioner-Appellant, D.C. No.
v. 2:06-cv-02878-
D. K. SISTO, GEB-CHS
Respondent-Appellee.
OPINION
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Eastern District of California
Garland E. Burrell, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted
February 9, 2010—San Francisco, California
Filed May 25, 2010
Before: John T. Noonan, Marsha S. Berzon and
Sandra S. Ikuta, Circuit Judges.
Opinion by Judge Noonan;
Dissent by Judge Ikuta
7449
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7451
COUNSEL
Deanna F. Lamb, Central California Appellate Program, Sac-
ramento, California, for the petitioner-appellant.
David Andrew Eldridge, Deputy Attorney General, Sacra-
mento, California, for the respondent-appellee.
7452 TAYLOR v. SISTO
OPINION
NOONAN, Circuit Judge:
Frank Taylor, a California state prisoner, appeals the judg-
ment of the district court denying his petition for habeas cor-
pus. We reverse the judgment.
FACTS
Early morning September 9, 2002, Frank Taylor was driv-
ing his wife’s car. For reasons undisclosed by the record she
had reported the car to the police as stolen. Officer Halk cal-
led in the license number. The dispatcher told him that the car
was stolen. Halk gave chase and called for backup. Eventu-
ally, Halk’s patrol car and another patrol car boxed Taylor in
his wife’s car into a driveway and signaled to Taylor to obey
orders from the police. Taylor backed up his car until it
touched Halk’s, then revved his engine and pushed the patrol
car backwards, forcing Halk to jump into his car to avoid
injury. Taylor then drove on to the sidewalk and briefly
escaped. He led the police on a chase in which he sped at
speeds from 60 to 100 miles per hour, ignoring speed limits
and stop signs. Ultimately, he crashed into a truck and was
captured.
PROCEEDINGS
Taylor was charged with evading a peace officer in viola-
tion of California Vehicle Code § 2800.2(a) and assault with
a deadly weapon on a peace officer in violation of California
Penal Code § 245(c).
At the start of jury selection the trial judge gave this admo-
nition to the prospective jurors:
The reason that being a juror is hard is because it’s
probably the only time in your life that you are ever
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7453
asked to take all of the experiences that you have had
that have contributed to how you think about every-
thing that you think about and to lay those experi-
ences aside and to only make your decisions based
upon what you hear that goes on in this trial, that you
hear in this courtroom, and upon that, you must
make your decision.
So I ask you to imagine as prospective — as
jurors, that there is a large box at the doorway to this
courtroom. And when you walk into this courtroom
as a juror, you take all the decisions that you have
made, all the opinions you have about how people
act, how people behave, what kind of people behave
in what way, what makes them do that, and you
leave them in that box. We call them your biases and
your prejudices, and we all have them. We depend
upon those biases and prejudices in our normal lives
a lot of times, but you can’t depend upon them when
you are jurors.
The only thing that we ask you to walk into this
courtroom with is your common sense, and that
serves you well as a juror, and that’s why it’s the
second hardest job in the world [the most difficult
job being that of a parent], but that’s what we call
upon you to do.
The court’s reference to the “box” and to the putting aside
of experience came up during the questioning of ten potential
jurors, eight of whom were dismissed. Mr. L, who was dis-
missed, stated that “[t]he judge told us yesterday to put per-
sonal experiences at the door, and if I’m selected as a juror,
I would do my best to put that aside, but . . . I might have a
tough time doing that . . . .” Ms. D, who was also dismissed,
did not understand the challenged admonition. When ques-
tioned outside of the presence of the other potential jurors, she
told the judge that she could set aside her personal experience
7454 TAYLOR v. SISTO
with sexual assault if the charge did not have elements of sex-
ual of assault, but that she would have “a greater difficulty of
putting aside just my everyday experience, because I think
that’s what my common sense is based on, is my everyday
experience. So I would be hard-pressed to put that aside and
still have my common sense.” The court clarified the admoni-
tion as follows:
The Court: Let me see if I can make it clearer to
you . . . so you can be clear with us.
Your everyday experience, like knowing that the
sun comes up in the west and sets in the east —
comes up in the east and sets in the west, whatever
it does, and those kinds of things, that nightfall is the
end of the day, that’s pretty common sense; that if
you throw things up in the air, they’ll fall down to
the ground, that’s what we’re talking about, common
sense, the kind of judgment that we make. Prejudice
and judgments have kind of the same root.
Prospective Juror D: Oh, Okay.
The Court: That all people with blue eyes act in
this particular way, all people with black skin act in
that particular way, those are the kind of judgments
that you leave in the box outside my courtroom.
During the sequestered questioning of Mr. T, whom the court
dismissed for cause, Mr. T stated that he would not be able
to put “in the box” his experience of having a brother who
was beaten and called racial epithets by sheriffs’ deputies.
During the questioning of the other jurors in open court, the
court referred to the “box” as “experiences . . . that might
affect your judgment.” The judge asked individual potential
jurors if they could put particular personal experiences “in the
box.” For example, the court asked Mr. J, whom the prosecu-
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7455
tor ultimately dismissed, about an experience being subjected
to an arrest warrant for a different person with the same name.
When Mr. J said that he could be objective, the court
asked,”[a]nd your experience with law enforcement would
remain in my box out there while listening to the testimony
of law enforcement officers?” The court asked other potential
jurors if they could set aside the following experiences:
• Mr. K (dismissed): “experiences with your sons
that might affect your ability to be fair and impar-
tial” and “feelings” that the potential juror might
have if the charged crime was similar to one in
which his son had been involved.
• Juror No. 4: “personal experiences” that might
create sympathy, referring to the juror’s experi-
ence being questioned by a grand jury.
• Mrs. W (dismissed): “experiences like that that
might affect your judgment” that must be “con-
trol[led] in this particular setting,” referring to
prior experiences with law enforcement.
Defense counsel also brought up the “box” in questioning
three potential jurors, two of whom he dismissed. Ms. G, who
had been prosecuted for a DUI, stated that she did not under-
stand what the “box” was, and counsel clarified that he meant
whether her experience of having committed a crime and been
prosecuted “will affect your ability to be fair to both sides in
this case.” Counsel asked Ms. T, whose husband was a retired
peace officer, whether she could leave anything she might
have heard from her husband “in the proverbial box outside
the courtroom.” Counsel also asked Juror No. 8 whether he
could “leave in the box” the “whole experience” of having his
father incarcerated for murder, or “whether there is part of
that experience that may affect your attitude toward either
side in this proceeding.”
7456 TAYLOR v. SISTO
At the close of evidence, the court did not refer to the
“box” or personal experiences. The court instructed the jury
that it “must not be influenced by pity for or by prejudice
against a defendant” and that it must “not be biased against
the defendant because he’s been arrested for this offense,
charged with the crime, or brought to trial.” The court
instructed the jury that it “must not be influenced by senti-
ment, conjecture, sympathy, passion, prejudice, public opin-
ion, or public feeling,” and that it “must decide all questions
of fact in this case from the evidence received in this trial, and
not from any other source,” giving as examples visits to the
location and consulting reference works. The court also
instructed the jury that it might draw inferences from circum-
stantial evidence. It instructed that the jury is “not bound to
decide an issue of fact in accordance with the testimony of
number of witnesses which does not convince you as against
the testimony of a lesser number or other evidence which
appeals to your mind with more convincing force.” Finally,
the court instructed the jury on reasonable doubt.
During voir dire, Taylor had objected under Batson v. Ken-
tucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), and People v. Wheeler, 583 P.2d
748 (Cal. 1978), to the prosecution’s use of peremptory chal-
lenges to strike three jurors: Mrs. W, whom the trial court
assumed to be Hispanic, Mr. L, who was of Southeast Asian
descent, and Ms. D, who was African-American. The trial
court rejected Taylor’s motions.
The jury acquitted Taylor of assault with a deadly weapon
but convicted him of the lesser included offense of assaulting
a peace officer in violation of Penal Code § 241(b). It con-
victed him of evading a police officer. Under California’s
“three strikes” system, he was sentenced to imprisonment for
26 years to life.
Taylor appealed to the state court of appeal for the third
district. His first ground was what the appeal court labeled
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7457
“the preinstruction of the jury,” that is, what Taylor described
as “the dehumanizing of the jury.”
Taylor had not objected to the preinstruction. The Court of
Appeals said that nonetheless it would review his objection
now. The court declared: “Read in context, and contrary to
defendant’s view, the instruction, although a bit odd, did not
create a jury of ‘automatic robots with sterilized minds’ . . . .
In context, the instruction did not command the jurors to
ignore life experiences.”
The Court of Appeals then addressed the Wheeler/Batson
objections, citing California cases that specifically rejected
Ninth Circuit precedents in this area. The court held that the
prosecutor’s stated reasons for his objections were race-
neutral and sincere. The court also rejected Taylor’s addi-
tional claims regarding the instructions on Vehicle Code
§ 2800.2(a), which were raised for the first time on appeal.
The Supreme Court of California summarily affirmed.
Taylor filed a habeas petition in federal court, raising the
same claims brought on direct appeal. The district court
denied his petition. This appeal followed.
ANALYSIS
The Standard of Review. We review the decision of the
California court of appeal. We are bound by federal statute to
affirm unless the decision “was contrary to, or an unreason-
able application of, clearly established Federal law, as deter-
mined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” 28 U.S.C.
§ 2254(d)(1). “Clearly-established” law consists of the hold-
ings not the dicta of the Supreme Court. Williams v. Taylor,
529 U.S. 362, 412 (2000).
The Judge’s Box. With a wonderfully concrete image, the
trial judge instructed all the prospective jurors in this case that
“they must as jurors, take all the decisions that you have
7458 TAYLOR v. SISTO
made, all the opinions you have about how people act, how
people behave, what kind of people behave in what way, what
makes them do that, and you leave them in that box.” He told
them that they must “take all of the experiences that you have
had that have contributed to how you think about everything
that you think about” and “lay those experiences aside.”
The instruction was an unqualified directive that each juror
disregard his or her own life experience. The instruction
included a reference to “your biases and your prejudices” but
perversely or paradoxically stated that the jurors’ experiences
were what “we call your biases or your prejudices.” Sweep-
ingly, the instruction asked the prospective jurors to deposit
all their experience in the judge’s disposal box.
The judge’s colloquies with individual prospective jurors
showed that the judge was not joking. The responses of indi-
viduals in the voir dire show them taking the judge’s instruc-
tion equally seriously. The judge’s only attempt to explain
what he meant consisted in the statements that a juror could
use her experience to know what nightfall was and where the
sun rose or set. Nightfall and sunrise are universal facts, not
experiences that may be particular to an individual juror.
Nothing in this explanation permitted a juror to draw on the
personal experiences that make up human life.
The Court of Appeals characterized the preinstruction as “a
bit odd,” but defensible “in context.” The Court of Appeals
did not specify the context to which it referred. The only con-
text that was apparent was the context of the criminal trial in
which the jury had a key role. It was in that context that the
potential jury members were told to shed their life experience.
[1] A reviewing court must consider “the reasonable likeli-
hood that the jury has applied the challenged instruction in a
way that prevents the consideration of constitutionally rele-
vant evidence.” Boyde v. California, 494 U.S. 370, 380
(1990). It might be argued that the instruction was harmless
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7459
because it could not have been obeyed — no one can com-
pletely discard life experience. But juries are presumed to
obey their instructions. See Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U.S.
200, 206 (1987). The colloquies with members of the voir dire
show them grappling with the instruction. To follow it com-
pletely may have been impossible, but it set a goal which
jurors were instructed to achieve. The instruction, in context,
created a pool of prospective jurors who were seeking to strip
themselves of part of what made them human.
[2] The standard instructions to the jury did not cure the
deficiency. These instructions on evidence and on reasonable
doubt, were not framed to correct or neutralize the preinstruc-
tion, whose central image had played such a prominent part
in the voir dire.
Did the preinstruction contradict or unreasonably apply a
holding of the Supreme Court? We conclude that it unreason-
ably applied a series of holdings concerning the nature of trial
by jury under the Sixth Amendment.
[3] “[T]he essential feature of a jury . . . lies in the interpo-
sition between the accused and his accuser of the common-
sense judgment of a group of laymen.” Williams v. Fla., 399
U.S. 78, 99 (1970). This fundamental precept has been recog-
nized in a diverse series of Supreme Court cases. In Head v.
Hargrave, 105 U.S. 45 (1881), Justice Stephen Field, writing
for a unanimous court, reversed a judgment when the jury had
been instructed to be “governed by the opinions of the
experts” in evaluating the value of the legal services whose
amount was in controversy. The instruction, Justice Field
wrote, “in effect, forbade them to exercise their own knowl-
edge and ideas.” Id. at 51. “So far from laying aside their own
general knowledge and ideas, the jury should have applied
that knowledge and those ideas to the matters of fact in evi-
dence in determining the weight to be given to the opinions
expressed; and it was only in that way that they could arrive
at a just conclusion.” Id. at 49. The error in instructing the
7460 TAYLOR v. SISTO
jury to discard their own knowledge was fundamental and
fatal.
Head was a civil case, and so did not involve the Sixth
Amendment, but a long line of Supreme Court cases estab-
lishes that criminal defendants are entitled to be judged by “a
body truly representative of the community.” Smith v. Texas,
311 U.S. 128, 130 (1940). The requirement of representative-
ness explicitly connects the right to trial by an impartial jury
to the varied and unique experiences that Americans of differ-
ent backgrounds bring into the jury box.
In Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 85 (1942), the
Supreme Court noted that the Constitution as originally
drafted guaranteed only that “the trial of all crimes . . . shall
be by jury,” but “the people and their representatives . . . were
quick to implement that guarantee by the adoption of the
Sixth Amendment which provides that the jury must be
impartial.” The Supreme Court went on to hold that the “se-
lection of jurors from the membership of particular private
organizations” is impermissible because it does not “comport
with the concept of the jury as a cross-section of the commu-
nity.” Id. at 86.
Around the same time, the Supreme Court struck down a
procedure for jury selection that excluded low wage laborers.
The Supreme Court observed that such laborers “constitute a
very substantial portion of the community, a portion that can-
not be intentionally and systematically excluded in whole or
in part without doing violence to the democratic nature of the
jury system.” Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co., 328 U.S. 217, 223
(1946). In Ballard v. United States, 329 U.S. 187 (1946),
reversing a criminal conviction because the jury was com-
posed exclusively of men, Justice William O. Douglas wrote:
“The truth is that the two sexes are not fungible; a community
made up exclusively of one is different from a community of
both . . . . a distinct quality is lost if either sex is excluded.”
Id. at 193-94.
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7461
Ballard was grounded in the supervisory power of the
Supreme Court over the federal judiciary. See 329 U.S. at
193. Ballard has been relied on in subsequent Supreme Court
cases interpreting the Sixth Amendment right to trial by an
impartial jury and the Equal Protection Clause. See, e.g.,
J.E.B. v. Alabama, 511 U.S. 127, 133 (1994); Taylor v. Loui-
siana, 419 U.S. 522,527, 531 (1975). Ballard quoted approv-
ingly from the dissenting opinion in the Ninth Circuit, which
explained that women should have been included in the jury
pool precisely because women may possess singular experi-
ences and beliefs that could have influenced their assessment
of the defendant’s culpability. See 329 U.S. at 194-95.
In Peters v. Kiff, 407 U.S. 493 (1972), reversing a convic-
tion of a white man for burglary by a jury composed exclu-
sively of whites, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that
we are unwilling to make the assumption that the
exclusion of Negroes has relevance only for issues
involving race. When any large and identifiable seg-
ment of the community is excluded from jury ser-
vice, the effect is to remove from the jury room
qualities of human nature and varieties of human
experience, the range of which is unknown and per-
haps unknowable.
Id. at 503. Justices Douglas and Stevens joined this opinion.
Justices White, Brennan, and Powell concurred, stating that
the court here proclaimed a new rule “governing criminal pro-
ceedings instituted hereafter.” Id. at 507 (White, J., concur-
ring).
[4] In Taylor v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court again
emphasized that “the fair-cross-section requirement [i]s fun-
damental to the jury trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amend-
ment.” Invoking “the commonsense judgment of the
community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken
prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps . . .
7462 TAYLOR v. SISTO
biased response of a judge,” Taylor made clear that the consti-
tutional right to a jury pool comprised of a “fair cross-section”
of the community derives from the importance of bringing a
broad spectrum of juror life experiences to bear on the process
of adjudicating guilt. 419 U.S. at 530.
More recently, in J.E.B. v. Alabama, reversing a judgment
in a state paternity case, in which the exercise of peremptory
challenges had eliminated all the men in the jury pool, Justice
Harry Blackmun, writing for the court, quoted: “Restricting
jury service to only special groups or excluding identifiable
segments playing majority roles in the community cannot be
squared with the constitutional concept of jury trial.” 511 U.S.
at 134 (quoting Taylor, 419 U.S. at 530). “The diverse and
representative character of the jury must be maintained ‘partly
as assurance of a diffused impartiality and partly because
sharing in the administration of justice is a phase of civic
responsibility.’ ” Id. (quoting Taylor, 419 U.S. at 530-31).
[5] These cases establish that a jury is meant to be made
up of human beings whose experience is vital to the validity
of the verdict. The cases stand as indices to the particular kind
of experience that a man or woman, a black person or a white
person, a low-wage laborer as distinct from a well-paid desk
worker may be expected to bring to service as a juror. In the
recognition of the need for diversity there is recognition of the
role of the experience of the jurors. That the jurors must be
human is an axiom. That humanity implies experience is also
axiomatic. The Sixth Amendment, as incorporated by the
Fourteenth Amendment, guarantees the right to “trial by an
impartial jury,” U.S. Const. Am. VI; Duncan v. Louisiana,
391 U.S. 145 (1968). The holdings of the Supreme Court con-
firm that an impartial jury is one that applies common sense
informed by the full range of human experience. The “box”
instruction affirmed by the California Court of Appeals
instructed the jury to abandon that experience.
[6] The statute governing habeas recognizes “that even a
general standard may be applied in an unreasonable manner.”
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7463
Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930, 953 (2007). In our case,
the Court of Appeals engaged in an “unreasonable applica-
tion” of federal law, as established by the holdings of the
Supreme Court. Applying the law to the facts of Taylor’s
case, the state court “ignor[ed]the fundamental principles
established by [the Supreme Court’s] most relevant prece-
dents.” Abdul-Kabir v. Quarterman, 550 U.S. 233, 258
(2007).
Judge Ikuta’s earnest dissent requires a response: In this
case we are applying a first principle: juries are made up of
human beings. One would not expect that principle to be
denied by any court and so one would not expect that the
Supreme Court would have occasion to enunciate it in so
many words. But as the decisions we have cited do demon-
strate, courts have occasionally acted as though the experi-
ence of diverse human beings can be eliminated from a jury,
and the Supreme Court has accordingly had to vindicate the
essential requirement of diversity of humans.
“Not one of these cases formulates a rule regarding how
individuals in the venire pool should use their life experiences
if seated on a jury,” the dissent observes. Exactly so. We did
not seek or set a rule as to how jurors should use their life
experiences. We are declaring that the established constitu-
tional functions of a jury forbids the elimination of such expe-
riences.
[7] Why did such exclusion do injury to the defendants in
these cases? The defendants obtained reversals of their con-
victions not because the rights of fellow citizens had been vio-
lated but because they, the defendants, had been deprived.
That deprivation was deprivation of the diversity of human
experience to which the defendants were entitled and which
is the governing principle here.
As the Supreme Court held:
7464 TAYLOR v. SISTO
AEDPA does not ‘require state and federal courts to
wait for some nearly identical factual pattern before
a legal rule must be applied.’ Carey v. Musladin, 549
U.S. 70, 81 (2006) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judg-
ment). Nor does AEDPA prohibit a federal court
from finding an application of a principle unreason-
able when it involves a set of facts ‘different from
those of the case in which the principle was
announced.’ Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63, 76
(2003).
Panetti, 551 U.S. at 953.
Because we grant Taylor’s petition based on his challenge
to the preinstruction, we do not reach Taylor’s additional
claims.
The judgement of the district court is REVERSED and the
case REMANDED with direction to the district court to issue
a writ of habeas corpus.
IKUTA, Circuit Judge, dissenting:
Once again, this court disregards both the language of the
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”)
and the Supreme Court’s repeated direction not to grant
habeas petitions unless the state court’s adjudication of the
petitioner’s claim “resulted in a decision that was contrary to,
or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established
Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the
United States,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1).
In this case, the trial court instructed prospective jurors to
put their biases and prejudices into a metaphorical “box” out-
side the courtroom, and to use only their common sense while
acting as jurors. Taylor’s counsel did not object to this
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7465
instruction. On appeal, Taylor claimed that the instruction
violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury because the
instruction denied him the “common-sense judgment of a
jury” of his peers by requiring the jurors to ignore their life
experiences. The California Court of Appeal held that “the
instruction, although a bit odd, did not create a jury of ‘auto-
matic robots with sterilized minds,’ ” and did not vitiate the
trial court’s reasonable doubt instruction to the jurors, which
they are presumed to follow.
It is readily apparent that this decision does not conflict
with any “clearly established” Supreme Court precedent. As
the Supreme Court has repeatedly explained, its precedent is
“clearly established” only if it squarely addresses an issue in
the state case or clearly extends to a similar factual context.
See, e.g., Wright v. Van Patten, 552 U.S. 120, 125 (2008) (per
curiam) (Supreme Court precedent must “squarely address[ ]”
the question at issue); Carey v. Musladin, 549 U.S. 70, 77
(2006) (Supreme Court precedent must “require” the state
court to reach a conclusion); see also Panetti v. Quarterman,
551 U.S. 930, 953 (2007) (Supreme Court precedent must
enunciate a principle that applies in an analogous case).
Although the majority has scoured over a century of
Supreme Court decisions, none of the cases it cites “squarely
address” the question whether the voir dire instruction at issue
here violates the Sixth Amendment, see Van Patten, 552 U.S.
at 125, or announces a principle clearly applicable to this
case, see Panetti, 551 U.S. at 953. All but one of the opinions
cited by the majority address a different question: whether
excluding an identifiable group from the jury pool violates
statutory or constitutional principles.1 The only case not con-
1
J.E.B. v. Ala. ex rel. T.B., 511 U.S. 127, 130-31 (1994) and Ballard v.
United States, 329 U.S. 187, 193 (1946) held that the systematic exclusion
of individuals on the basis of gender from grand and petit juries violated
the equal protection clause and relevant federal statutes, respectively.
Smith v. Texas, 311 U.S. 128, 131-32 (1940) held that a complete absence
7466 TAYLOR v. SISTO
sidering this jury pool issue held that a trial court erred in
instructing jurors in a civil case to rely on the testimony of
expert witnesses, rather than on their own judgment. Head v.
Hargrave, 105 U.S. 45, 50 (1881).
Not one of these cases formulates a rule regarding how
individuals in the venire pool should use their life experiences
if seated on a jury. Nor, as the majority itself acknowledges,
does any case enunciate the so-called “first principle” that
courts may not eliminate “the experience of diverse human
beings” from a jury. Maj. Op. at 7463. While these cases do
contain scattered dicta, broad aphorisms, and general observa-
tions regarding the “kinds of harm that flow from discrimina-
tion in jury selection,” Peters, 407 U.S. at 498, such remarks
do not amount to “clearly established Federal law” on the
Sixth Amendment issue presented here. Under AEDPA’s
“highly deferential standard for evaluating state-court rul-
ings,” Renico v. Lett, No. 09-338, slip op. at 5 (May 3, 2010)
(internal quotation marks omitted), we cannot reverse a state
court’s ruling for being an unreasonable application of infer-
ences drawn from such isolated phrases. See Williams v. Tay-
lor, 529 U.S. 362, 412 (2000) (The phrase “clearly established
Federal law” ”refers to the holdings, as opposed to the dicta,
of this Court’s decisions . . . .”).
Even if the majority’s handful of cases could stand for a
general principle requiring juries to apply “common sense
of African-Americans from grand jury lists violated the defendant’s equal
protection rights. Peters v. Kiff, 407 U.S. 493, 501 (1972) held that the
systematic exclusion of African-Americans from both the grand jury and
the petit jury pools denied the defendant due process. Glasser v. United
States, 315 U.S. 60, 86-87 (1941), superseded on other grounds by rule
as stated in Bourjaily v. United States, 483 U.S. 171, 181 (1987), held that
selecting jurors from membership lists of private organizations would vio-
late a defendant’s constitutional rights. And Thiel v. S. Pac. Co., 328 U.S.
217, 224 (1946) held that a federal court could not exclude daily wage
earners from a jury panel.
TAYLOR v. SISTO 7467
informed by the full range of human experience,” Maj. Op. at
7462, we could still not say that the California Court of
Appeal’s decision here was objectively unreasonable. The
“more general the rule at issue—and thus the greater the
potential for reasoned disagreement among fair-minded
judges—the more leeway [state] courts have in reaching out-
comes in case-by-case determinations.” Lett, slip op. at 8
(alterations in original) (internal quotation marks omitted)
(quoting Yarborough v. Alvarado, 541 U.S. 652, 664 (2004));
see Knowles v. Mirzayance, 129 S. Ct. 1411, 1420 (2009).
Here, the state appellate court reasonably concluded that the
voir dire instruction, read in context, “did not command the
juror to ignore life experience.” Even if this conclusion is
wrong, “a federal habeas court may not issue the writ simply
because that court concludes in its independent judgment that
the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established
federal law erroneously or incorrectly.” Lett, slip op. at 5
(internal quotation marks omitted). AEDPA “demands that
state-court decisions be given the benefit of the doubt.” Id.
(internal quotation marks omitted).
In sum, the majority has strayed far from the Supreme
Court’s AEDPA jurisprudence in granting the writ in this
case. Under the explicit terms of § 2254(d)(1) and the oft-
repeated direction of the Supreme Court, habeas relief is
unauthorized. As a result, I fear this decision is set to join the
long line of Supreme Court reversals of decisions by our court
that decline to take AEDPA seriously. See McDaniel v.
Brown, 130 S. Ct. 665, 666 (2010) (per curiam); Wong v. Bel-
montes, 130 S. Ct. 383, 384 (2009) (per curiam); Hedgpeth v.
Pulido, 129 S. Ct. 530, 530-31 (2008) (per curiam); Kane v.
Garcia Espitia, 546 U.S. 9, 9-10 (2005) (per curiam); Schriro
v. Smith, 546 U.S. 6, 7 (2005) (per curiam); Middleton v.
McNeil, 541 U.S. 433, 436 (2004) (per curiam); Yarborough
v. Gentry, 540 U.S. 1, 5 (2003) (per curiam); Woodford v. Vis-
ciotti, 537 U.S. 19, 20 (2002) (per curiam); Early v. Packer,
537 U.S. 3, 4 (2002) (per curiam); Stewart v. Smith, 536 U.S.
856, 857 (2002) (per curiam). I respectfully dissent.