Brecht v. Abrahamson
Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.
Status
More on how this was screened
Three earlier opinions that questioned or confined its test are listed below; later Supreme Court decisions preserved the Brecht standard. Whitmore v. Kemna questioned whether AEDPA abrogated the need for a separate Brecht analysis after a state court performed Chapman review, but declined to decide the issue. Gutierrez v. McGinnis and Zappulla v. New York then read Mitchell v. Esparza to confine Brecht's standalone test when the state court had reviewed harmlessness. The Supreme Court subsequently held in Fry v. Pliler that Brecht applies whether or not the state court recognized the error, and clarified in Brown v. Davenport that a habeas petitioner must satisfy both Brecht and AEDPA. The other reviewed opinions followed or applied Brecht, reported these or Brecht's own historical acts, rejected adverse arguments, or directed the nearby treatment language at other authorities.
7,021 later cases cite Brecht v. Abrahamson; 188 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.
Relying on Brecht v. Abrahamson?
This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.
Treatments
Limited
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The Second Circuit read Mitchell v. Esparza to confine Brecht as the governing lens when a state court expressly performed harmless-error review, limiting Brecht's independent test to situations the court left unresolved where the state court had not reviewed harmlessness.
Gutierrez v. McGinnis · Second Circuit · filed
Thus AEDPA may not overrule Brecht directly, but the statute’s implications do call Brecht’s, continuing viability into question. ... In its recent decision of Mitchell v. Esparza, 540 U.S. 12, 124 S.Ct. 7, 157 L.Ed.2d 263 (2003) (per curiam), however, the Supreme Court implicitly rejected Brecht as the proper lens for examining the harmlessness of constitutional errors on collateral review, at least where the state explicitly adjudicated a federal claim on harmless error grounds. ... Mitchell signals, and we therefore hold, that when a state court explicitly conducts harmless error review of a constitutional error, a habeas court must evaluate whether the state unreasonably applied Chapman. We do not presently reach the issue of whether or how to apply Brecht where the state court has not engaged in harmless error review, as, of course, those facts are not before us.
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The Second Circuit followed Mitchell v. Esparza and confined Brecht's independent harmless-error test where a state appellate court had reviewed harmlessness.
Zappulla v. New York · Second Circuit · filed
We have previously noted that it remains “an open question in this circuit whether, following the passage of AEDPA, the applicable test on habeas review of a state conviction remains the one set forth in Brecht, or instead should be a determination [of] whether the state court’s decision was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of Chapman.” ... This case requires us to address what standard governs our review of a district court’s determination that a constitutional error was harmless following the passage of AEDPA. ... We follow, as we must, the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Mitchell to hold that, in reviewing a state court’s harmless error determination, we only may reverse determinations thaf are objectively unreasonable.
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Questioned
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The Eighth Circuit questioned whether AEDPA abrogated the requirement to conduct a separate Brecht analysis when the state court had already performed Chapman review, but found it unnecessary to decide because the error was harmless under either approach.
Whitmore v. Kemna · Eighth Circuit · filed
We are not convinced that the AEDPA did not abrogate the requirement that federal habeas courts conduct a harmless error analysis under Brecht in situations such as the one before us, where the state court already has conducted a Chapman harmless error analysis, that is, where the claim has been “adjudicated on the merits” in state court. ... But we find it unnecessary in this case to squarely address whether Brecht applies because the result here is the same under either analysis: the state court correctly found that any Doyle error was harmless to Whitmore.
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