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On Cone's motion for postconviction relief, the state trial court correctly recognized Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668 (1984) and the then-recent decision in Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U. S. 168 (1986), as establishing the governing rule. See Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law 5-6, J. A. 84. The court also referred to Baxter v. Rose, 523 S. W. 2d 930 (Tenn. 1975), a pre-Strickland case in which the Tennessee Supreme Court followed the tests adopted in the Sixth and D.C. Circuits. See id., at 936. These pre-Stricklandcircuit cases are not significantly different from Strickland on the performance standard. See Strickland, supra, at 696-697. The trial court found that counsel's performance was not deficient. Findings, supra, at 6, J. A. 84. The court therefore did not need to address the prejudice component, see Strickland, supra, at 697, and it did not.
On appeal, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals cited Strickland as the standard for the prejudice requirement. Cone v. State, 747 S. W. 2d 353, 356 (1987). The court found both that counsel was not deficient and that "the findings of guilt and the imposition of the death penalty were based upon the facts and the law--not by shortcomings of counsel." Id., at 357-358. Although not expressly stated, it is evident that the state court believed that the Strickland prejudice requirement applies to the circumstances of the present case.
Strickland established a general rule that "actual ineffectiveness claims alleging a deficiency in attorney performance are subject to a general requirement that the defendant affirmatively prove prejudice." 466 U. S., at 693. Prejudice is defined as "a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different." Id., at 694. Exceptions to this requirement are few and far between. There is a small class of cases where a showing of a different outcome is insufficient. SeeNix v. Whiteside, 475 U. S. 157, 175 (1986) (client perjury); Lockhart v. Fretwell, 506 U. S. 364, 370-371 (1993) (legal argument now known to be erroneous); Strickland, 466 U. S., at 695 (jury nullification). The common principle underlying these cases is that a client has no right to a lawyer who will cause the system to malfunction in his favor.
The other group of cases are those where a showing of a different result is not required. They include complete denial of counsel, conflict of interest, and state interference with counsel. Strickland, supra, at 692. Claims that the attorney has erred are different in kind, not just in degree, from those identified as exceptions to the general rule. The Strickland Court flatly refused to classify attorney errors "according to the likelihood of causing prejudice." Id., at 693. Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U. S. 168, 184 (1986), the last pertinent Supreme Court precedent before the state court decision in this case, applied the two-part Strickland standard to a case where defense counsel did not present any evidence in mitigation other than "a simple plea for mercy from petitioner himself." Id., at 186. Far from being "clearly established" that the prejudice prong of Strickland did not apply to an attorney's considered decision to not introduce mitigating evidence or make a closing argument, it appeared to be clearly established that the requirement did apply.
The status of a rule as not "clearly established" may be confirmed by later cases pointing the other direction. Cf. Lambrix v. Singletary, 520 U. S. 518, 536 (1997) (use of later case to confirm "new rule" status); Caspari v. Bohlen, 510 U. S. 383, 395 (1994) (later cases relevant to "limited extent"). Smith v. Robbins, 528 U. S. 259 (2000) presented a far stronger argument for presumed prejudice than does the present case. Robbins' appellate attorney did not make any argument at all on his behalf. See id., at 265, 267. However important closing argument may be to a penalty trial, waiver of it does not come close to the complete absence of argument in Robbins. Yet the Court rejected a presumption of prejudice and required Robbins to prove it. Id., at 286-287.
No clearly established rule makes an exception to Strickland under the facts of the present case. Strickland's two-prong test is therefore the clearly established law for both the "contrary to" and "unreasonable application" prongs of §2254(d)(1). The state court's decision is not contrary to Strickland. A federal habeas court may not sustain a collateral attack on the state court judgment unless, applyingStrickland's rule to the facts of the present case, a decision against the defendant would be unreasonable.
"Habeas corpus 'is designed to guard against extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems.' " Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U. S. 619, 634 (1993) (emphasis added) (quoting Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307, 332, n. 5 (1979) (Stevens, J., concurring in the judgment)). This Court has said many times that habeas is different from an appeal from the judgment of conviction. See id., at 633 (collecting cases). Its role is "secondary and limited." Ibid. (quoting Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U. S. 880, 887 (1983)). Section 2254(d) recognizes the limited purpose of habeas. When the state courts have considered the appellant's claim, recognized the correct rule of law, applied that rule to the facts of the case, and reached a conclusion within the range of reasonable disagreement, there has been no extreme malfunction of the system.
Although the present case has reached the Supreme Court, most cases do not. In most federal habeas cases, the final decision will be made by a three-judge panel of the court of appeals. When that panel disagrees with the decision of the state court, one of those decisions must be wrong, but no simple rule tells us which one. See supra, at 7. When a federal district or circuit court grants habeas relief to a state prisoner, it might be correcting an erroneous state decision, or it might be erroneously nullifying a correct decision. Seesupra, at 7. In 28 U. S. C. §2254(d)(1), Congress sought to deal with this uncertainty, as well as to expedite the processing of habeas cases. See part I, supra.
As the Williams Court noted, "The term 'unreasonable' is no doubt difficult to define." Williams v. Taylor, 529 U. S. 362, 410 (2000). Some definition is needed, however, if the standard is going to be applied with any degree of uniformity. The definitions must be chosen with care, as some formulations in the courts of appeals, if taken literally, would come close to a judicial repeal of the statute. Tranv.Lindsey, 212 F. 3d 1143, 1153 (CA9 2000), for example, stated that a "firm conviction" that the state court decision was incorrect was sufficient for a collateral attack on a final judgment. Yet the federal court being "convinced" on the merits is exactly the standard theWilliams majority rejected because it would have given "the 1996 amendment no effect whatsoever." 529 U. S., at 403. The addition of the adjective "firm" would give state judgments little additional protection. Cf. Maynard v. Cartwright, 486 U. S. 356, 364 (1988).
Congress deliberately chose the word "unreasonable," see Williams, supra, at 411, and "unreasonable" is a strong word. It means "[n]ot guided by reason; irrational or capricious." Black's Law Dictionary 1537 (7th ed. 1999). The Williams Court's rejection of a subjective standard for an objective one should not be misinterpreted as a watering down of this stringent limitation. "Objective legal reasonableness" is the criterion of the qualified immunity line of cases, see Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U. S. 299, 306 (1996); Harlowv.Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800, 818 (1982), yet that standard "provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law." Malley v. Briggs, 475 U. S. 335, 341 (1986). Similarly, §2254(d) is a "new, highly deferential standard for evaluating state-court rulings." Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U. S. 320, 333, n. 7 (1997) (emphasis added).
There are other connections between §2254(d) and the immunity cases. The statutory term "clearly established" appears to be lifted from them. See Scheidegger, Habeas Corpus, Relitigation, and the Legislative Power, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 888, 947 (1998). Both rules are intended to enable courts to more quickly dispose of suits against government officials. See Behrens, 516 U. S., at 305-306;Williams, 529 U. S., at 404; see also part I, supra.
United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897 (1984) similarly adopted an objective reasonableness test for suppression of evidence obtained with a search warrant, citing Harlow. Id., at 922-923. Applying the general rule of probable cause to the specific facts of the individual case, the fruits of the search will not be suppressed if the evidence before the issuing magistrate is "sufficient to create disagreement among thoughtful and competent judges as to the existence of probable cause." Id., at 926. There is no inconsistency between the objectivity requirement that Williams found in this statute and the "highly deferential" characterization of it in Lindh. In the Senate floor debate on §2254(d), both the principal sponsor and the principal opponent referred to Leon in their discussion of the meaning of the "unreasonable application" prong. See 141 Cong. Rec. 15,064, col. 2 (1995) (statement of Sen. Hatch); id., at 15,059, col. 3 (statement of Sen. Biden).
Saucier v. Katz, 533 U. S. 194, 150 L. Ed. 2d 272, 121 S. Ct. 2151 (2001) illustrates the use of an objective standard of reasonableness in evaluating an application to specific facts of a general rule of law with a "sometimes 'hazy border.' " Id., 150 L. Ed. 2d, at 284, 121 S. Ct., at 2158. "The question is what the officer reasonably understood his powers and responsibilities to be, when he acted, under clearly established standards." Id., 150 L. Ed. 2d, at 285, 121 S. Ct., at 2159. A court need not agree with that understanding; "substantial grounds" for the officer's conclusion are sufficient. Id., 150 L. Ed. 2d, at 286, 121 S. Ct., at 2159.
Some applications are patently unreasonable even without a case on or near the point. See United States v. Lanier, 520 U. S. 259, 271 (1997) (selling children into slavery). However, the more general the standard and the further one gets from the core of constitutional rights, the broader the zone of reasonable disagreement.
In Wright v. West, 505 U. S. 277, 308 (1992), Justice Kennedy noted that, in the retroactivity cases, "The comity interest is not, however, in saying that since the question is close the state-court decision ought to be deemed correct because we are in no better position to judge. That would be the real thrust of a principle based on deference." Deference is the principle of the new statute, though. "[I]n both houses of Congress section 2254(d) 'was called a "deference" standard by every member who spoke on the question, opponents as well as supporters.' " Matteo v. Superintendent, 171 F. 3d 877, 890 (CA3 1999) (quoting Scheidegger, supra, 98 Colum. L. Rev., at 945); see 141 Cong. Rec. 15,057, col. 2 (1995) (statement of Sen. Biden); id., at 15,062, col. 3 (statement of Sen. Hatch). Its real thrust is indeed that "State courts, in many respects, are just as good, if not better, than the Federal courts in these areas, just as good." 141 Cong. Rec. 15,062, col 2 (1995) (statement of Sen. Hatch). Congress's concern was primarily with the district and circuit courts rather than this Court, as indicated by the limitation on the definition of clearly established federal law, but the same standard must be applied in cases that arrive here through §2254. This Court retains the authority to review state court decisions de novo under 28 U. S. C. §1257.
Although Williams rejected reference to "all reasonable jurists" as the standard, 529 U. S., at 410, it did not reject the whole Teague line of cases as an analogous inquiry. Indeed, Williams refers to Justice O'Connor's clarification of the Teague line in Wright for its objective standard. See ibid. Butler v. McKellar, 494 U. S. 407, 415 (1990) asked whether the question was "susceptible to debate among reasonable minds . . . ." That remains the standard under Teague, and it translates easily to the reasonableness inquiry required by the new statute, so long as it is understood that the inquiry is an objective one. It is consistent with Harlow, Leon, and their broad latitude for what a reasonable officer could have believed was the limit of his authority.
A standard of susceptibility to debate among reasonable minds is stringent enough, if properly applied, to achieve Congress's objectives, while still allowing relief for those "few indeed . . . whom society has grievously wronged . . . ." Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391, 440-441 (1963), overruled on other grounds, Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U. S. 722, 750 (1991). The frontiers of constitutional criminal procedure have been pushed so far from the original Bill of Rights that any state decision that really did violate a fundamental right, seeRose v. Lundy, 455 U. S. 509, 544 (1982) (Stevens, J., dissenting), would necessarily be outside the zone of reasonable debate. That zone consists entirely of non-fundamental, court-created rules of relatively recent vintage.
When the normal appellate process concludes with a decision within the zone "susceptible to debate among reasonable minds," it has "resulted in a ' "satisfactory conclusion." ' " See Williams, 529 U. S., at 410 (quoting Wright v. West, 505 U. S., at 287, in turn quotingBrown v. Allen, 344 U. S. 443, 463 (1953)). There has been no "extreme malfunction[ ]," see supra, at 19, which would warrant the drastic remedy of collateral attack on a final judgment. The federal district and circuit courts are not "higher" courts above the state courts in the appellate hierarchy. See Scheidegger, supra, 98 Colum. L. Rev., at 898-900. Congress's stringent limitation on habeas is consistent with its policy in other areas of preventing the lower federal courts from exercising de facto appellate jurisdiction over state courts, see id., at 900-903, reserving that role to this Court alone. See Darr v. Burford, 339 U. S. 200, 217 (1950), overruled on other grounds, Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S., at 435.
Before Williams, the First Circuit interpreted the "unreasonable application" prong as authorizing relief when the state court decision "is outside the universe of plausible, credible outcomes." O'Brien v. Dubois, 145 F. 3d 16, 25 (1998). That court has since reaffirmed that the O'Brien formulation is "congruent" with Williams v. Taylor. See Williams v. Matesanz, 230 F. 3d 421, 423 (2000). It is substantially the same as the Butler standard we propose.
The Second Circuit has stated that "to permit habeas relief . . . [s]ome increment of incorrectness beyond error is required," but "that increment need not be great; otherwise, habeas relief would be limited to state court decisions 'so far off the mark as to suggest judicial incompetence.' " Francis S. v. Stone, 221 F. 3d 100, 111 (2000). It is not entirely clear what this opinion means by "not great." If it means that Congress only nudged the benchmark a few millimeters from de novo relitigation, that interpretation cannot be squared with the language, history, or purpose of the statute. As noted, supra, at 20, Congress deliberately chose the strong word "unreasonable." Section 2254(d) was the centerpiece of a landmark reform intended to have a major impact on the way federal courts treat habeas cases. Cases in which a state court judgment is successfully collaterally attacked in federal court should be "few indeed," see supra, at 23, and there is no merit to an objection that the statute will actually limit relief to few cases.
There are reasons other than judicial incompetence why a decision may be so far off the mark as to be unreasonable. As Williamsv.Taylor illustrates, a court's application of a rule may be skewed by a misunderstanding of the rule. "It is impossible to determine . . . the extent to which the Virginia Supreme Court's error with respect to its reading of Lockhart affected its ultimate finding thatWilliamssuffered no prejudice." 529 U. S., at 414. In an overloaded judicial system, it is also possible that an unreasonable application may result from a failure to give the case sufficient attention. Justice Jackson noted nearly half a century ago that "floods of stale, frivolous and repetitious petitions inundate the docket of the lower courts," and "[i]t must prejudice the occasional meritorious application to be buried in a flood of worthless ones." Brown v. Allen, 344 U. S., at 536-537 (opinion concurring in the judgment). The situation has certainly not improved since then. If the inundated state court overlooks the needle in the haystack, see id., at 537, despite the undisputable merit of the petition, then §2254(d)(1) still permits federal habeas relief.
In the present case, the Sixth Circuit made only a terse mention of §2254(d)(1). Cone v. Bell, 243 F. 3d 961, 979 (2001). This mention followed the court's novel and probably erroneous expansion of the "presumed prejudice" cases. See supra, part IV. The question at this point should have been whether, applying both prongs of the clearly established Strickland rule to the facts of this case, a decision against the petitioner was unreasonable, i.e., whether his entitlement to relief was so clear as to not be "susceptible to debate among reasonable minds." For the reasons stated in the state's brief and the briefs of the other amici, the state court decision was reasonable and §2254(d)(1) precludes collateral attack on that judgment.
The decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit should be reversed.
January, 2002
Respectfully submitted,
Kent S. Scheidegger
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