Larry Devel Stewart v. Tony Trierweiler, Warden

A jury is a black box by design. Courts control the input. Courts respect the output. How a jury turns the one into the other is usually—and intentionally—a mystery. Still, sometimes a record indicates a constitutional violation’s harmful effect on a jury’s output. Those clues cannot be ignored. Everyone agrees that the input in Larry Stewart’s trial violated the Confrontation Clause. The state court erroneously admitted and instructed the jury to consider highly incriminating hearsay statements allegedly made by Stewart’s nontestifying co-defendant. This included statements that she saw Stewart with a gun matching the alleged murder weapon the night before the crime. Given conflicting evidence about the gun, this testimony was critical. At least this jury thought so: the jury specifically asked during deliberations to review the impermissible testimony again and further asked to whom the gun was registered. Applying O’Neal v. McAninch, 513 U.S. 432, 436–438 (1995), the district court retained “grave doubt” about the violation’s “substantial influence” on this jury’s output and granted a conditional writ of habeas corpus. App. 35a–37a. The Sixth Circuit reversed, finding the constitutional error harmless because, in its view, “[t]he admissible evidence offers plenty of support” for a guilty verdict. App. 6a. The questions presented are: 1. Whether federal harmless-error review must focus on “the impact of the thing done wrong” on the