Martin James Kipp v. Ron Broomfield, Acting Warden

At Martin Kipp’s capital trial, the prosecutor presented evidence that Kipp worshipped Satan and concluded his penalty-phase closing by asserting that Kipp “has murder in his heart, has Satan [in] his soul.” After three days of deliberations, the jurors voted for death only after one of them brought a Bible into the jury room and read several passages from it to the others, including the phrase, “an eye for an eye.” Eight of the jurors self-identified as Christian. The question presented is: Whether clearly established federal law requires that a habeas petitioner’s claim that his constitutional rights were violated because a juror read passages from the Bible to other jurors during capital-sentencing deliberations be analyzed under the presumed prejudice rule of Mattox v. United States, 146 U.S. 140, 150 (1892), and Remmer v. United States, 347 U.S. 227, 229 (1954), because the Bible-reading is an impermissible external influence on the jury’s deliberations and verdict.