Kendall Streb v. United States

The “reasonable jurists” test was created only as a threshold to discourage frivolous habeas appeals. It was never intended as a sky-reaching wall over which only a handful of certificate-of-appealability applicants surmount. Statutorily, 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c) nowhere suggests habeas appeals are to be the exception, not the norm. This Court should correct circuits’ pattern refusals to issue COAs, and establish clearly how to go about “demonstrating” that “reasonable jurists” exist who would find an issue “debatable” or deserving of “encouragement to proceed further.” The circuits’ unfaithfulness to the test raises the first question. The second question is also of national importance, and is the issue for which a COA was sought: I. Is the “reasonable jurists” test being administered faithfully and consistently in circuits such as the Fourth, in which COA applications have been denied over 8,400 times since 1996, while less than 100 have been granted; or, in the Eighth, which has only granted 109 COAs between January 2015 and January 2025; or, in the Sixth, which has granted just 427 COAs in 2,372 cases in that same time frame? II. Do this Court’s holdings in plea bargaining precedents Lafler, Frye and Padilla dictate that federal criminal defense attorneys should provide Sentencing Guideline calculations when relaying plea offers to clients, in order to avoid being ineffective under Strickland?