Roderick Leshun Rankin v. Dexter Payne, Director, Arkansas Department of Correction

Over thirteen years after Roderick LeShun Rankin was convicted of three murders and sentenced to death, the pastor of his deceased brother Rodney disclosed for the first time that Rodney had made detailed confessions only days after the crime. A habeas court may reach the merits of a procedurally defaulted claim when the petitioner proves his innocence with “new reliable evidence . . . that was not presented at trial.” Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298, 324 (1995). Although a majority of circuits hold that Schlup evidence is “new” when it was “not presented at trial,” id., the Eighth Circuit limits “new” evidence to that which “was unavailable at trial and could not have been discovered through the exercise of due diligence.” The pastor’s disclosures were not “new,” the court below reasoned, because Rodney told his brother before trial that he committed the murders and thus conferred to Rankin the “factual basis” of the pastor’s later disclosures. The question presented is: May evidence of innocence be “new” under Schlup even if it was available at the time of trial?

Trial counsel admits that he never investigated Rodney’s guilt even though he believed that Rodney was the true perpetrator. Counsel thereby failed to investigate and develop evidence of Rodney’s threats to kill one of the decedents (the newly estranged mother of his two children) as well as physical evidence that fit more closely with Rodney than with Rankin. As an alternative to its Schlup ruling, the Eighth Circuit held that counsel performed reasonably “given the lack of evidence pointing to Rodney.” The question presented is: When assessing trial counsel’s performance, did the Eighth Circuit fail to consider the totality of evidence from counsel’s perspective at the time?

The Eighth Circuit held that the Arkansas Supreme Court reasonably adjudicated the merits of Rankin’s claim under Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), when, five years before Atkins’ issuance, the court credited an IQ score of 72 over an earlier IQ score of 66, determined that Rankin was not “mentally retarded” under state law, and rejected Rankin’s argument that the court should “‘reduce’ these scores by the possible three point margin of error or ‘average’ them together in some way.” Rankin v. State, 948 S.W.2d 397, 404 (Ark. 1997). The Eighth Circuit also ruled that AEDPA bars any post-Atkins evidence. The question presented is: Should the Court hold this case pending its decision in Hamm v. Smith, No. 24- 872, in which the Court is considering “whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing an Atkins claim”?