Adam Carey v. United States

The structural-error doctrine categorically exempts a narrow class of constitutional errors from harmless-error review. Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279 (1991). When such an error is preserved and raised on direct appeal, automatic reversal follows without inquiry into prejudice. Neder v. United States, 527 U.S. 1 (1999). In Weaver v. Massachusetts, 582 U.S. 286 (2017), this Court identified three rationales that have explained why certain errors are structural, including that some errors’ effects are “too hard to measure.” Id. at 295. These rationales were offered as description, not as a test for determining whether a novel error qualifies as structural. But lower courts, reading Weaver’s explanatory framing as prescriptive, have used the measurability rationale to deny structural-error status to errors whose effects they found quantifiable. The result is reasoning that treats the ability to perform harmless-error analysis as proof that the analysis is reliable, when the structural-error doctrine’s measurability inquiry asks not whether such analysis can be performed but whether the nature of the error renders it a valid method of assessment. This inversion, which Weaver’s explanatory framing invited, has divided the lower courts. The question presented is: Whether a court of appeals may deny structural-error status to a trial error on the ground that harmless-error analysis of it is possible and its effects quantifiable, when the structural-error doctrine asks not whether such analysis can be performed but whether the nature of the error renders it reliable, and whether Weaver v. Massachusetts should be clarified to foreclose that reasoning, which produced in this case harmless-error review of an error that exposed a deliberating jury to excluded evidence on a central disputed issue without curative instruction.