David Harris Miller v. United States

Question One In United States v. Gonzalez-Lopez, 548 U.S. 140 (2006), this Court held that the erroneous deprivation of a criminal defendant’s chosen counsel is structural error requiring reversal without any showing of prejudice. The deprivation in that case was caused by the trial court. Here, the deprivation was engineered by the prosecution, which obtained a pretrial restraint of the assets petitioner needed to retain his chosen counsel by presenting both a grand jury and a Farmer hearing with an indictment charging a money-laundering conspiracy that was supported by no evidence of petitioner’s agreement or knowledge. The question presented is: Whether the structural-error rule of Gonzalez-Lopez applies when the Government—rather than the trial court—engineers the loss of a defendant’s counsel of choice through a pretrial asset restraint resting on a charge the grand jury was given no evidence to support, and whether Kaley v. United States, 571 U.S. 320 (2014), forecloses any remedy for that deprivation. Question Two Whether a court of appeals satisfies 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c), as construed in Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322 (2003), mA Buck v. Davis, 580 U.S. 100 (2017), when it denies a certificate of appealability in a single sentence and without analysis, in a case where the district court rejected a freestanding structural-error claim by applying the prejudice standard of Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), and without addressing controlling circuit precedent.