Roderick Napoleon Harris v. Eric Guerrero, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division

Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), held that a defendant receives ineffective assistance of counsel when counsel’s performance “fell below an objective standard of reasonableness” and the deficient performance prejudiced the defense. Courts must compare counsel’s conduct to the “prevailing professional norms,” not merely accept counsel’s after-the-fact justification for why their challenged conduct was reasonable. Id. at 687–90. As Justice Alito emphasized, “[i]t is the responsibility of the courts to determine the nature of the work that a defense attorney must do in a capital case in order to meet the obligations imposed by the Constitution.” Bobby v. Van Hook, 558 U.S. 4, 14 (2009) (Alito, J., concurring). The questions presented are:

1. Whether Strickland requires a habeas court to identify and apply the prevailing professional norms in order to determine whether trial counsel’s performance at trial was constitutionally deficient.

2. Whether a habeas court may defer to trial counsel’s post-hoc explanation for their performance at trial in determining whether their conduct was constitutionally deficient.

3. Whether the Fifth Circuit erred by applying the Arizona weighing framework described in Thornell v. Jones, 602 U.S. 154 (2024), in determining whether counsel’s introduction of stun-belt evidence was prejudicial under Strickland instead of Texas’s different non-weighing capital scheme. -i-