On Petition for Rehearing En Banc
United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky at Pikeville.
No. 7:15-cv-00038—Karen K. Caldwell, District Judge.
Argued En Banc: June 14, 2023
Decided and Filed: November 3, 2023
Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; BATCHELDER, MOORE, CLAY, GIBBONS,
GRIFFIN, KETHLEDGE, STRANCH, BUSH, LARSEN, NALBANDIAN,
READLER, MURPHY, DAVIS, and MATHIS, Circuit Judges.
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OPINION
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MURPHY, Circuit Judge. A state jury convicted Samuel Fields of breaking into an
elderly woman’s home, slashing her throat, and stabbing a knife through her head. The police
found Fields next to the woman’s body, and he confessed to killing her. At trial, the prosecution
argued that Fields got into the woman’s home by unscrewing a porch window with a certain
knife that was admitted into evidence; the defense countered that Fields could not have
conducted this feat because he was intoxicated at the time of the crime. During deliberations, the
jury used this knife to unscrew the screws on a jury-room cabinet. It found Fields guilty and
sentenced him to death. Fields later alleged that the jury’s “experiment” with the knife violated
the Constitution. The Kentucky Supreme Court disagreed, and a federal district court denied
Fields habeas relief.
Fields renews this jury-experiment claim, among others, on appeal. For well over a
century, lower courts have debated when jury experiments of this type violate state or federal
law. But one court has yet to enter this debate: the U.S. Supreme Court. That fact dooms
Fields’s claim in these proceedings. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
(AEDPA), we may not grant habeas relief unless a state court has unreasonably applied “clearly
established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court[.]” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1).
Because the Court has not identified any principles to distinguish proper from improper jury
experiments, Fields cannot show that the experiment in his case violated “clearly established”
law from the Supreme Court. His other claims also cannot overcome AEDPA’s standards. We
thus affirm the denial of habeas relief. |