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SAMUEL FIELDS,
Petitioner-Appellant,
v.
SCOTT JORDAN, Warden,
Respondent-Appellee.
   No. 17-5065
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.