Winston v. Boatwright, No. 10-1156 (7th Cir. 2011)
Annotate this CaseA jury, composed entirely of women, acquitted petitioner on state law charges of second-degree sexual assault by sexual intercourse but found him guilty of unlawful sexual contact with a 15-year-old girl. After exhausting state remedies, he unsuccessfully petitioned for habeas corpus. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. On petitions for habeas corpus claiming ineffective assistance, federal courts defer to counsel's reasonable choices and to the state court's evaluation of that issue 28 U.S.C. 2254(d)(1). The state court found that the acquittal on one count demonstrated that defendant was not prejudiced by his lawyer's striking of male jurors and assumed that, because the lawyer had a strategic reason for his actions, his performance was not constitutionally inadequate. The Seventh Circuit disagreed, stating that "Intentionally violating the Constitution by discriminating against jurors on account of their sex is not consistent with, or reasonable under, prevailing professional norms," but concluded that the error did not merit reversal. It was not outside the boundaries of reasonable differences of opinion, given the state of the law at the time, for those courts to predict that the Supreme Court would apply a harmless-error standard even to intentional Batson violations like the one in this case.
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