Lockyer v. Andrade

Lockyer v. Andrade
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 5, 2002 Decided March 5, 2003
Full case name	Bill Lockyer, Attorney General of California, v. Leandro Andrade
Citations	538 U.S. 63 (more) 123 S. Ct. 1166; 155 L. Ed. 2d 144
Case history
Prior	Defendant convicted, Los Angeles County Superior Court; conviction affirmed, California Court of Appeal. Then defendant filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. district court for the Central District of California. The petition was denied, but the decision was reversed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Andrade v. Att'y Gen., 270 F.3d 743 (9th Cir. 2001). The Supreme Court granted certiorari, 535 U.S. 969 (2002).
Holding
It is clearly established federal law that sentence imposed under California's three strikes law is not cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy David Souter · Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer
Case opinions
Majority	O'Connor, joined by Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas
Dissent	Souter, joined by Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. VIII; 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1); Cal. Penal Code § 667

Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003),^[1] decided the same day as Ewing v. California (a case with a similar subject matter),^[2] held that there would be no relief by means of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from a sentence imposed under California's three strikes law as a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments. Relying on the reasoning of Ewing and Harmelin v. Michigan,^[3] the Court ruled that because no "clearly established" law held that a three-strikes sentence was cruel and unusual punishment, the 50-years-to-life sentence imposed in this case was not cruel and unusual punishment.