Boies Schiller Flexner pro bono client, Michael DeLeon, was released from prison on Thanksgiving Day, concluding the firm’s six-year pro bono representation of Mr. DeLeon.
In 2008, when DeLeon was seventeen, the police searched DeLeon’s mother’s house and told his mother that DeLeon was under arrest and that she needed to bring him to the police station. At the police station, DeLeon was interviewed without Miranda warnings and confessed to attending a party with a group of boys and shooting a gun in the air. The trial court recognized that DeLeon’s public defender used the wrong legal standard to apply Miranda, and denied DeLeon’s motion to suppress the confession. Because another member of DeLeon’s group had fired the gun into the party crowd and killed someone, DeLeon was charged and convicted of second-degree “felony” murder and was sentenced to 40 years to life.
BSF filed a pro bono federal habeas petition on DeLeon’s behalf in 2014. The petition argued that DeLeon’s Miranda rights were violated by the introduction of his confession without considering his age, based on J.D.B. v. North Carolina, 564 U.S. 261 (2011), which held that age must be considered in an evaluation of whether Miranda applies. BSF also argued that DeLeon’s public defender provided ineffective assistance of counsel when she applied the incorrect legal standard in DeLeon’s motion to suppress the confession.
Under current Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), it is notoriously difficult to succeed on a habeas petition. Indeed, in 2015, the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt lamented that “constitutional rulings by state courts” had become “nearly unreviewable by the federal judiciary.” But District Court Judge Dolly Gee granted BSF’s habeas petition on both claims. In determining the applicable standard of review, she recognized that DeLeon’s petition presented one of “those rare cases when a state court decides a federal claim in a way that is ‘contrary to’ clearly established Supreme Court precedent.” She then ordered California to release or retry Mr. DeLeon. After a California state court judge held that the state did not have probable cause to detain Mr. DeLeon without his unconstitutionally-taken confession, California released Mr. DeLeon on Thanksgiving Day 2020.
Shira Liu, lead BSF lawyer for Mr. DeLeon, commented: “Mr. DeLeon suffered a great injustice when he was convicted based on statements he made to the police as a juvenile without Miranda warnings. We are delighted that Mr. DeLeon has been released after being incarcerated for twelve years starting at the age of seventeen, and will now be able to live his life as a free man.” Liu also thanked BSF for providing pro bono support to the case for free for more than six years, funding attorney and paralegal time to prepare the habeas petition and reply brief, as well as briefing in response to the State’s motion to dismiss and two sets of recommendations by the magistrate judge.
Mr. DeLeon was also brilliantly represented by Laura Kelly in his appeals in California State Court and by Marc Rothenberg in juvenile court proceedings subsequent to the habeas grant.