Stenson v. Lambert

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that a petitioner’s request for self-representation was equivocal where his “requests for self-representation were concessions that he really did not want to represent himself, but that he felt the court and [defense counsel] were forcing him to do so”
• holding under AEDPA that state court was not objectively unreasonable in excluding claimed mitigating evidence
• holding that state court determination that request to proceed pro se was untimely was not objectively unreasonable under AEDPA as the Supreme Court has never held that Faretta’s “weeks before trial” standard requires courts to grant requests coming on the eve of trial
• noting the court has held on numerous occasions that a complete breakdown of communication may occur even where counsel is providing competent representation, albeit only in “extreme” cases
• “[F]orcing a defendant to go to trial with an attorney with whom he has an irreconcilable conflict amounts to constructive denial of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.”
• finding a defendant’s attempted waiver of counsel invalid where he simultaneously said that he “really [did] not want to proceed without counsel” and believed that the trial judge and his attorney were “forcing” him to represent himself

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).