In Borden v. Allen, No. 09-14322 (July 12, 2011), the Court denied habeas relief to an Alabama death row inmate convicted of 1993 murders.
The Court agreed with Alabama courts that at the State post-conviction stage, Borden failed to adequately allege facts supporting his ineffective assistance of counsel claim at his state trial. The Court found that “nowhere” had Borden pled facts that would tend to show that he was prejudiced by his counsel’s allegedly deficient performance. The Court treated the dismissal by Alabama courts of Borden’s post-conviction proceedings as the equivalent of a determination on the merits, and it deferred to that determination as not unreasonable under AEDPA standards.
