Cite as: 534 U. S. 362 (2002)
Kennedy, J., dissenting
acceptance of these two premises should lead it to conclude that Lee's violation of the Rule was an adequate state ground for the Missouri court's decision.
Yet the Court deems Lee's default inadequate because, it says, to the extent feasible under the circumstances, he substantially complied with the Rule's essential requirements. Ante, at 385. These precise terms have not been used in the Court's adequacy jurisprudence before, and it is necessary to explore their implications. The argument is not that Missouri has no interest in enforcing compliance with the Rule in general, but rather that it had no interest in enforcing full compliance in this particular case. This is so, the Court holds, because the Rule's essential purposes were substantially served by other procedural devices, such as opening statement, voir dire, and Lee's testimony on the stand. These procedures, it is said, provided the court with the information the Rule requires the motion itself to contain. Ante, at 382-385. So viewed, the Court's substantial-compliance terminology begins to look more familiar: It simply paraphrases the flawed analytical approach first proposed by the Court in Henry v. Mississippi, 379 U. S. 443 (1965), but not further ratified or in fact used to set aside a procedural rule until today.
Before Henry, the adequacy inquiry focused on the general legitimacy of the established procedural rule, overlooking its violation only when the rule itself served no legitimate interest. See, e. g., Douglas v. Alabama, supra, at 422-423; Davis v. Wechsler, supra, at 24. Henry was troubling, and much criticized, because it injected an as-applied factor into the equation. See, e. g., R. Fallon, D. Meltzer, & D. Shapiro, Hart and Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System 584 (4th ed. 1996) (hereinafter Hart & Wechsler) (calling this element of Henry "radical"); 16B Wright & Miller § 4028, at 394 (arguing that Henry's approach—under which "state procedural rules may accomplish forfeiture only if necessary to further a legitimate state interest in the
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