Lee v. Kemna, 534 U.S. 362, 33 (2002)

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394

LEE v. KEMNA

Kennedy, J., dissenting

actual circumstances of application to the very case before the court"—"unduly subordinates state interests"); cf. ante, at 376 ("There are . . . exceptional cases in which exorbitant application of a generally sound rule renders the state ground inadequate"). The petitioner in Henry had defaulted his Fourth Amendment claim in state court by failing to lodge a contemporaneous objection to the admission of the contested evidence. Despite conceding the legitimate state interest in enforcing this common rule, the Court vacated the state-court judgment, proposing that the default may have been inadequate because the rule's "purpose . . . may have been substantially served by petitioner's motion at the close of the State's evidence asking for a directed verdict." Henry v. Mississippi, supra, at 448. The suggestion, then, was that a violation of a rule serving a legitimate state interest may be ignored when, in the peculiar circumstances of a given case, the defendant utilized some other procedure serving the same interest.

For all Henry possessed in mischievous potential, however, it lacked significant precedential effect. Henry itself did not hold the asserted state ground inadequate; instead it remanded for the state court to determine whether "petitioner's counsel deliberately bypassed the opportunity to make timely objection in the state court." 379 U. S., at 449-453. The cornerstone of that analysis, the deliberate-bypass standard of Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391, 426-434 (1963), later was limited to its facts in Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72, 87-88 (1977), and then put to rest in Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U. S., at 750. Subsequent cases maintained the pre-Henry focus on the general validity of the challenged state practice, either declining to cite Henry or framing its holding in innocuous terms. See, e. g., James v. Kentucky, 466 U. S., at 349; Monger v. Florida, 405 U. S. 958 (1972); see also Hart & Wechsler 585-586 (describing the "[d]emise of Henry"); 16B Wright & Miller § 4020, at 291 ("Later decisions, over a period now measured in decades,

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