686
Syllabus
final argument, did not subject the State's death penalty call to meaningful adversarial testing; and that the state court's adjudication of respondent's claim was therefore an unreasonable application of the clearly established law announced in Strickland.
Held: Respondent's claim was governed by Strickland, and the state court's decision neither was "contrary to," nor involved "an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law" under § 2254(d)(1). Pp. 693-702.
(a) Section 2254(d)(1)'s "contrary to" and "unreasonable application" clauses have independent meaning. A federal habeas court may grant relief under the former clause if the state court applies a rule different from the governing law set forth in this Court's cases, or if it decides a case differently than this Court has done on a set of materially indistinguishable facts. Williams v. Taylor, 529 U. S. 362, 405-406. The federal court may grant relief under the latter clause if the state court correctly identifies the governing legal principle from this Court's decisions but unreasonably applies it in the particular case. Id., at 407-410. Such application must be objectively unreasonable, which is different from incorrect. To satisfy Strickland's two-part test for evaluating claims that counsel performed so incompetently that a defendant's sentence or conviction should be reversed, the defendant must prove that counsel's representation fell below an objective reasonableness standard and that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's un-professional error, the proceeding's result would have been different. In Cronic, this Court identified three situations in which it is possible to presume prejudice to the defense. Respondent argues that his claim fits within the exception for cases where "counsel entirely fails to subject the prosecution's case to meaningful adversarial testing," 466 U. S., at 659 (emphasis added), because his counsel failed to mount a case for life imprisonment after the prosecution introduced evidence in the sentencing hearing and gave a closing statement. Under Cronic, the attorney's failure to test the prosecutor's case must be complete. Here, respondent argues not that his counsel failed to oppose the prosecution throughout the sentencing proceeding, but that he failed to do so at specific points. The challenged aspects of counsel's performance— failing to adduce mitigating evidence and waiving closing argument— are plainly of the same ilk as other specific attorney errors subject to Strickland's performance and prejudice components. See, e. g., Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U. S. 168, 184. Because the state court correctly identified Strickland's principles as those governing the analysis of respondent's claim, there is no merit in his contention that the state
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