Stumpf v. Houk

The majority has resurrected a new substantive right of their own invention, which made its first appearance in Stumpf v. Mitchell, 367 F.3d 594 (6th Cir.2004), vacated by Bradshaw v. Stumpf, 545 U.S. 175, 125 S.Ct. 2398, 162 L.Ed.2d 143 (2005), and apparently had all along been lurking somewhere within the Fourteenth Amendment. In its current iteration, the new right protects a convicted murderer from being sentenced to death where mitigating evidence (i.e., evidence that does not undermine the murder conviction itself but that might have counseled towards a more lenient sentence) discovered…