Issue: What overarching issue was the court addressing or resolving (one questions not a paragraph just one sentence encapsulating)

Facts: What are the facts that the court described and cared about?

facts section should only include the actual facts of the case.

Rule of Law: what amendment? what italicized case was used? and why they are used

Application- how did the court apply the rule to the facts?

*application section should be how the Court applied the facts to the law

Conclusion: what result did the court reach and WHY?

HINTON v. ALABAMA

In Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), we held that a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel is violated if his trial attorney's performance falls below an objective standard of resonableness and if there is a resonable probability that the result of the trial would have been different absent the deficient act or omission. Anthony Ray Hinton, an inmate on Alabama's death row, asks us to decide whether the Alabama courts correctly applied Stricland to his case. We conclude that they did not and hold that Hinton's trial attorney rendered constiutionally deficient performance. We vacate the lower court's judgment and remand the case reconsideration fo whether the attorney's deficient performance was prejudicial.

In February 1985, a restaurant manager in Birmingham was shot to death in the course of an after-hours robbery of his restaurant. A second manager was murdered during a very similar robbery of another restaurantin July. Then, later in July, a restaurant managernamed Smotherman survived another similar robbery-shooting. During each crime, the robber fired two .38 caliber bullets; all six bullets were recovered by police investigators. Smotherman described his assailant to the police, and when the police showed him a photographic array, he picked out Hinton's picture.

The police arrested Hinton and recovered from his house a .38-caliber revolver belonging to his mother, who shared the house with him. After analyzing the six bullets fired during the three crimes and test-firing the revolver, examiners at the State's Department of Forensic Sciences concluded that the six bullets had all been fired from the same gun: the revolver found at Hinton's house. Hinton was charged with two counts of capital murder for the killings during the first two robberies. He was not charged in connection with the third robbery (that is, the Smotherman robbery).

At trial, the State's strategy was to link Hinton to the Smotherman robbery through eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence about the bullets fired at Smotherman and then to persuade the jury that, in light of the similarity of the three crimes and forensic analysis of the bullets and the Hinton revolver,Hinton must alsohave committed the two murders. Smotherman identified Hinton as the man who robbed his restaurant and tried to kill him, and two other witnesses provided testimony that tended to link Hinton to the Smotherman robbery. Hinton maintained that he was innocent and that Smotherman had misidentified him. In support of that defense, Hinton presented witnesses who testified in support of his alibi that he was at work at a warehouse at the time of the Smotherman robbery.

At trial, the State's strategy was to link Hinton to the Smotherman robbery through eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence about the bullets fired at Smotherman and then to persuade the jury that, in light of the similarity of the three crimes and forensic analysis of the bullets and the Hinton revolver, Hinton must also have committed the two murders. Smotherman identified Hinton as the man who robbed his restaurant and tried to kill him, and two other witnesses provided testimony that tended to link Hinton to the Smotherman robbery. Hinton maintained that he was innocent and that Smotherman had misidentified him. In support of that defense, Hinton presented witnesses who testified in support of his alibi that he was at work at a warehouse at the time of the Smother-man robbery