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[DO NOT PUBLISH]
In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Eleventh Circuit
____________________
No. 21-14380
Non-Argument Calendar
____________________
FRANCISCO PALACIOS-BARAS,
Petitioner-Appellant,
versus
WARDEN HANCOCK STATE PRISON,
Respondent-Appellee.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of Georgia
D.C. Docket No. 1:19-cv-04024-AT
____________________
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2 Opinion of the Court 21-14380
Before WILSON, BRASHER, and EDMONDSON, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
Francisco Palacios-Baras (“Petitioner”), a Georgia prisoner
now proceeding with counsel, appeals the district court’s denial of
his
28 U.S.C. § 2254 petition for writ of habeas corpus. Petitioner
seeks to vacate his 2011 Georgia conviction for kidnapping. No re-
versible error has been shown; we affirm.
I.
Briefly stated, Petitioner’s conviction stems from these facts.
As part of an ongoing drug-trafficking investigation, officers ob-
tained warrants to intercept calls to and from three cell-phone
numbers used by Petitioner. Some of the intercepted phone con-
versations led officers to believe that a person had been kidnapped
for ransom. Officers set up surveillance on Petitioner’s home.
When officers executed a traffic stop on two cars seen leaving the
house, they found the kidnapping victim seated in the backseat.
Officers arrested the suspects involved in the traffic stop but were
unable to locate Petitioner. The next day, officers “pinged” the lo-
cation of Petitioner’s cell phone to obtain the phone’s location.
Based on this data, officers were able to locate and arrest Petitioner.
Following a jury trial, Petitioner was convicted of kidnap-
ping and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Petitioner’s convic-
tion was affirmed by the state appellate court. See Deleon-Alvarez
v. State,
751 S.E.2d 497 (Ga. Ct. App. 2013).
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21-14380 Opinion of the Court 3
In 2015, Petitioner filed a counseled petition for a writ of ha-
beas corpus in the state court. There, Petitioner argued -- based on
the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Jones,
565 U.S.
400 (2012) -- that the warrantless GPS monitoring of Petitioner’s
cell-phone location constituted an unlawful search under the
Fourth Amendment.
The state habeas court denied Petitioner relief. The state
habeas court rejected Petitioner’s argument under Jones, conclud-
ing that Jones was distinguishable from the facts of Petitioner’s
case. The state habeas court noted that the critical issue in Jones
was that officers affixed physically a GPS monitoring device to the
defendant’s car: conduct that constituted a “search” because it in-
volved a physical trespass on defendant’s property. In contrast, the
state habeas court explained that Petitioner’s case involved no
physical trespass on Petitioner’s person or car. Instead, officers ob-
tained location information remotely using the internal GPS capa-
bilities of Petitioner’s cell phone. The state habeas court also noted
that the Supreme Court in Jones declined expressly to address
whether obtaining location information “through electronic
means, without an accompanying trespass” constituted a search
under the Fourth Amendment. The state habeas court thus con-
cluded that Jones was inapplicable to Petitioner’s case and provided
no basis for habeas relief. The Supreme Court of Georgia later de-
nied without comment Petitioner’s application for a certificate of
probable cause.
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4 Opinion of the Court 21-14380
Petitioner timely filed the counseled section 2254 federal ha-
beas petition at issue in this appeal. In pertinent part, Petitioner
argued that the state habeas court unreasonably applied established
federal law when it failed to give Petitioner the benefit of the deci-
sion in Jones.
The district court denied Petitioner habeas relief, concluding
that the state habeas court’s decision was a reasonable application
of federal law. The district court, however, granted Petitioner a
certificate of appealability on this issue: whether Petitioner’s
“Fourth Amendment rights were violated under United States v.
Jones,
565 U.S. 400 (2012), in connection with law enforcement of-
ficials’ warrantless use of GPS tracking technology on Petitioner’s
cell phone to locate him.” This appeal followed.
II.
“We review a district court’s decision to grant or deny a ha-
beas petition de novo, including its determination of whether the
state court’s decision was unreasonable.” Cave v. Sec’y, Dep’t of
Corr.,
638 F.3d 739, 743 (11th Cir. 2011).
When the merits of a section 2254 habeas claim have been
already adjudicated in state court, our review is highly deferential
to the state court. See
id. at 744. When -- as in this case -- the state
appellate court affirms without an opinion, we “‘look through’ the
unexplained decision to the last related state-court decision that
does provide a relevant rationale,” and “presume that the
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21-14380 Opinion of the Court 5
unexplained decision adopted the same reasoning.” See Wilson v.
Sellers,
138 S. Ct. 1188, 1192 (2018).
To obtain habeas relief, a petitioner must show that the state
court’s ruling “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable appli-
cation of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Su-
preme Court of the United States; or . . . was based on an unrea-
sonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence pre-
sented in the State court proceeding.” See 28 U.S.C. 2254(d).
A state-court decision is “contrary to” established Supreme
Court precedent (1) “if the state court arrives at a conclusion oppo-
site to that reached by [the Supreme] Court on a question of law”;
or (2) “if the state court decides a case differently than [the Su-
preme] Court has on a set of materially indistinguishable facts.”
Williams v. Taylor,
529 U.S. 362, 412-13 (2000) (O’Connor, J., writ-
ing for the majority). A state court’s decision constitutes an unrea-
sonable application of Supreme Court precedent “if the state court
identifies the correct governing legal principle from [the Supreme]
Court’s decisions but unreasonably applies that principle to the
facts of the prisoner’s case.”
Id. at 413.
The Supreme Court has stressed the distinction between “an
unreasonable application of federal law” and “an incorrect applica-
tion of federal law.” See Renico v. Lett,
559 U.S. 766, 773 (2010)
(emphasis in original) (“This distinction creates ‘a substantially
higher threshold’ for obtaining relief than de novo review.”). In
reviewing a state court’s decision on habeas review, the proper in-
quiry is whether the state court’s application of federal law was
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6 Opinion of the Court 21-14380
“objectively unreasonable,” not whether the state court “applied
clearly established federal law erroneously or incorrectly.”
Id. To
obtain habeas relief, “a state prisoner must show that the state
court’s ruling on the claim being presented in federal court was so
lacking in justification that there was an error well understood and
comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fair-
minded disagreement.” Cave,
638 F.3d at 744 (citing Harrington v.
Richter,
562 U.S. 86, 103 (2011)).
Here, the state habeas court determined reasonably that the
circumstances involved in Jones were materially distinguishable
from the circumstances involved in Petitioner’s case. In Jones, the
Supreme Court stressed that the officers in that case attached phys-
ically a GPS tracker to the defendant’s car: a circumstance not in-
volved in Petitioner’s case. See Jones,
565 U.S. at 404 (“It is im-
portant to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Govern-
ment physically occupied private property for the purpose of ob-
taining information.”);
id. at 406-07 (noting that the Fourth Amend-
ment has historically been concerned with government trespass
upon “persons, houses, papers, and effects”). The Supreme Court
also declined expressly to address whether collecting location in-
formation via electronic monitoring absent a physical trespass --
like the officers did in Petitioner’s case -- would violate the Fourth
Amendment. See Jones,
565 U.S. at 412.
To extend a precedent is more and different from following
a precedent. We cannot conclude that the state habeas court’s de-
termination that Jones offered no basis for habeas relief in
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21-14380 Opinion of the Court 7
Petitioner’s case was either contrary to, or an unreasonable appli-
cation of, clearly established Supreme Court precedent. We affirm
the district court’s denial of Petitioner’s
28 U.S.C. § 2254 petition.
AFFIRMED.
