Source: https://kuwaitifreedom.org/supreme_court_vs_guantanamo_bay_prisoners/rasul_vs_bush_president_of_united_states.php
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 16:31:33+00:00

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(1) The Court rejects respondents' primary submission that these cases are controlled by Eisentrager's holding that a District Court lacked authority to grant habeas relief to German citizens captured by U. S. forces in China, tried and convicted of war crimes by an American military commission headquartered in Nanking, and incarcerated in occupied Germany. Reversing a Court of Appeals judgment finding jurisdiction, the Eisentrager Court found six critical facts: The German prisoners were (a) enemy aliens who (b) had never been or resided in the United States, (c) were captured outside U. S. territory and there held in military custody, (d) were there tried and convicted by the military (e) for offenses committed there, and (f) were imprisoned there at all times. 339 U. S., at 777. Petitioners here differ from the Eisentrager detainees in important respects: They are not nationals of countries at war with the United States, and they deny that they have engaged in or plotted acts of aggression against this country; they have never been afforded access to any tribunal, much less charged with and convicted of wrongdoing; and for more than two years they have been imprisoned in territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control. The Eisentrager Court also made clear that all six of the noted critical facts were relevant only to the question of the prisoners' constitutional entitlement to habeas review. Ibid. The Court's only statement on their statutory entitlement was a passing reference to its absence. Id., at 768. This cursory treatment is explained by the Court's then-recent decision in Ahrens v. Clark, 335 U. S. 188, in which it held that the District Court for the District of Columbia lacked jurisdiction to entertain the habeas claims of aliens detained at Ellis Island because the habeas statute's phrase "within their respective jurisdictions" required the petitioners' presence within the court's territorial jurisdiction, id., at 192. However, the Court later held, in Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 410 U. S. 484, 494-495, that such presence is not "an invariable prerequisite" to the exercise of §2241 jurisdiction because habeas acts upon the person holding the prisoner, not the prisoner himself, so that the court acts "within [its] respective jurisdiction" if the custodian can be reached by service of process. Because Braden overruled the statutory predicate to Eisentrager's holding, Eisentrager does not preclude the exercise of §2241 jurisdiction over petitioners' claims. Pp. 6-11.
Construing all three actions as petitions for writs of habeas corpus, the District Court dismissed them for want of jurisdiction. The court held, in reliance on our opinion in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), that "aliens detained outside the sovereign territory of the United States [may not] invok[e] a petition for a writ of habeas corpus." 215 F. Supp. 2d 55, 68 (DC 2002). The Court of Appeals affirmed. Reading Eisentrager to hold that " 'the privilege of litigation' does not extend to aliens in military custody who have no presence in 'any territory over which the United States is sovereign,' " 321 F. 3d 1134, 1144 (CADC 2003) (quoting Eisentrager, 339 U. S., at 777-778), it held that the District Court lacked jurisdiction over petitioners' habeas actions, as well as their remaining federal statutory claims that do not sound in habeas. We granted certiorari, 540 U. S. 1003 (2003), and now reverse.
Because subsequent decisions of this Court have filled the statutory gap that had occasioned Eisentrager's resort to "fundamentals," persons detained outside the territorial jurisdiction of any federal district court no longer need rely on the Constitution as the source of their right to federal habeas review. In Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 410 U. S. 484, 495 (1973), this Court held, contrary to Ahrens, that the prisoner's presence within the territorial jurisdiction of the district court is not "an invariable prerequisite" to the exercise of district court jurisdiction under the federal habeas statute. Rather, because "the writ of habeas corpus does not act upon the prisoner who seeks relief, but upon the person who holds him in what is alleged to be unlawful custody," a district court acts "within [its] respective jurisdiction" within the meaning of §2241 as long as "the custodian can be reached by service of process." 410 U. S., at 494-495. Braden reasoned that its departure from the rule of Ahrens was warranted in light of developments that "had a profound impact on the continuing vitality of that decision." 410 U. S., at 497. These developments included, notably, decisions of this Court in cases involving habeas petitioners "confined overseas (and thus outside the territory of any district court)," in which the Court "held, if only implicitly, that the petitioners' absence from the district does not present a jurisdictional obstacle to the consideration of the claim." Id., at 498 (citing Burns v. Wilson, 346 U. S. 137 (1953), rehearing denied, 346 U. S. 844, 851-852 (opinion of Frankfurter, J.); United States ex rel. Toth v. Quarles, 350 U. S. 11 (1955); Hirota v. MacArthur, 338 U. S. 197, 199 (1948) (Douglas, J., concurring)). Braden thus established that Ahrens can no longer be viewed as establishing "an inflexible jurisdictional rule," and is strictly relevant only to the question of the appropriate forum, not to whether the claim can be heard at all. 410 U. S., at 499-500.
Attempting to paint Braden as a refutation of Ahrens (and thereby, it is suggested, Eisentrager), today's Court imprecisely describes Braden as citing with approval post-Ahrens cases in which "habeas petitioners" located overseas were allowed to proceed (without consideration of the jurisdictional issue) in the District Court for the District of Columbia. Ante, at 10. In fact, what Braden said is that "[w]here American citizens confined overseas (and thus outside the territory of any district court) have sought relief in habeas corpus, we have held, if only implicitly, that the petitioners' absence from the district does not present a jurisdictional obstacle to consideration of the claim." 410 U. S., at 498 (emphasis added). Of course "the existence of unaddressed jurisdictional defects has no precedential effect," Lewis v. Casey, 518 U. S. 343, 352, n. 2 (1996) (citing cases), but we need not "overrule" those implicit holdings to decide this case. Since Eisentrager itself made an exception for such cases, they in no way impugn its holding. "With the citizen," Eisentrager said, "we are now little concerned, except to set his case apart as untouched by this decision and to take measure of the difference between his status and that of all categories of aliens." 339 U. S., at 769. The constitutional doubt that the Court of Appeals in Eisentrager had erroneously attributed to the lack of habeas for an alien abroad might indeed exist with regard to a citizen abroad--justifying a strained construction of the habeas statute, or (more honestly) a determination of constitutional right to habeas. Neither party to the present case challenges the atextual extension of the habeas statute to United States citizens held beyond the territorial jurisdictions of the United States courts; but the possibility of one atextual exception thought to be required by the Constitution is no justification for abandoning the clear application of the text to a situation in which it raises no constitutional doubt.
The dissent argues that Braden did not overrule Ahrens' jurisdictional holding, but simply distinguished it. Post, at 7. Of course, Braden itself indicated otherwise, 410 U. S., at 495-500, and a long line of judicial and scholarly interpretations, beginning with then-Justice Rehnquist's dissenting opinion, have so understood the decision. See, e.g., id., at 502 ("Today the Court overrules Ahrens"); Moore v. Olson, 368 F. 3d 757, 758 (CA7 2004) ("[A]fter Braden ... , which overruled Ahrens, the location of a collateral attack is best understood as a matter of venue"); Armentero v. INS, 340 F. 3d 1058, 1063 (CA9 2003) ("[T]he Court in [Braden] declared that Ahrens was overruled" (citations omitted)); Henderson v. INS, 157 F. 3d 106, 126, n. 20 (CA2 1998) ("On the issue of territorial jurisdiction, Ahrens was subsequently overruled by Braden"); Chatman-Bey v. Thornburgh, 864 F. 2d 804, 811 (CADC 1988) (en banc) ("[I]n Braden, the Court cut back substantially on Ahrens (and indeed overruled its territorially-based jurisdictional holding)"). See also, e.g., Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 485 U. S. 617, 618 (1988) (per curiam); Eskridge, Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo. L. J. 1361, App. A (1988).

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