Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/339/200
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 20:44:33+00:00

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Petitioner was serving a term in the Oklahoma state penitentiary when, on November 28, 1930, he was summoned to appear in another Oklahoma county to plead to two separate charges of armed bank robbery. In January of 1931, he was tried by jury, and convicted on the first charge; petitioner then pleaded guilty to the second. He was sentenced to two terms of forty years each, to run consecutively, and the first sentence is now being served. No appeal from the conviction was taken, but in 1947 petitioner applied to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals for habeas corpus. Judging only from the state court's opinion, 1 for the original petition is not included in the record before us, petitioner alleged in the state court that he had been without funds to employ counsel, that he had not had the aid of counsel of his own choosing, and had not been provided sufficient time to procure and prepare witnesses for his defense. These allegations were reviewed by the state court and the writ was denied on the merits. No application for certiorari was made here.
It is not argued that the courts below state the law incorrectly insofar as the second conviction is concerned. It has long been settled that the federal courts will not consider on habeas corpus claims which have not been raised in the state tribunal; 5 and in any event, it is unquestioned doctrine that only the sentence being served is subject to habeas corpus attack. 6 Further, since neither court based its conclusion upon petitioner's failure to appeal from his initial conviction, that issue is not before us. There is no problem of jurisdiction or power in the federal courts to consider applications for habeas corpus. Nor is there at issue the effect of a refusal of certiorari by this Court upon future applications for federal habeas corpus by the state prisoner. The issue of exhaustion of remedy, however, is not only of vital concern to those who would seek the protection of the Great Writ, but in the case of state prisoners is crucial to the relationship between the state and federal sovereignties in the exercise of their coordinate power over habeas corpus. Doubt respecting this issue should not go unresolved. We therefore granted certiorari. 337 U.S. 923, 69 S.Ct. 1169.
The established doctrine was applied to meet the variations presented by the cases. By 1891, it was clear that a federal circuit court committed no error in refusing a writ on the ground that the petitioner had not come to this Court on writ of error; 16 and a great body of cases affirmed this holding that the petitioner should be 'put to his writ of error'. 17 Baker v. Grice 18 states the reason for the rule that after a final determination of the case by the state court, the federal courts will even then generally leave the petitioner to his remedy by writ of error from this Court.
And to this the Court added, in Markuson v. Boucher, 19 the explicit reason why the exhaustion principle must extend to remedies available in this Court as well as those open in the state tribunals.
Ex parte Hawk prescribes only what should 'ordinarily' be the proper procedure; all the cited cases from Ex parte Royall to Hawk recognize that much cannot be foreseen, and that 'special circumstances' justify departure from rules designed to regulate the usual case. The exceptions are few but they exist. 29 Other situations may develop. Compare Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86, 43 S.Ct. 265, 67 L.Ed. 543. Congress has now made statutory allowance for exceptions such as these, leaving federal courts free to grant habeas corpus when the exist 'circumstances rendering such (state) process ineffective to protect the rights of the prisoner.' 28 U.S.C. 2254, 28 U.S.C.A. § 2254.
There is an insistence voiced by the dissent that we determine what effect the lower federal courts should accord a denial of certiorari by this Court when the state prisoner later applies for federal habeas corpus. The issue of the effect of such a denial apparently could arise only in a case where after our refusal, the state prisoner presented his application to another federal court. It is not here in this case. We doubt the effectiveness of a voluntary statement on a point not in issue. 38 Whether a refusal to grant certiorari imports an opinion on any issue or not, the reason persists for requiring an application here from the state refusal before application to another federal court.
There should be no controversy over whether the refusal of certiorari 'would serve the purpose of an adjudication on the merits.' All the authorities agree that res judicata does not apply to applications for habeas corpus. The courts must be kept open to guard against injustice through judicial error. 39 Even after this Court has declined to review a state judgment denying relief, other federal courts have power to act on a new application by the prisoner. 40 On that application, the court may require a showing of the record and action on prior applications, and may decline to examine further into the merits because they have already been decided against the petitioner. 41 Thus there is avoided abuse of the writ by repeated attempts to secure a hearing on frivolous grounds, and repeated adjudications of the same issues by courts of coordinate powers.
As the Hawk requirement, we think, has always been the rule, no change in procedure is necessary and the reiteration of the rule in this decision can, of course, result in no shifting of the burden of work among federal courts. 44 No person restrained by state process could heretofore have been certain of a hearing on the merits of his application to a federal district court unless he had sought review in this Court of the state's refusal to release him. 45 Further the rule contributes toward expeditious administration since it raises the constitutional issue in a federal forum immediately, without the necessity of a second trial court proceeding and the compilation of a second record. And while the rule has the merit of reasonable certainty, it does not err on the side of unreasonable rigidity. Flexibility is left to take care of the extraordinary situations that demand prompt action. Solicitous as we are that no man be unconstitutionally restrained and that prompt, certain and simple methods for redress be available, those ends for which modern habeas corpus has been evolved can best be achieved by requiring in ordinary cases the exhaustion of state remedies and review here.
The present case involves a refusal on the merits of state collateral relief from a conviction allegedly obtained in violation of the Constitution. No review was sought in this Court of the state's refusal. Instead, without alleging that review had been sought in this Court and without reliance upon any pleaded facts to excuse such failure, the petitioner filed his application for this habeas corpus in the District Court. Limiting its consideration of the application solely to the question as to whether this was an extraordinary instance that required disregard of accustomed procedure, the District Court found that this was not a case of peculiar urgency. We agree with the lower court's conclusion that it should go no further into consideration of the application. A conviction after public trial in a state court by verdict or plea of guilty places the burden on the accused to allege and prove primary facts, not inferences, that show, notwithstanding the strong presumption of constitutional regularity in state judicial proceedings, that in his prosecution the state so departed from constitutional requirements as to justify a federal court's intervention to protect the rights of the accused. 46 The petitioner has the burden also of showing that other available remedies have been exhausted or that circumstances of peculiar urgency exist. Nothing has been pleaded or proved to show that here exceptional circumstances exist to require prompt federal intervention. Oklahoma denied habeas corpus after obviously careful consideration. 47 If that denial violated federal constitutional rights the remedy was here, not in the District Court, and the District Court properly refused to examine the merits.
The problem as rephrased in the dissent stated with precision the decisive inquiry. Relief from a federal court cannot come until corrective State process to vindicate the claimed federal right is unavailable. This has been so ever since Ex parte Royall, 117 U.S. 241, 6 S.Ct. 734, 29 L.Ed. 868. Therefore, if the 'state remedies' which must be exhausted include an application for review of a State court's decision by our discretionary writ of certiorari, it would be premature for a District Court to entertain a petition for habeas corpus before such application. That questionwhether a petition for certiorari is to be deemed part of the 'state remedies'had never been canvassed by this Court. The Court had made some uncritical assertions about it and in a moment I shall deal with them. But the problem had never been critically analyzed until the issue became determinative of the decision in Wade v. Mayo.
5. Now the Court likewise rejects the basis of the dissent in Wade v. Mayothat a petition for certiorari is to be deemed part of State remedies and as such must be exhausted. But it retains the conclusion which was drawn from the rejected premise. It does so in complete disregard of our repeated insistence regarding the significance of denial of petitions for certiorari, reflecting the narrow range of inquiry not going to the merits which alone is open on such petitions. Likewise disregarded are practical considerations relating to the administration of this Court's business, particularly the inherent difficulties of ascertaining in this Court in the first instance the available remedies under State procedure, which is a threshold question in determining whether State remedies have been exhausted.
It is suggested, however, that this Court should have the first opportunity to consider whether a State court was right in having denied a constitutional claimwhat has been colloquially called a 'first-crack' policy. The most weighty considerations of practical administration counsel against it. The burden of the Court's volume of business will be greatly increased, not merely because a greater number of certiorari petitions would be filed, but by reason of the effective pressure toward granting petitions more freely. For if the 'first-crack' policy has any validity, it would require that every doubt be resolved in favor of granting certiorari, rather than leaving the case to the District Courts.
The difficulties in determining exhaustion of State remedies are illustrated by a litigation another stage of which was reached by denial of certiorari last Monday. Hawk v. State of Nebraska, 339 U.S. 923, 70 S.Ct. 612. At an earlier date, the Supreme Court of Nebraska had affirmed a denial of habeas corpus by the lower State court. Hawk v. Olson, 145 Neb. 306, 16 N.W.2d 181. This Court granted certiorari and reversed on the merits, acting on the assumption that a federal right had been disregarded, 326 U.S. 271, 66 S.Ct. 116, 90 L.Ed. 61, despite our earlier statement in Ex parte Hawk, 321 U.S. 114, 116, 64 S.Ct. 448, 449, 88 L.Ed. 572, to the effect that State remedies could not be deemed exhausted in Nebraska until coram nobis had been attempted. On the remand, the Nebraska Supreme Court advised us that we had misconceived its opinion and misunderstood local procedurethat it had not denied a federal claim out of hand but decided only that habeas corpus was not the proper procedural road to take in Nebraska. 146 Neb. 875, 22 N.W.2d 136. Hawk then applied for a writ of habeas corpus in the federal District Court for Nebraska, but was told that he must first try coram nobis in the State courts. 66 F.Supp. 195, affirmed sub nom. Hawk v. Jones, 8 Cir., 160 F.2d 807. The district judge showed his knowledge of his local law, for when the federal claim was asserted by coram nobis it was heard on the merits, decided by a Nebraska trial court against the petitioner and affirmed by the Nebraska Supreme Court, Hawk v. State, 151 Neb. 717, 39 N.W.2d 561.
Burke v. State of Georgia, 338 U.S. 941, 70 S.Ct. 422, is another admirable illustration of why we should not require cases raising a dubious constitutional question as to the validity of State convictions to be brought here before habeas corpus is sought in the District Courts. That we denied certiorari 'without prejudice' to future proceedings in the District Court carried no legal significance. 2 The case merely demonstrates how frequently in this situation preliminary questions of State procedure and State court jurisdiction are involved. Instead of allowing these local issues to be canvassed initially in the District Courts, it is now proposed to deal with cases like Burke v. State of Georgia by requiring that they be brought here enveloped in the fog of State procedural law and then leaving it to the District Courts to lift the fog after we have concluded that it is took thick for us to pierce. Such procedure, I submit, would neither further the administration of justice nor be conducive to the proper use of this Court's time for the effective conduct of its inescapable business nor advance the self-esteem of State courts.
11. Due regard for State and federal relations as expressed in the doctrine of exhaustion of State remedies and adherence to the function played by certiorari in the business of this Court combine to reject as erroneous the notion that federal District Courts are to be barred from exercising their habeas corpus jurisdiction if certiorari was not first sought here. The error derives from the assumption that a petition for certiorari to this Court was included in the 'State remedies available' which must be exhausted before a federal court can entertain a writ of habeas corpus. This assumption appears for the first time in a per curiam opinion in Ex parte Hawk, 321 U.S. 114, 117, 64 S.Ct. 448, 450, 88 L.Ed. 572. It was repeated, though not in issue, in the per curiam in White v. Ragen, 324 U.S. 760, 764, 65 S.Ct. 978, 980, 89 L.Ed. 1348. A consideration of what actually was said in Ex parte Hawk on this matter makes it perfectly clear how the misconception about certiorari in relation to the District Court's jurisdiction in habeas corpus crept into Ex parte Hawk. The following is everything contained in Ex parte Hawk on the subject: 'Ordinarily an application for habeas corpus by one detained under a state court judgment of conviction for crime will be entertained by a federal court only after all state remedies available, including all appellate remedies in the state courts and in this Court by appeal or writ of certiorari, have been exhausted. Tinsley v. Anderson, 171 U.S. 101, 104105, 18 S.Ct. 805, 807, 43 L.Ed. 91; Urquhart v. Brown, 205 U.S. 179, 27 S.Ct. 459, 51 L.Ed. 760; United States ex rel. Kennedy v. Tyler, 269 U.S. 13, 46 S.Ct. 1, 70 L.Ed. 138; Mooney v. Holohan, supra, 294 U.S. 103, 115, 55 S.Ct. 340, 79 L.Ed. 791, 98 A.L.R. 406; Ex parte Abernathy, 320 U.S. 219, 64 S.Ct. 13, 88 L.Ed. 3.' 321 U.S. at pages 116117, 64 S.Ct. at page 450, 88 L.Ed. 572.
The essence of this statement is the doctrine of exhaustion of State remedies. Two of the citationsMooney v. Holohan and Ex parte Abernathyhave only that relevance. The three other citationsTinsley v. Anderson; Urquhart v. Brown; United States ex rel. Kennedy v. Tylerare directed to the particularization in the main statement as to the exhaustion of 'all state remedies available, including all appellate remedies * * * in this Court * * *.' These three cases illustrate a series of decisions in this Court holding that a lower federal court ordinarily ought not to exercise its jurisdiction in habeas corpus in favor of one in State custody even after a final determination by the highest court of a State unless he has availed himself of his remedy 'to review it by writ of error from this court.' Tinsley v. Anderson, 171 U.S. 101, 105, 18 S.Ct. 805, 807, 43 L.Ed. 91.
But this jurisdictional situation was drastically changed by the Act of September 6, 1916, 39 Stat. 726, and the Act of February 13, 1925, 43 Stat. 936. The whole purport of this transforming jurisdictional legislation was to bar the door of this Court to litigation like this flood of habeas corpus cases. After this shift from review as of right to review by grace, it could no longer be said that a litigant forwent his right to have this Court review and reverse a State court. The right was gone. Only an opportunityand a slim oneremained. It completely misconceives the doctrine which required a case to be brought to this Court by writ of error, because it was the duty of this Court to adjudicate the claim on the merits, to apply it to the totally different factors involved in certiorari. All the considerations of policy required that the process of constitutional adjudication through writ of error be exhausted before a lower federal court could step in. Until Ex parte Hawk there was no suggestion of assimilating certiorari to the writ of error doctrine. In the present context of the Court's business in relation to these casestheir volume and the required knowledge of local law with which the local federal judges are much more familiar than we can possibly beall considerations of policy urge against requiring certiorari to be filed and denied before the District Court may be allowed to exercise jurisdiction.
The reasons underlying stare decisis are not applicable to such a procedural suggestion as Ex parte Hawk made regarding the requirement of petitioning this Court for certiorari before evoking the District Court's jurisdiction on habeas corpus. That suggestion never was translated into practice so far as the records of this Court disclose. What was specifically decided in Ex parte Hawk did become the practice of this Courtthat is, petitions for leave to file a writ of habeas corpus in this Court under § 262 of the Judicial Code, now 28 U.S.C. 1651, 28 U.S.C.A. § 1651, were thereafter denied. But no instance has been revealed in which this Court acted on the suggestion that exhaustion of State remedies includes denial of certiorari here. Apart from the fact that Wade v. Mayo displaced the inclusion of certiorari as part of the State remedies, it was recognized at the last term of Court that the scope of Ex parte Hawk was that it expressed the 'doctrine of exhaustion of state remedies'. Young v. Ragen, 337 U.S. 235, 238, 69 S.Ct. 1073, 1074.
12. A final point remains and that is the suggestion that the provision of the 1948 revision of the Judicial Code requires adherence to what was said in Ex parte Hawk about resort to certiorari. The Code provisions say no such thing nor do the Reviser's notes. Section 2254 of Title 28 merely formulates the judicial doctrine first announced by this Court in Ex parte Royall, 117 U.S. 241, 6 S.Ct. 734, 29 L.Ed. 868the doctrine of exhaustion of State remedies: 'An application for a writ of habeas corpus in behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted unless it appears that the applicant has exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State * * *.
The first alternativethat in habeas corpus cases denial of certiorari has the effect of a disposition on the meritswould require a complete change in our consideration of such petitions by this Court. They would have to be treated as we now treat cases in which a petition for certiorari is granted so as to be heard on the merits. This would cast a new burden upon the Court full of the direst consequences to the proper disposition of the rest of the business of the Court. In addition, if denial of certiorari as though on the merits but without full dress consideration would, for all effective purposes, preclude resort to the District Courts on a claim that State custody is in violation of the Constitution, it would judicially nullify the habeas corpus jurisdiction which was first given to the lower federal courts by the Act of February 5, 1867, and has ever since been retained. On the second alternative, i.e., that denial of certiorari in habeas corpus cases is like any other denial of certiorari, the Court would announce that a meaningless step in this Court is an indispensable preliminary to going to the local District Court.
Holiday v. Johnston, 313 U.S. 342, 350, 550, 61 S.Ct. 1015, 1017, 85 L.Ed. 1392; Price v. Johnston, 334 U.S. 266, 291 292, 68 S.Ct. 1049, 1062, 1063, 92 L.Ed. 1356; 28 U.S.C. 2242, 28 U.S.C.A. § 2242, restating R.S. § 754.
See Hawk v. Olson, supra, 326 U.S. at pages 274275, motes 3, 4, 66 S.Ct. at page 118.
Comity through discretion in granting habeas corpus had an antecedent in an early statutory command restraining federal injunctive interference with state courts. 28 U.S.C. 2283, 28 U.S.C.A. § 2283, 1 Stat. 334, § 5; see Bowles v. Willingham, 321 U.S. 503, 64 S.Ct. 641, 88 L.Ed. 892. Cf. the three-judge district court provisions, 28 U.S.C. 2281, 2284, 28 U.S.C.A. §§ 2281, 2284.
In re Jugiro, 140 U.S. 291, 11 S.Ct. 770, 35 L.Ed. 510; In re Frederich, 149 U.S. 70, 7778, 13 S.Ct. 793, 795, 796, 37 L.Ed. 653; People of State of New York v. Eno, 155 U.S. 89, 98, 15 S.Ct. 30, 33, 39 L.Ed. 80; Pepke v. Cronan, 155 U.S. 100, 15 S.Ct. 34, 39 L.Ed. 84; Whitten v. Tomlinson, 160 U.S. 231, 242, 16 S.Ct. 297, 301, 40 L.Ed. 406; Tinsley v. Anderson, 171 U.S. 101, 104 105, 18 S.Ct. 805, 807, 43 L.Ed. 91; State of Minnesota v. Brundage, 180 U.S. 499, 503, 21 S.Ct. 455, 457, 45 L.Ed. 639; Reid v. Jones, 187 U.S. 153, 23 S.Ct. 89, 47 L.Ed. 116; Urquhart v. Brown, 205 U.S. 179, 181182, 27 S.Ct. 459, 460, 51 L.Ed. 760; United States ex erl. Kennedy v. Tyler, 269 U.S. 13, 17, 46 S.Ct. 1, 2, 70 L.Ed. 138.
Ex parte Spencer, 228 U.S. 652, 660661, 33 S.Ct. 709, 711, 57 L.Ed. 1010.
321 U.S. 114, 116117, 64 S.Ct. 448, 450, 88 L.Ed. 572.
324 U.S. 760, 765, 65 S.Ct. 978, 981, 89 L.Ed. 1348. In the White case we concluded that the state ground was the refusal by the Supreme Court of Illinois to entertain applications with possible fact controversies. 324 U.S. at pages 766767, 65 S.Ct. at pages 981, 982. We made it clear that while proper procedure does not require review in this Court of a judgment denying habeas corpus on an adequate state ground, other available state remedies must be exhausted before an application should be entertained in a district court. 324 U.S. at page 767, 65 S.Ct. at page 982.
'* * * The thing in mind in the drafting of this section was to provide that review of state court action be had so far as possible only by the Supreme Court of the United States, whose review of such action has historical basis, and that review not be had by the lower federal courts, whose exercise of such power is unseemly and likely to breed dangerous conflicts of jurisdiction. * * * One of the incidents of the state remedy is (the) right to apply to the Supreme Court for certiorari. If a petitioner has failed to make such application after the refusal of the state court to release him, he cannot be said to have exhausted the remedies available to him under state procedure, provided he has the right to apply again to the state courts for relief as a basis for application to the Supreme Court for certiorari. * * * The fact that certiorari from the Supreme Court to the state court may be called a federal remedy is not determinative of the question here involved. The crucial matter is that petitioner still has a right to attack in the courts of the state the validity of his conviction and, upon the record made in such attack, to petition the highest court of the land for a review. So long as such right remains, he does not have, and ought not have, the right to ask a review by one of the lower federal courts. * * *' Parker, Limiting the Abuse of Habeas Corpus, 8 F.R.D. 171, 176177.
Compare Bowen, L.J., in Cooke v. New River Co., 38 Ch.D. 56, 7071: '* * * like my Brothers who sit with me, I am extremely reluctant to decide anything except what is necessary for the special case, because I believe by long experience that judgments come with far more weight and gravity when they come upon points which the Judges are bound to decide, and I believe that obiter dicta, like the proverbial chickens of destiny, come home to roost sooner or later in a very uncomfortable way to the Judges who have uttered them, and are a great source of embarrassment in future cases.' Cohens v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 399400, 5 L.Ed. 257; Wright v. United States, 302 U.S. 583, 593594, 58 S.Ct. 395, 399, 82 L.Ed. 439.
Ex parte Hawk, 321 U.S. 114, 117, 64 S.Ct. 448, 450, 88 L.Ed. 572; House v. Mayo, 324 U.S. 42, 48, 65 S.Ct. 517, 521, 89 L.Ed. 739; White v. Ragen, 324 U.S. 760, 764765, 65 S.Ct. 978, 980, 981, 89 L.Ed. 1348.
Judge Learned Hand has carried the requirement of eliciting a denial of a petition for certiorari in habeas corpus cases to its logical conclusion by giving such denial conclusive effect on the merits. Schechtman v. Foster, 2 Cir., 172 F.2d 339, 342343. That is the logical conclusion of such a requirementbut it is the logic of unreality. For it flies in the face of the actualities of a denial. The considerations entering into such denials have necessitated the hitherto settled principle that denial carries no suggestion of adjudication on the merits.

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