Opinion ID: 107875
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: retroactivity on habeas corpus.

Text: What has already been said is, from my standpoint, enough to dispose of the case before us. Ordinarily I would not go further. But in this instance I consider it desirable and appropriate to venture some observations on the application of the retroactivity doctrine in habeas corpus cases, under the prevailing scope of the Great Writ as set forth in this Court's 1963 decision in Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391, and in today's decision in Kaufman v. United States, ante, p. 217. I believe this course is fitting because none of the Court's prior retroactivity decisions has faced up to the quite different factors which should govern the application of retroactivity in habeas corpus cases; because the retroactive application of Katz in habeas corpus cases would seem to be foreclosed by the present decision; because principled habeas retroactivity now seems to me to demand much more than the purpose, reliance, and judicial administration standards, ante, at 249, which have so far been regarded as the tests governing retroactivity in direct review and habeas corpus cases alike; and because the retroactivity doctrine is still in a developing stage. In what ensues I shall simply try to suggest some of the considerations which appear to me to lay bare the complexities of the retroactivity problem on habeas which I feel have not been sufficiently explored in past decisions, leaving expression of definitive views upon any of such considerations for future habeas cases to which they are germane.
While, as I have argued, a reviewing court has the obligation to rule upon every decisive issue properly raised by the parties on direct review, the federal courts have never had a similar obligation on habeas corpus. Indeed, until Brown v. Allen, 344 U. S. 443 (1953), federal courts would never consider the merits of a constitutional claim if the habeas petitioner had a fair opportunity to raise his arguments in the original proceeding. [2] See my dissent in Fay v. Noia, supra, at 449-463; see also Bator, Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, 76 Harv. L. Rev. 441, 463 (1963). With habeas restricted in this way, the question of applying a new constitutional rule to convictions which had become final arose so infrequently that the retroactivity issue could not be considered a significant one in those days. Even under Brown, the retroactive application of new rules in habeas cases did not serve to erode the finality of criminal judgments to any substantial degree. It was the rare case in which the habeas petitioner had raised a new constitutional argument both at his original trial and on appeal. Yet it was only in such a case that Brown would permit a habeas court to apply the new rule. Cf. Sunal v. Large, 332 U. S. 174 (1947). The conflict between retroactivity and finality only became of major importance with the Court's decision in Fay v. Noia, supra . For the first time, it was there held that, at least in some instances, a habeas petitioner could successfully attack his conviction collaterally despite the fact that the new rule had not even been suggested in the original proceedings. Thus, Noia opened the door for large numbers of prisoners to relitigate their convictions each time a new constitutional rule was announced by this Court. I continue to believe that Noia, which has been given even broader scope in Kaufman v. United States, supra , constitutes an indefensible departure both from the historical principles which defined the scope of the Great Writ and from the principles of federalism which have formed the bedrock of our constitutional development. Nevertheless, my views on this score have not prevailed, and pending re-examination of the scope of habeas corpus, I believe myself obliged to consider on its own bottom the retroactivity problem which Noia has spawned, since it is a matter of the greatest importance if the integrity of the federal judicial process is to be maintained in this era of increasingly rapid constitutional change.
The greatly expanded writ of habeas corpus seems at the present time to serve two principal functions. See Kaufman v. United States, supra , at 229; Mishkin, The Supreme Court, 1964 TermForeword: The High Court, The Great Writ, and the Due Process of Time and Law, 79 Harv. L. Rev. 56, 77-101 (1965). First, it seeks to assure that no man has been incarcerated under a procedure which creates an impermissibly large risk that the innocent will be convicted. It follows from this that all new constitutional rules which significantly improve the pre-existing fact-finding procedures are to be retroactively applied on habeas. See my Brother BLACK'S dissent in Kaufman v. United States, supra, at 235-236. The new habeas, however, is not only concerned with those rules which substantially affect the fact-finding apparatus of the original trial. Under the prevailing notions, Kaufman v. United States, supra, at 224-226, the threat of habeas serves as a necessary additional incentive for trial and appellate courts throughout the land to conduct their proceedings in a manner consistent with established constitutional standards. In order to perform this deterrence function, the habeas court need not, as prior cases make clear, necessarily apply all new constitutional rules retroactively. In these cases, the habeas court need only apply the constitutional standards that prevailed at the time the original proceedings took place. The theory that the habeas petitioner is entitled to the law prevailing at the time of his conviction is, however, one which is more complex than the Court has seemingly recognized. First, it is necessary to determine whether a particular decision has really announced a new rule at all or whether it has simply applied a well-established constitutional principle to govern a case which is closely analogous to those which have been previously considered in the prior case law. Only a short time ago, for example, we attempted to define with more precision the conditions governing the issuance of a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Spinelli v. United States, 393 U. S. 410 (1969). While we had never previously encountered the precise situation raised in Spinelli, our decision in that case rested upon the established doctrine that a magistrate may issue a warrant only when he can judge for himself the validity of the affiant's conclusion that criminal activity is involved. Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14 (1948); Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U. S. 108 (1964). Surely, it could not be thought that Spinelli should not be retroactively applied under the expanded habeas process because it was not announced until 1969. One need not be a rigid partisan of Blackstone to recognize that many, though not all, of this Court's constitutional decisions are grounded upon fundamental principles whose content does not change dramatically from year to year, but whose meanings are altered slowly and subtly as generation succeeds generation. In such a context it appears very difficult to argue against the application of the new rule in all habeas cases since one could never say with any assurance that this Court would have ruled differently at the time the petitioner's conviction became final. In the Katz case, however, one can say with assurance that there was a time at which this Court would have ruled differently. For in Olmstead, Goldman, and On Lee, [3] the Court did just that. Even under the prevailing view of habeas, this fact should be of significance. Although the threat of collateral attack may be necessary to assure that the lower federal and state courts toe the constitutional line, the lower courts cannot be faulted when, following the doctrine of stare decisis, they apply the rules which have been authoritatively announced by this Court. If anyone is responsible for changing these rules, it is this Court. Even in this situation, however, the doctrine of stare decisis cannot always be a complete answer to the retroactivity problem if a habeas petitioner is really entitled to the constitutional law which prevailed at the time of his conviction. Consider, for example, the state of Fourth Amendment law as it existed after our decision in Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505 (1961). As my Brother STEWART notes today, ante, at 248, Silverman went a long way toward rejecting the principles supporting the Goldman and Olmstead rules. The Court in Silverman cautioned that the scope of the Fourth Amendment's protection is not inevitably measurable in terms of ancient niceties of tort or real property law. 365 U. S., at 511. The majority's opinion concluded with the warning: We find no occasion to re-examine Goldman here, but we decline to go beyond it, by even a fraction of an inch. Id., at 512. It is hard to believe that any lawyer worthy of the name could, after reading Silverman, rely with confidence on the continuing vitality of the Goldman rule. Nor is it by any means clear to me that it would have been improper for a lower court to have declined to follow Goldman in the light of Silverman. [4] Given the deterrence purpose of the expanded habeas corpus, it thus could be persuasively argued that the Katz rule should be applied to all cases which had not become final at the time Silverman was decided. [5]
Katz, of course, has been one of the lesser innovations of a decade that has witnessed revolutionary changes in the most fundamental premises of hitherto accepted constitutional law. And similar difficulties arise as to the retroactive application of the Court's other landmark decisions if one is to insist that a habeas petitioner is entitled to the law as it stood at the time of his conviction. It is possible to argue, for example, that the Court's decision in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961), imposing the exclusionary rule on the States, was a sufficient indication to the lower courts that they should no longer rely on the doctrine of stare decisis when confronted with the claim that other Bill of Rights guarantees should be incorporated into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It would follow from this position that all subsequent decisions incorporating various other provisions of the Bill of Rights into Due Process should be applied to all cases arising on habeas which were pending on appeal at the time Mapp was decided. On the other hand, one could argue that stare decisis was still the appropriate rule for the lower courts until this Court made it clear that a particular guarantee was applicable to the States. It would follow from this position that the Court's decision in Griffin v. California, 380 U. S. 609 (1965), should be retroactively applied only to Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1 (1964), which was the first case beginning the process of incorporating the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, and that Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145 (1968), should not be applied to any of those cases which had become final before that decision required the States to provide criminal jury trials on the same basis as the Federal Government. Neither of these positions would be squarely inconsistent with the Court's new view of habeas corpus. Indeed, if the Court in Mapp had given any indication whatever that it accepted my Brother BLACK'S incorporationist philosophy in its pristine purity, see Adamson v. California, 332 U. S. 46, 68-123 (1947), it would appear that it would have been improper for the lower courts to rely on the old precedents to respond to the new claims advanced by criminal defendants. However, the Court has never accepted MR. JUSTICE BLACK'S constitutional premises in full-blown form. Instead, it has embarked on a course of selective incorporation in which the nature of each particular Bill of Rights guarantee has been examined before it was imposed upon the States. Given the ad hoc character of this approach, and given the fundamental place of federalism in the traditional conception of constitutional adjudication, it could certainly be strongly argued that the lower courts could properly follow the traditional due process approach until the time this Court made it clear that a particular Bill of Rights guarantee had been incorporated. The relationship for retroactivity purposes among the Escobedo, Miranda, Wade, and Gilbert decisions [6] presents another difficult problem under the new habeas corpus concept. It can be argued that the line-up cases, Wade and Gilbert, should be retroactively applied to all those cases pending when Miranda was decided. Since Miranda placed affirmative requirements upon police officers to assure that the accused would have an opportunity to obtain counsel at one critical stage of the criminal process, neither police officials nor the lower courts, it might be argued, could properly assume that other critical stages would not be comparably treated. Similarly, it may be suggested that the rules announced in both Miranda and the line-up cases should be applied to all cases still pending on appeal when Escobedo v. Illinois announced that the Sixth Amendment applied in the police station. For Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335 (1963), had already established the proposition that the State must provide free counsel to indigents at the criminal trial. It is doubtless true that a habeas court encounters difficult and complex problems if it is required to chart out the proper implications of the governing precedents at the time of a petitioner's conviction. One may well argue that it is of paramount importance to make the choice of law problem on habeas as simple as possible, applying each new rule only to those cases pending at the time it is announced. While this would obviously be simpler, simplicity would be purchased at the cost of compromising the principle that a habeas petitioner is to have his case judged by the constitutional standards dominant at the time of his conviction. I do not pretend to have exhausted in the foregoing discussion all the complexities of the retroactivity problem on habeas. But the considerations I have canvassed suggest that we should take a hard look at where we are going in the retroactivity field so that this new doctrine may be administered in accordance with the basics of the judicial tradition. Unfortunately, the Court does not even attempt this task. For the reasons stated in Part I of this opinion I cannot subscribe to the affirmance of the judgment of the Court of Appeals. I would remand the case to that court for reconsideration in light of Katz v. United States .