Opinion ID: 2286316
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Rethinking Retroactivity

Text: The Mendes court derived its approach to retroactivity from Linkletter, the case in which the Supreme Court abandoned its historic adherence to the rule that judicial decisions necessarily apply retrospectively and adopted instead of that rule a tripartite balancing test. Pursuant to that test, the retroactive application of a new rule of law turned on the results of a judicial inquiry into the purpose of the new rule, the extent of reliance on prior understanding of the law, and the effect of retroactive application on the administration of justice. [19] See Linkletter, 381 U.S. at 629, 636, 85 S.Ct. 1731; Stovall, 388 U.S. at 297, 87 S.Ct. 1967; Chevron Oil, 404 U.S. at 106-07, 92 S.Ct. 349. The underlying premise of Linkletter and its progeny was that the courts are neither required to apply, nor prohibited from applying, a decision retrospectively and must therefore weigh the merits and demerits [of retroactive application of a new rule] in each case, Linkletter, 381 U.S. at 629, 85 S.Ct. 1731. We need not trace the evolution of retroactivity doctrine in the Supreme Court in detail. As Judge Mack, the author of the majority opinion in Mendes, observed for the court in Kirk v. United States, 510 A.2d 499 (D.C.1986), [t]he outcome of the [ Linkletter ] balancing test varied considerably, and there was widespread criticism that it rested on no principled basis. Id. at 505. Justice Harlan spoke for many both inside and outside the Supreme Court when he concluded a few years after Linkletter that `[r]etroactivity' must be rethought. Desist v. United States, 394 U.S. 244, 258, 89 S.Ct. 1030 (1969) (Harlan, J., dissenting). It was not long before a majority of the Supreme Court agreed with Justice Harlan, and by 1993, Linkletter was overruled and its retroactivity doctrine swept away. The Supreme Court has summarized the change that took place by saying that [w]hile it was accurate in 1974 to say that a new rule announced in a judicial decision was only presumptively applicable to pending cases, we have since established a firm rule of retroactivity. Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244, 278 n. 32, 114 S.Ct. 1483 (1994) (citing Harper v. Virginia Dept. of Taxation, 509 U.S. 86, 113 S.Ct. 2510, 125 L.Ed.2d 74 (1993) and Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314, 107 S.Ct. 708, 93 L.Ed.2d 649 (1987)). In Griffith the Court explicitly overruled Linkletter and held that in criminal cases, all newly declared rules of law must be applied retroactively to all criminal cases pending on direct review or not yet final [20]  with no exception for cases in which the new rule constitutes a `clear break' with the past. Griffith, 479 U.S. at 328, 107 S.Ct. 708. In Harper the Court heed[ed] the admonition that `the Court has no more constitutional authority in civil cases than in criminal cases to disregard current law or to treat similarly situated litigants differently.' Harper, 509 U.S. at 97, 113 S.Ct. 2510 (citation omitted). Extending the rejection of the Linkletter doctrine to civil cases, the Harper Court stated that we can scarcely permit `the substantive law [to] shift and spring' according to `the particular equities of [individual parties'] claims' of actual reliance on an old rule and of harm from a retroactive application of the new rule. Id. (citation omitted; brackets in original). [21] Harper squarely held that [w]hen this Court applies a rule of federal law to the parties before it, that rule is the controlling interpretation of federal law and must be given full retroactive effect in all cases still open on direct review and as to all events, regardless of whether such events predate or postdate our announcement of the rule. Id. When this court took note of these Supreme Court developments in 1998, it recognized that they substantially undermined the retroactivity jurisprudence of Mendes. Washington, 718 A.2d at 1075. Indeed, the court added, we think it probable that if ... Harper, and not Linkletter, had reflected the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in 1978, this court would have given its decision in Mendes full retroactive effect. Id. at 1076. The Washington court acknowledged that it was nonetheless bound to follow Mendes, because overruling a precedent of this court can be effected only by this court en banc. Id. (citing M.A.P. v. Ryan, 285 A.2d 310, 312 (D.C.1971)). In the present case, this court is en banc; and Mendes is ripe for reconsideration. Preliminarily, our use of the term reconsideration suggests that we have some choice in the matter. In their arguments before us, the parties to this case have assumed that we are free to choose either to embrace Griffith and Harper or to adhere to Mendes, at least when we articulate new rules of local, i.e., District of Columbia, law. [22] Cf. Great Northern R.R. Co. v. Sunburst Oil & Refining Co., 287 U.S. 358, 364-65, 53 S.Ct. 145, 77 L.Ed. 360 (1932) (state courts are free to adopt different rules regarding the retroactive effect of their own interpretations of state law). As a matter of judicial policy, the Supreme Court ordinarily defers to the decisions of this court on matters of District law. See Whalen v. United States, 445 U.S. 684, 687-88, 100 S.Ct. 1432, 63 L.Ed.2d 715 (1980); Pernell v. Southall Realty, 416 U.S. 363, 368-69, 94 S.Ct. 1723, 40 L.Ed.2d 198 (1974). That said, we need not dwell further on the question whether this court has the legal prerogative to retain Mendes; for on the assumption that we do have discretion to choose, we nonetheless opt to jettison Mendes in favor of Griffith and Harper. We proceed, therefore, to the merits. As we do so, we are mindful that the commonality of sovereignty of the District of Columbia and the United States, District of Columbia v. Ray, 305 A.2d 531, 534 (D.C.1973), lends support to, even if it does not settle, the argument that we should follow current rather than former Supreme Court teaching. Cf. Hornstein v. Barry, 560 A.2d 530, 536-37 n. 15 (D.C.1989) (en banc) (applying federal rule serves the interest of harmony between court systems and uniformity of result in the same geographical area). On its merits, the Mendes retroactivity doctrine is subject to the same criticisms that felled Linkletter in the Supreme Court. First, on its own terms, the doctrine is difficult to apply in a principled and predictable fashion. There is, for instance, considerable ambiguity in the threshold requirement that this court must announce a new legal rule in order to trigger the Mendes inquiry. When is a legal rule new enough to meet this requirement? To say that the test is whether the new rule is a clear break, or newly minted, or not clearly foreshadowed, offers little real guidance; not only do such standards invite subjective adjudication, but they also are not consistent with each other. Not clearly foreshadowed is a more lenient standard than clear break while newly minted sounds like it falls somewhere else on the continuum of novelty  though exactly where is not easy to say. Our holding in Noble, for example, may not have been clearly foreshadowed, but it was hardly a newly minted principle given that it was based on a hoary old principle of statutory construction and that it ratified an interpretation of the GTCA that had held sway in the federal system for a decade. Whether our holding was a clear break from the past is debatable, because that depends on what is included in the past. Passing the threshold inquiry of whether the court has announced a new legal rule, the criteria that Mendes requires the court to investigate and balance are also problematic  none more so than the reliance factor on which appellants place so much weight in the present case. Under Mendes, the court must consider [t]he degree of reliance by the litigants before the court, and in some cases by the public at large, on the legitimacy of the prior rule, whether the reliance was reasonable in view of any intimations that the prior rule might change, and the degree of hardship that the parties before the court, and others in general, may sustain if the reliance interests are overridden by retrospective application of the new rule. 389 A.2d at 789-90. This can fairly be characterized as an open-ended inquiry that is bereft of standards to guide it; exactly whose reliance should be considered, how that reliance is to be established and measured, whether there were signals that the prior rule should not be relied upon, whether it was reasonable to expect the litigants and others to pick up on those signals and conduct themselves accordingly, what kind and degree of hardship should be considered, how to determine and assess the hardship, are some of the questions that the appellate court is expected to resolve. Moreover, although these questions are partly factual, the court is expected to answer them without the benefit of a true evidentiary record detailing the extent to which the old rule of law was relied upon. The court is compelled to speculate, and to base its answers on hypotheses that are untested and probably untestable. Appellants' reliance claims in the present case exemplify these problems. Appellants contend that D.C.Code offenders may have relied on the understanding that revocation of parole would not result in loss of street time credit when they tendered guilty pleas, decided to violate conditions of their parole, defended themselves against revocation of parole, or planned for their anticipated reparole. Appellants further contend that Superior Court judges may have relied on the prior understanding when they sentenced some offenders, and that the Parole Board may have relied on that erroneous understanding when it revoked the parole of some offenders. These are all hypothetical possibilities, but what are we to make of them when the record does not tell us, for example, whether such reliance on the pre- Noble rule actually occurred, how many people were adversely affected, how those people were affected, or who those people were? Again, appellants contend that it was reasonable for D.C.Code offenders to rely on the information about their sentences which they received from the Department of Corrections prior to Noble. Yet there was information available to these offenders which could have alerted them that the Department's sentence computations were subject to correction. This information included the regulation issued by the United States Parole Commission, the Ninth Circuit's decision in Tyler, and the fact that for a decade after the GTCA was enacted, D.C.Code offenders in federal custody continued to forfeit street time credit when their parole was revoked. The record is silent as to whether and to what extent D.C.Code offenders were aware of these facts. The equitable balancing that Mendes requires is subject to the further criticism that it is ad hoc and standardless. In the present case for example, Mendes would require us to weigh the extent of reliance on the pre- Noble rule against such considerations as the interest in treating D.C.Code offenders the same whether they are under federal or local supervision; public safety concerns over the premature release of felons who have demonstrated their inability to comply with parole conditions; and the longstanding principle that a convicted defendant must serve the sentence mandated by law, and cannot rely on an administrative mistake to insist on a more lenient sentence. Once these and other factors are identified, however, the court is on its own as far as balancing them is concerned. In addition to the difficulty of applying Mendes in a principled way, there is a more fundamental objection to be made. By allowing courts to exercise their discretion to make their legal rulings prospective, the Mendes doctrine is antithetical to basic principles governing the role of courts. Unlike legislation, which is presumptively prospective in operation, judicial decisions are presumptively retrospective. In every case, the court's ruling is a statement to the parties before it telling them what the law was that governed the acts and events leading up to the lawsuit  not what the law should have been or what it ought to be. Saying what the law was rather than what it should be is the judicial mandate in a democratic polity, distinct from the legislative mandate to make rules of law for the future. In the words of the Supreme Court, `the nature of judicial review' strips us of the quintessentially `legislat[ive]' prerogative to make rules of law retroactive or prospective as we see fit. Harper, 509 U.S. at 95, 113 S.Ct. 2510 (quoting Griffith, 479 U.S. at 322, 107 S.Ct. 708 (brackets in original)). For as Justice Harlan observed: If we do not resolve all cases before us on direct review in light of our best understanding of governing . . . principles, it is difficult to see why we should so adjudicate any case at all. . . . In truth, the Court's assertion of power to disregard current law in adjudicating cases before us that have not already run the full course of appellate review, is quite simply an assertion that our constitutional function is not one of adjudication but in effect of legislation. Griffith, 479 U.S. at 323, 107 S.Ct. 708 (quoting Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. at 679, 91 S.Ct. 1160 (concurring opinion)). As Justice Harlan's statement implies, a prospective-only ruling is indeed a statement by the court that it is at liberty to disregard what it has determined to be the governing law in the case before it. The same may be said of a ruling that is only partially or selectively retrospective, i.e., that is retroactively applied only to the parties before the court in the case in which it is announced  it is a statement that the court may disregard the governing law when similarly situated parties come before it. [23] The premise of Mendes is that this court has the authority to disregard governing law  including, as appellants assert in this case, a Congressional enactment  based on the notions of fairness that the judges on the court may be persuaded to entertain in the particular case. This premise begs the question of where we derive such authority. It is no answer to say that we may sit as a court of equity, because it is well established that `courts of equity can no more disregard statutory and constitutional requirements and provisions than can courts of law.' Immigration and Naturalization Serv. v. Pangilinan, 486 U.S. 875, 883, 108 S.Ct. 2210, 100 L.Ed.2d 882 (1988) (quoting Hedges v. Dixon County, 150 U.S. 182, 192, 14 S.Ct. 71, 37 L.Ed. 1044 (1893)). An overriding legal principle, such as the constitutional ex post facto prohibition in Bouie, may preclude retroactive application of a rule of law. Absent the intervention of such a countervailing principle, it is our judicial duty to apply the law in the cases before us, not to disregard it. As Bouie illustrates, the Constitution does impose specific limits on the retroactivity of judicial decisions. The existence of these Constitutional limits, some of which overlap with the criteria identified in Mendes, responds to the fairness concerns which underlay our opinion in that case. In Landgraf the Supreme Court identified several provisions of the Constitution that embody antiretroactivity principles: The Ex Post Facto Clause flatly prohibits retroactive application of penal legislation. Article I, § 10, cl. 1, prohibits States from passing another type of retroactive legislation, laws `impairing the Obligation of Contracts.' The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause prevents the Legislature (and other government actors) from depriving private persons of vested property rights except for a `public use' and upon payment of `just compensation.' The prohibitions on `Bills of Attainder' in Art. I, §§ 9-10, prohibit legislatures from singling out disfavored persons and meting out summary punishment for past conduct. . . . The Due Process Clause also protects the interests in fair notice and repose that may be compromised by retroactive legislation; a justification sufficient to validate a statute's prospective application under the Clause `may not suffice' to warrant its retroactive application. Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 266, 114 S.Ct. 1483 (footnote and citations omitted). Accord, Lynce v. Mathis, 519 U.S. 433, 439-40, 117 S.Ct. 891, 137 L.Ed.2d 63 (1997) (The specific prohibition on ex post facto laws is only one aspect of the broader constitutional protection against arbitrary changes in the law. In both the civil and the criminal context, the Constitution places limits on the sovereign's ability to use its lawmaking power to modify bargains it has made with its subjects.) Even though the cited Constitutional provisions are primarily a check on the legislature, Bouie shows that they may apply to judicial acts as well by virtue of the Due Process Clause. The Constitution is not the only source of legal principles that may operate to limit the retroactivity of new rules of law announced in judicial decisions. The Supreme Court has referred to the unsurprising fact that, as courts apply `retroactively' a new rule of law to pending cases, they will find instances where that new rule, for well-established legal reasons, does not determine the outcome of the case. Reynoldsville Casket Co. v. Hyde, 514 U.S. 749, 758-59, 115 S.Ct. 1745, 131 L.Ed.2d 820 (1995). For example, a limitation inherent in the principle [of retroactivity] itself is that [n]ew legal principles, even when applied retroactively, do not apply to cases already closed. Id. at 758, 115 S.Ct. 1745. [24] Along with this principle of finality, the Court in Reynoldsville Casket offered other examples of non-Constitutional limitations on retroactivity: Thus, a court may find (1) an alternative way of curing the . . . violation, or (2) a previously existing, independent legal basis (having nothing to do with retroactivity) for denying relief, or (3) as in the law of qualified immunity, a well-established general legal rule that trumps the new rule of law, or (4) a principle of law, such as that of finality present in the Teague context, that limits the principle of retroactivity itself. Id., 514 U.S. at 759, 115 S.Ct. 1745. The Court has, however, ruled out simple reliance (of the sort at issue in Chevron Oil ) as a basis for creating an exception to Harper 's rule of retroactivity. Id. at 759, 115 S.Ct. 1745. We are persuaded by the foregoing considerations that the time has come to abandon the retroactivity doctrine of Mendes and conform our jurisprudence to that of the Supreme Court. We adopt the firm rule of retroactivity, Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 278 n. 32, 114 S.Ct. 1483, that the Court articulated in Griffith and Harper. [25]