Opinion ID: 708223
Heading Depth: 6
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Risk of Erroneous Deprivation and Value of Safeguards

Text: 107 There is no direct evidence in the record to show what percentage of decisions utilizing undisclosed classified information result in error; yet, as the district court below stated, One would be hard pressed to design a procedure more likely to result in erroneous deprivations. See, e.g., Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565, 580, 95 S.Ct. 729, 739, 42 L.Ed.2d 725 (1975) (finding that the risk of error is not at all trivial in summary discipline in school settings). Without any opportunity for confrontation, there is no adversarial check on the quality of the information on which the INS relies. See Knauff, 338 U.S. at 551, 70 S.Ct. at 316 (Jackson, J., dissenting) (The plea that evidence of guilt must be secret is abhorrent to free men, because it provides a cloak for the malevolent, the misinformed, the meddlesome, and the corrupt to play the role of informer undetected and uncorrected.) (citation omitted). 108 Although not all rights of criminal defendants are applicable to the civil context, the procedural due process notice and hearing requirements have ancient roots in the rights to confrontation and cross-examination. Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474, 496, 79 S.Ct. 1400, 1413, 3 L.Ed.2d 1377 (1959). 109 Certain principles have remained relatively immutable in our jurisprudence. One of these is that where governmental action seriously injures an individual, and the reasonableness of the action depends on fact findings, the evidence used to prove the Government's case must be disclosed to the individual so that he has an opportunity to show that it is untrue. 110 Id. As judges, we are necessarily wary of one-sided process: democracy implies respect for the elementary rights of men ... and must therefore practice fairness; and fairness can rarely be obtained by secret, one-sided determination of facts decisive of rights. Anti-Fascist Committee v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, 170, 71 S.Ct. 624, 647-48, 95 L.Ed. 817 (1951) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). It is therefore the firmly held main rule that a court may not dispose of the merits of a case on the basis of ex parte, in camera submissions. Abourezk, 785 F.2d at 1061. Thus, the very foundation of the adversary process assumes that use of undisclosed information will violate due process because of the risk of error. We conclude that the district court did not err in finding that there is an exceptionally high risk of erroneous deprivation when undisclosed information is used to determine the merits of the admissibility inquiry. 111