Opinion ID: 147435
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Supreme Court has a developed jurisprudence governing the application to cases on collateral review of its cases decided pre-finality and those decided post-finality.

Text: The retroactive application of newly announced constitutional rules in criminal cases has long troubled the Supreme Court. As noted, retroactivity takes that rule and transports it back in time to a proceeding that pre-dated the announcement of the rule, treating the rule as if it existed at the time of the prior proceeding. Because this fiction has the potential to upset settled proceedings, especially in the criminal context, over the years the Court came to adopt a bright-line that splits the application of these rules into two domains of review. Whether a new rule applies retroactively depends on whether a criminal conviction is on direct review or collateral review at the time of the Supreme Court decision announcing the new rule. If the conviction is on direct review when the new rule is announced, Griffith allows the retroactive application of the new rule to all criminal cases pending on direct review as a basic norm[ ] of constitutional adjudication. 479 U.S. at 322, 107 S.Ct. 708. If the conviction is on collateral review when the new rule is announced ( i.e., convictions that became final before the new rule is announced), Teague restricts the application of that new rule to narrow exceptions discussed below. This bright-line distinction was made due to the differing considerations between the two domains of review. 1. Griffith The Griffith Court held that the failure to apply a newly declared constitutional rule to criminal cases pending on direct review violates basic norms of constitutional adjudication. 479 U.S. at 322, 107 S.Ct. 708. It was the very integrity of judicial review that required application of a new constitutional rule to all similar cases pending on direct review. Id. at 323, 107 S.Ct. 708. Two principles guided this decision. First, the Court recognized that [a]s a practical matter, of course, we cannot hear each case pending on direct review and apply the new rule. But we fulfill our judicial responsibility by instructing the lower courts to apply the new rule retroactively to cases not yet final. Thus, it is the nature of judicial review that precludes us from [s]imply fishing one case from the stream of appellate review, using it as a vehicle for pronouncing new constitutional standards, and then permitting a stream of similar cases subsequently to flow by unaffected by that new rule. Id. (citation omitted). Second, the Court recognized that selective application of new rules violates the principle of treating similarly situated defendants the same. As we pointed out in United States v. Johnson, [457 U.S. 537, 102 S.Ct. 2579, 73 L.Ed.2d 202 (1982) ] the problem with not applying new rules to cases pending on direct review is the actual inequity that results when the Court chooses which of many similarly situated defendants should be the chance beneficiary of a new rule. Although the Court had tolerated this inequity for a time by not applying new rules retroactively to cases on direct review, we noted: The time for toleration has come to an end. Id. (citations omitted) (emphasis in original). The Court therefore held that a new rule for the conduct of criminal prosecutions is to be applied retroactively to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final, with no exception for cases in which the new rule constitutes a `clear break' with the past. Id. at 328, 107 S.Ct. 708. I note that pending on direct review is slightly different from not yet final. A case that has already exhausted the direct appeal as of right resulting in a state-court decision on the merits, but is not yet final, is still within the purview of Griffith. Finality is the key date. The Griffith Court instruct[ed] the lower courts, state and federal, to apply the new rule retroactively to cases not yet final. Id. at 323, 107 S.Ct. 708. It did not merely advise those courts to consider applying the rule subject to their discretion, but mandated application of the new rule. It was only through this mandate that actual inequity between many similarly situated defendants would be avoided. [8] 2. Teague In Teague, the Supreme Court dealt with the other side of the retroactivity question. Collateral attacks such as habeas corpus are not meant to be a substitute for direct review, and the Court has recognized an interest in leaving concluded litigation in a state of repose. 489 U.S. at 306, 109 S.Ct. 1060 ( quoting Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. 667, 682-83, 91 S.Ct. 1160, 28 L.Ed.2d 404 (1971) (Harlan, J., concurring in judgments in part and dissenting in part)). Quoting the second Justice Harlan, the Court noted that it was `sounder, in adjudicating habeas petitions, generally to apply the law prevailing at the time a conviction became final than it is to seek to dispose of [ habeas ] cases on the basis of intervening changes in constitutional interpretation.' Id. ( quoting Mackey, 401 U.S. at 689, 91 S.Ct. 1171 (Harlan, J.) (alteration in original)). The Court identified only two exceptions to the general prohibition against the retroactive application of new post-finality rules to cases on collateral review: (1) new rules that place certain kinds of primary, private individual conduct beyond the power of the criminal law-making authority to proscribe, id. at 307, 109 S.Ct. 1060; and (2) new watershed rules of criminal procedure... [that] `alter our understanding of the bedrock procedural elements that must be found to vitiate the fairness of a particular conviction,' id. at 311, 91 S.Ct. 1171 (emphasis in original) (citation omitted). In deciding Griffith and Teague, the Supreme Court has carefully set out the different concerns in the pre-finality (direct appeal) and post-finality (collateral attack) application of new rules. In the context of retroactivity for federal habeas review, the Teague Court focused on the distinction between intermediate judgments subject to appeal and final judgments subject only to collateral attack: Application of constitutional rules not in existence at the time a conviction became final seriously undermines the principle of finality which is essential to the operation of our criminal justice system. Without finality, the criminal law is deprived of much of its deterrent effect. The fact that life and liberty are at stake in criminal prosecutions shows only that `conventional notions of finality' should not have as much place in criminal as in civil litigation, not that they should have none.  Id. at 309, 109 S.Ct. 1060 (emphases in original) (citation omitted). With this view of finality, the Court held that [u]nless they fall within an exception to the general rule, new constitutional rules of criminal procedure will not be applicable to those cases which have become final before the new rules are announced, using finality, not the date of the relevant state-court decision, as the inflection point between Griffith and Teague. Id. at 310, 109 S.Ct. 1060.