Opinion ID: 425952
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Pearce, Blackledge, and Due Process

Text: 31 An emphasis on the freedom of criminal defendants to exercise legal rights led the Supreme Court twice to prohibit actions harmful to criminal defendants after such an exercise. In North Carolina v. Pearce, supra, a criminal defendant successfully appealed his conviction. Upon retrial he was given a more severe sentence than he had received at his first trial. The Supreme Court held that such an increase in punishment would be allowed only when the reason for the increase appears in the record, and that the reason must be based upon objective information concerning identifiable conduct on the part of the defendant occurring after the time of the original sentencing proceeding. 395 U.S. at 726, 89 S.Ct. at 2081. 32 Blackledge, supra, extended the same basic idea to a prosecutor. In Blackledge the defendant was initially tried and convicted of a misdemeanor in state district court and exercised a statutory right to a trial de novo in the state superior court. The prosecutor then indicted the defendant on a felony charge for the same behavior. The Blackledge Court extended Pearce and held that the reindictment violated the due process clause. The Court also noted: 33 This would clearly be a different case if the State had shown that it was impossible to proceed on the more serious charge at the outset, as in Diaz v. United States, 223 U.S. 442, 32 S.Ct. 250, 56 L.Ed. 500. In that case the defendant was originally tried and convicted for assault and battery. Subsequent to the original trial, the assault victim died, and the defendant was then tried and convicted for homicide. Obviously, it would not have been possible for the authorities in Diaz to have originally proceeded against the defendant on the more serious charge, since the crime of homicide was not complete until after the victim's death. 34 Blackledge, 417 U.S. at 29 n. 7, 94 S.Ct. at 2103 n. 7. 35 Blackledge used the phrase prosecutorial vindictiveness to describe the problem it sought to remedy. In retrospect, that was an unfortunate choice of words, because it suggests that the problem was merely one of renegade prosecutors attempting to punish valid assertions of constitutional rights. Indeed, due process clearly prohibits actual vindictive punishment of a defendant's assertion of a constitutional right, but Blackledge saw prosecutorial vindictiveness as a much more systemic problem: 36 [I]f the prosecutor has the means readily at hand to discourage such appeals--by upping the ante through a felony indictment whenever a convicted misdemeanant pursues his statutory appellate remedy--the State can insure that only the most hardy defendants will brave the hazards of a de novo trial. 37 There is, of course, no evidence that the prosecutor in this case acted in bad faith or maliciously in seeking a felony indictment against Perry. The rationale of our judgment in the Pearce case, however, was not grounded upon the proposition that actual retaliatory motivation must inevitably exist. Rather, we emphasized that since the fear of such vindictiveness may unconstitutionally deter a defendant's exercise of the right to appeal or collaterally attack his first conviction, due process also requires that a defendant be freed of apprehension of such a retaliatory motivation on the part of the sentencing judge. 395 U.S., at 725, 89 S.Ct. at 2080. We think it clear that the same considerations apply here. 38 Id. 417 U.S. at 27-28, 2 94 S.Ct. at 2102. 39 Thus it is clear that the doctrine of prosecutorial vindictiveness in Blackledge was not intended to provide a remedy for past wrongs. Instead, it was intended to remove any deterrent bar to future defendants contemplating whether to assert a protected right. Blackledge stands squarely in the due process protecting mode. 40