Opinion ID: 429819
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Illusion of Voluntary Consent

Text: 85 The majority acknowledges that consent to trial by magistrate must be voluntary to avoid violating the litigants' rights to an Article III judge. Without citation of authority and drawing only upon the absence of any complaint of involuntariness in the present case, the majority assumes that consent can always be the product of free choice. This assumption ignores the practical realities behind the Magistrates Act's passage and the very real pressures on district judges to try to channel more and more cases to magistrates. 86 Congress perceived the Act as a means to cope with increasingly crowded federal court dockets. The legislative history demonstrates that Congress recognized that greater availability of magistrates would induce economically disadvantaged litigants, unable to afford the delay and cost of waiting for adjudication by an Article III judge, to consent to trial before a magistrate. In a Senate Report on the 1979 Act, the Committee on the Judiciary stated: 87 The bill recognizes the growing interest in the use of magistrates to improve access to the courts for all groups, especially the less-advantaged. The latter lack the resources to cope with the vicissitudes of adjudication delay and expense. 88 S.Rep. No. 74, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. 4, reprinted in 1979 U.S.Code Cong. & Ad.News 1469, 1472 (emphasis added). 89 Such economic coercion will be joined by coercion on litigants from the district courts themselves. It ignores reality to suppose that at least some busy district courts will not control their dockets by pressuring litigants to consent to trial before a magistrate. The steady growth in the use of magistrates has been well documented. From 159 full-time magistrate positions authorized for 1978, the number has risen to 223. See 1977 Annual Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts at 28 (Report); 1983 Report at 200. While the majority and the Third Circuit in Wharton-Thomas, 721 F.2d at 930-931, recognize that pressure on parties to submit cases increases in direct proportion to the number of magistrate positions, the majority argues that the process can be reversed when the situation becomes intolerable. Majority op. at 546. I cannot agree. The Constitution should prevent this type of coercion from ever occurring. 90 The Senate Report's explicit intent to induce the poor to choose magistrates is matched by an equally unsettling expression in a House Report that cases which do not require sophisticated legal knowledge should be given to magistrates, rather than to Article III judges. 91 [A]t their choice, parties can utilize the particular advantages of magistrates and judges. There are cases which do not require those special attributes of Article III judges, but nonetheless do require an impartial generalist to resolve issues of importance to the parties. 92 H.Rep. No. 1364, 95th Cong., 2d Sess. 12 (1978). Reflecting the philosophy that Article III judges should be reserved for complicated disputes, the district courts have adopted rules referring to magistrates for recommended findings on grievances between individuals and the government, including civil rights cases and habeas corpus. See, e.g., D.Ariz.R. 17(c) (habeas corpus, other post-conviction petitions, prisoner civil rights); C.D.Cal.R. 1.0 (entitlement to Social Security benefits, immigration, civil rights actions under 42 U.S.C. Secs. 1981-1986, habeas corpus, judgment debtor proceedings, and others); D.Col.R. 17(f) (all prisoner petitions). 93 Yet Hamilton's vision was that independent judges exercise Article III judicial power to decide all cases in which the operation of our laws is claimed to work an injustice, not just cases that some view as more important: 94 But it is not with a view to infractions of the Constitution only that the independence of the judges may be an essential safeguard against the effects of occasional ill humors in the society. These some times extend no farther than to the injury of the private rights of particular classes of citizens, by unjust and partial laws. Here also the firmness of the judicial magistracy is of vast importance in mitigating the severity, and confining the operation of such laws. 95 The Federalist No. 78, at 528 (J. Cooke ed. 1961). 96 A comparison of that simple statement with the confused allocation of responsibility between Article III judges and magistrates under this Act demonstrates how far we have veered from the course the Constitution charted. 97 In my opinion, the panel correctly decided that the consensual reference of civil cases to a magistrate violates the Constitution.