Court Opinion

ID: 9420228
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:53:26.633853+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:43:49.193634
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
The dissenting opinion is written as though this Court were a court of criminal appeals for revision of convictions in the State courts. It is written as though we were asked to consider independently, and as a revisory appellate tribunal which had power to do so, whether a conviction in the courts of Alabama was based upon a coerced confession. One would hardly gather from the dissenting opinion that a trial was had in Alabama under the best safeguards to which a defendant in our courts is entitled; that he was defended by counsel concededly able who exerted all his professional skill on behalf of his client; that the trial judge guided the proceedings with competence and scrupulosity; that then followed a careful review of the trial on appeal, resulting in an affirmance of the judgment of conviction by the highest court of Alabama.
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does require still further protection. A State must furnish corrective process to enable a convicted person, even after such proceedings as I have outlined, to establish that in fact a sentence was procured under circumstances which offend “the fundamental conceptions of justice which lie at the base of our civil and political institutions.” Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U. S. 103, 112. Such re-insurance that no one is punished in violation of basic notions of justice does not of course require determination of such *273a claim by another jury. “Each State may decide for itself whether, after guilt has been determined by the ordinary processes of trial and affirmed on appeal, a later challenge to its essential justice must come in the first instance, or even in the last instance, before a bench of judges rather than before a jury.” Hysler v. Florida, 315 U.S. 411, 417.
Alabama, it cannot be denied, provides for such corrective process. If Alabama chose to leave the determination of the reasonableness of such a claim as is here made finally and on the merits to the Supreme Court of Alabama, of course we could not say that Alabama was disregardful of the requirements of due process. Nor, in view of the circumstances of this case, could we in all fairness say that the Supreme Court of Alabama could not have reasonably rejected that claim — made as belatedly as it was and having regard to the human probabilities of the situation. If the Supreme Court of Alabama could, as a matter of due process, have rejected on the merits the claim that the very foundation of the original proceedings, resulting in the judgment of conviction, was undermined because of an infraction of the United States Constitution, it would disregard reason for this Court to hold that a conscientious State court could not have concluded, as the Supreme Court of Alabama has concluded, that, on the totality of the circumstances, the probabilities were so strong against the truth of the allegations on which the claim was based that it did not require a hearing of witnesses to reject it. In reaching such a conclusion the Supreme Court of Alabama was entitled to consider the circumstances of the original trial, the manner of its conduct by the trial judge, the professional ability with which the defendant was represented, the behavior of the accused throughout the proceedings, and, in the light of all these circumstances, the weight to be attached to the affidavits on which his present petition is based.
*274For me, the essence of the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court is contained in the following sentence: “We think it is asking entirely too much of the court to believe that this defendant, in the secrecy of consultation with his own able counsel, would say to counsel in substance that there was nothing upon which to base an objection to his confessions, solely because he was under fear generated by treatment which he claims was accorded him on July 3, nearly four months previous.” 249 Ala. 667, 670. Since I cannot deem the reasoning by which this conclusion was reached as unsustainable in reason, I am not entitled to reject it, and I therefore agree with this Court’s opinion.
But this merely carries me to sustaining the judgment of the Alabama Supreme Court. There is not now before us any right that the petitioner may have under the Judicial Code to bring an independent habeas corpus proceeding in the District Court of the- United States.1

 See also § 2254 of the legislation revising the Judicial Code, H. R. 3214, 80th Cong., 2d Sess., as passed by Congress on June 16,1948:
“State custody: remedies in State courts.
“An application for a writ of habeas corpus in behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted unless it appears that the applicant has exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State, or that there is either an absence of available State corrective process or the existence of circumstances rendering such process ineffective to protect the rights of the prisoner.
“An applicant shall not be deemed to have exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State, within the meaning of this section, if he has the right under the law of the State to raise, by any available procedure, the question presented.” (Congressional Record, June 16, 1948, p. 8676.)