Court Opinion

ID: 9469119
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:32:41.668862+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:14.107324
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join Chief Judge Markey’s opinion without any reservations, but I think it unfortunate as a matter of fundamental principle that we have to reverse the dismissal of the petition for habeas corpus in this case and I want to explain why I think it unfortunate, in the hope that Congress will consider reforms in the habeas corpus statute.
As an original matter of construction of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, as amended, 28 U.S.C. §§ 2241-2253, it is strongly arguable that the court below was required to dismiss the petition because the petitioner had received a full and fair evidentiary hearing in the state courts on all of the issues raised by his petition. Every allegation in the petition was made at Jones’ trial, where he had an opportunity to present evidence in support of his allegations and took it. The state trial court found against him on the facts and its findings were affirmed by the state supreme court with a full opinion. Jones had counsel throughout the state-court proceeding. The very record excerpts that he submitted to the court below confirm the fact that he was allowed to and did present evidence to the trial court in support of his allegations.
Since there is no indication that the state courts gave Jones less than a full and fair hearing on the factual assertions underlying his constitutional claims, I would conclude, if I were writing on a clean slate, that Jones is not in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States. See 28 U.S.C. § 2241(c)(3). This is so even though the district judge below, had he sent for the state-court record and weighed *268Jones’ evidence against the state’s, might for all we know have concluded that the factual determinations underlying the rejection of Jones’ constitutional claims by the state courts were erroneous, or even clearly erroneous. It is an affront to the principles both of federalism and of rational criminal procedure for a single federal district judge to reexamine factfindings fairly made by a state trial court and affirmed with full opinion by the state’s highest court. It undermines the responsibility and morale of state judges, denies reasonable finality to criminal proceedings and thereby undermines the legitimacy of the criminal-justice system, imposes unduly on the time of our busy district judges, arouses false hopes in state prisoners, and probably does not increase the overall accuracy of constitutional determinations. These concerns were powerfully marshaled almost 20 years ago in Professor Bator’s article, Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, 76 Harv.L.Rev. 441 (1963), and experience since, impressionistic as it largely is, has increased rather than diminished their force.
But as Chief Judge Markey’s opinion makes clear, we are not writing on a clean slate in this case. We are bound by the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), enacted in 1966 in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Townsend v. Sain, 372 U.S. 293, 83 S.Ct. 745, 9 L.Ed.2d 770 (1963). Townsend had held that a federal court in a habeas corpus proceeding brought by a state prisoner was not bound by state-court factfindings even if the findings followed an adequate evidentiary hearing. “[T]he power of inquiry on federal habeas corpus is plenary. Therefore, where an applicant for a writ of habeas corpus alleges facts which, if proved, would entitle him to relief, the federal court to which the application is made has the power to receive evidence and try the facts anew.” Id. at 312, 83 S.Ct. at 756. Moreover, a federal evidentiary hearing is in some circumstances mandatory, for example when “the state factual determination is not fairly supported by the record as a whole,” id. at 313, 83 S.Ct. at 757; to determine whether it is fairly supported, review of the complete state-court record is ordinarily indispensable, id. at 319, 83 S.Ct. at 760.
Townsend was a product of its time. The southern states’ resistance to court-ordered desegregation had induced a widespread skepticism concerning the willingness of government in those states, including the courts, to protect the federal constitutional rights of their black citizens; and blacks were then as they are now disproportionately represented in the population of criminal defendants. Moreover, the process whereby the Supreme Court has progressively constitutionalized state criminal procedure, by reading the criminal-procedure provisions of the Bill of Rights expansively and applying the expansive readings to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, was then just beginning, and the number and variety of constitutional claims that state prisoners would be able to raise in habeas corpus proceedings was not foreseen. Times have changed, and recent decisions of the Supreme Court—notably Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976); Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72, 97 S.Ct. 2497, 53 L.Ed.2d 594 (1977); and Sumner v. Mata, 449 U.S. 539, 101 S.Ct. 764, 66 L.Ed.2d 722 (1981) — reflect a much greater receptivity to the arguments against an expansive right of federal habeas corpus for state prisoners than the Townsend decision did.
It is thus doubtful that the standard laid down in Townsend for deciding when an evidentiary hearing is mandatory would be adopted by the Supreme Court today. But this is completely academic in light of section 2254(d). That statute — unintentionally so far as one can tell — froze the standard laid down in Townsend v. Sain against any change of mind (which was not then foreseen) by the Supreme Court, until such time as Congress itself should amend or repeal the statute. Section 2254(d) provides that state factfindings may not be presumed to be correct if the evidentiary hearing in the state court was inadequate for any one of several reasons (see §§ 2254(d)(l)-(7)) or —no matter how fair and complete the *269state court’s evidentiary hearing was — if the federal district court concludes, “on a consideration of [the] part of the record [that is pertinent to the sufficiency of the evidence to support the state court’s factual determination] as a whole,” that the state court’s factual determination “is not fairly supported by the record.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(8). Nothing in the legislative history or circumstances of adoption suggests that the quoted language does not mean what it says. Where, therefore, as in the present ease, the habeas corpus petitioner challenges the sufficiency of the evidence relied on by the state court to reject his constitutional claims, the federal district court has to examine the relevant portions of the record to determine whether the state court’s factual determination is fairly supported.
As Chief Judge Markey explains, the district court below disabled itself from doing this by dismissing the petition when it did. Jones had not submitted to the court the entire record relevant to his factual contentions but just the portions that supported his claims. Of course, if the submitted portions of the record had provided no support for those claims the district court would have been empowered to deny the petition without further ado. But they did provide support for his claims. Not very much, but if there were no other relevant evidence in the record it would be difficult to understand why the state courts had rejected Jones’ claims, and the district court would have had to conclude that the state-court factfindings were not fairly supported by the record and would have had to conduct an evidentiary hearing. There must in fact have been other evidence, evidence contrary to the petitioner’s, in the state-court record; this can be inferred from the discussion of the petitioner’s contentions by the Illinois Supreme Court. But section 2254(d)(8) prevents the federal habeas corpus judge from deferring to factfindings in a state judicial opinion (if, as here, they are challenged) unless they are supported by the record, and he cannot tell whether they are supported by the record without having the relevant portions of the record before him.
Section 2254(e), also added in 1966, provides that a petitioner who questions the sufficiency of the evidence in support of a state court’s factual determination shall, if he is able, produce that part of the record pertinent to a determination of sufficiency. Though indigent, Jones was evidently able to produce the record of the state-court proceedings, because he submitted several hundred pages of the record to the court below. But unless we are to believe that the state presented no evidence contrary to his claims — which is unbelievable in light of the Illinois Supreme Court’s opinion — he did not submit the whole of the pertinent record to the district court. The court could therefore have asked him to supplement his submission further. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e). It could have issued an order to show cause to the state, see 28 U.S.C. § 2243, which in its return would no doubt have furnished the court with a copy of the other relevant portions of the record. It was empowered though certainly not required to send for the whole record — more than 12,000 pages, we are told, most of it probably irrelevant to petitioner’s contentions. But what the court could not do, without violating section 2254(d), was simply dismiss the petition, since the petitioner had challenged the sufficiency of the evidence in the state proceeding to reject his constitutional claims and the court did not have enough of the record before it to show that the evidence was sufficient.
So we are forced to reverse — a result unsupportable as a matter of fundamental principle. If a criminal defendant has received a full and fair evidentiary hearing in state court on his federal constitutional claims, that is all he should be entitled to; the federal courts should not be required, and probably should not be allowed, to reweigh or rehear the facts. But section 2254(d) bars this approach. If this is what Congress wants, it is not for us to complain; but I cannot believe it is what Congress has ever wanted. So far as appears (the legislative history is unilluminating), section 2254(d) was intended simply to clarify, rather than to endorse and perpetuate, the *270Townsend criteria for review and redetermination of state-court factfindings in federal habeas corpus proceedings; but the effect of the statute has been to preserve as if in amber the outmoded jurisprudence of Townsend, and to forestall judicial reform.
If I am correct that the statute has, through inadvertence, come to have an effect different from the one it was intended to have, then it would seem to follow that Congress should reexamine the statute; specifically, that it should consider amending it to provide that federal courts in habeas corpus proceedings may not reexamine state-court factfindings based, as in the present case, on a full and fair evidentiary hearing.