Court Opinion

ID: 9429695
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:27:40.514723+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:20.955318
License: Public Domain

*21Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Blackmun, and Justice O’Connor join, dissenting.
Today’s decision will make less sense to laymen than it does to lawyers. Respondent Ross was convicted of first-degree murder in a North Carolina trial court in 1969. In 1977, eight years later, he instituted the present federal habeas action seeking to have his conviction set aside on the ground that an instruction given by the trial judge improperly placed upon him, rather than on the State, the burden of proving the defenses of “lack of malice” and “self-defense.” Today, 15 years after the trial, the Court holds that Ross’ conviction must be nullified on federal constitutional grounds. Responding to the State’s contention that Ross never raised any objection to the instruction given by the trial judge, and that North Carolina law requires such an objection, the Court blandly states that no competent lawyer in 1969 could have expected that such an objection would have been sustained, because the law was to the contrary. Consequently, we have the anomalous situation of a jury verdict in a case tried properly by then-prevailing constitutional standards being set aside because of legal developments that occurred long after the North Carolina conviction became final.
Along its way to this troubling result, the Court reaffirms the importance of the principles of comity and orderly administration of justice that underlie our decisions in such cases as Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72 (1977). It fully concedes the application of these principles on federal habeas review through the “cause and prejudice” standard adopted in Wainwright v. Sykes. Ante, at 11.1 The Court’s seemingly *22straightforward determination of “cause” in this instance also involves a labyrinthine treatment of our prior decisions that flouts both common sense and significantly bends our decisions in Hankerson v. North Carolina, 432 U. S. 233 (1977), and Engle v. Isaac, 456 U. S. 107 (1982).
The District Court in this case held that respondent failed to satisfy the “cause” standard of Wainwright v. Sykes, and thus, his claims were barred by the State’s procedural default rule, which required him to at least raise the issue on direct appeal. Like the Court of Appeals, the Court proposes to adopt “novelty” as a possible form of “cause” under Wainwright v. Sykes to justify ignoring the State’s procedural default rule. But this equating of novelty with cause pushes the Court into a conundrum which it refuses to recognize. The more “novel” a claimed constitutional right, the more unlikely a violation of that claimed right undercuts the fundamental fairness of the trial. To untie this knot in logic, the Court proposes a definition of novelty that makes a claim novel if the legal basis for asserting the claim is not reasonably available. Ante, at 15-16. This standard, of course, has no meaningful content independent of the factual setting in which it is applied. The Court’s attempt to give content to this novelty standard, however, is simply too facile; under its application, virtually any new constitutional claim can be deemed “novel.”
The starting point for the Court’s evaluation of respondent’s novelty claim should be our decision in In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970), which initiated a line of cases culminating, one would hope, in Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U. S. 510 (1979). The Court in Winship held that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution required the State to prove the elements of a crime “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But the only issue in Winship that was treated as novel was whether *23the same burden of proof requirements applied to juvenile trials. With respect to adults the Court treated this question as settled by a long line of earlier decisions, ranging in date of decision from Miles v. United States, 103 U. S. 304 (1881), to Holland v. United States, 348 U. S. 121 (1954). The Court stated:
“Expressions in many opinions of this Court indicate that it has long been assumed that proof of a criminal charge beyond a reasonable doubt is constitutionally required.” 397 U. S., at 362.
In short, just a year after respondent’s conviction, this Court regarded as well established the principle that in an adult trial the State was constitutionally required to bear the burden of proof as to “every fact necessary to constitute the crime . . . charged.” Id., at 364.
Our decision in Winship was held fully retroactive in Ivan V. v. City of New York, 407 U. S. 203 (1972). Three years later, in Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U. S. 684 (1975), we held that it was contrary to our Winship decision to require a defendant in a murder prosecution to prove that he acted in the heat of passion or sudden provocation in order to reduce the offense to manslaughter. The Court held that the constitutional interests described in Winship were “implicated to a greater degree in this case than they were in Winship itself.” 421 U. S., at 700.
The Mullaney decision was given retroactive effect in Hankerson v. North Carolina, supra. In reaching this decision, however, the Court dealt with the State’s argument that retroactive application of Mullaney v. Wilbur would have a serious, adverse impact on the administration of justice in this country because of the number of potential retrials that might be required, by reaffirming the principles enunciated in Ivan V. and by stating:
“Moreover, we are not persuaded that the impact on the administration of justice in those States that utilize the *24sort of burden-shifting presumptions involved in this ease will be as devastating as respondent asserts. If the validity of such burden-shifting presumptions were as well settled in the States that have them as respondent asserts, then it is unlikely that prior to Mullaney many defense lawyers made appropriate objections to jury instructions incorporating those presumptions. Petitioner made none here. The North Carolina Supreme Court passed on the validity of the instructions anyway. The States, if they wish, may be able to insulate past convictions by enforcing the normal and valid rule that failure to object to a jury instruction is a waiver of any claim of error.” 432 U. S., at 244, n. 8.
If North Carolina took any solace from this Court’s explicit statement in Hanker son that North Carolina need not worry about having to retry murders so long as it applied a contemporaneous-objection rule, today’s opinion shows that its reliance was quite unjustified. The Court today does a complete about-face from Hankerson and, without even mentioning the above-quoted language, holds that the state court may not bar the belated assertion of such a claim by application of a contemporaneous-objection rule. The Court goes on to conclude that the claim based upon the allocation of proof in the instructions was “novel” in 1969, because the leading case on point at that time was Leland v. Oregon, 343 U. S. 790 (1952), which held that the State might require a defendant to bear the burden of proving affirmative defenses. But the holding of Leland was reaffirmed in Patterson v. New York, 432 U. S. 197 (1977), indicating that our decision in Leland did not speak directly to the issues involved in Mullaney v. Wilbur. Further, far from being regarded as the “leading case” on the subject in 1969, Leland v. Oregon was only mentioned as one of a number of cases in a string citation for the general proposition approved in Winship. 397 U. S., at 362.
*25Finally, the Court asserts no convincing basis for distinguishing respondent’s claims from those rejected in our decision in Engle v. Isaac, 456 U. S. 107 (1982). In Engle v. Isaac we determined that claims similar to respondent’s hardly qualified as novel, their assertion coming at least four and one-half years after Winship. Though we stated that Winship laid the basis for the claims asserted in Engle v. Isaac, we also expressly stated that the legal basis on which Winship rested was perceived earlier by other courts. 456 U. S., at 131, n. 39. The Court now distinguishes those other cases essentially on their facts, while never coming to grips with the fact that the reasoning employed in State v. Nales, 28 Conn. Supp. 28, 248 A. 2d 242 (1968), and Stump v. Bennett, 398 F. 2d 111 (CA8 1968), formed the framework for respondent’s claims asserted here.2
We are reduced by this bizarre line of reasoning to the following conclusions: Winship, decided in 1970, simply reaffirmed a long line of existing cases when it held that the burden of proof as to the elements of the crime must be borne by the State “beyond a reasonable doubt”; and Mullaney v. Wilbur, decided in 1975, considered this principle even more *26applicable to instructions on elements of the crime in a murder trial than was true of the finding of delinquency in Winship. In other words, Mullaney was an a fortiori case from Winship, and Winship announced a principle which had been settled many years ago by decisions of this Court.3
But, it seems, lawyers are not required to reason in quite the same manner as judges do. A lawyer in North Carolina, one year before Winship announced that the constitutional requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt had been long settled in the law, had no “reasonable basis” upon which to challenge the jury instructions given by the North Carolina trial court in this case. Either one or the other of these modes of reasoning, it seems to me, must be wrong.
I would conclude that there was an adequate basis for raising an objection in this case, and that the State’s interests in the finality of its judgments require an attorney to raise an objection when an instruction violates a constitutional requirement of the allocation of burden of proof which this Court held one year later had been long settled. I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

 Part of the Court’s opinion suggests that it might be of two minds on this matter. It states that “the cause requirement may be satisfied under certain circumstances when a procedural failure is not attributable to an intentional decision by counsel made in pursuit of his client’s interests.” Ante, at 14. As the Court’s opinion makes clear, however, this formulation does not presage a return to the “knowing waiver” or “deliberate *22by-pass” rule of Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391 (1963), which was squarely rejected by a majority of this Court in Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S., at 87-88.

 For instance, the Court’s treatment of the decision in Stump v. Bennett wholly ignores the following language:
“Whether or not one interprets the treatment of Davis in Leland as denying a constitutional status to the ‘presumption of innocence,’ this much is clear: when the burden of persuasion is shifted to the defendant to disprove essential elements of a crime, as it was in the instant case, then it is certain that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been violated.” 398 F. 2d, at 118.
I cannot imagine a clearer basis than Stump for asserting the claim upon which respondent ultimately prevailed in the Fourth Circuit.
Stump was decided on June 27, 1968; by November 13, 1968, the Connecticut court in State v. Nales relied upon Stump to strike down the conviction in that case. 28 Conn. Supp., at 31, 248 A. 2d, at 244. Respondent’s conviction came in March of the following year, which certainly is enough time to find that the legal basis for making his claim was reasonably available to him.

 The Court justifies its decision in part on the ground that federal courts, sitting on habeas review, stand as the last guardians of individual rights against state oppression. Ante, at 10. As protectors of individual liberties, however, the federal judiciary must take into consideration the systemic effects of its habeas review powers. The orderly administration of justice and concerns of finality not only have significance for the allocation of social resources in the area of criminal justice, but also affect the distribution of those resources so allocated, and ultimately, what justice remains to be dispensed by courts. The time and energy spent relitigating trials long final and completely fair when first conducted takes resources away from others demanding attention from the criminal justice system. The Court’s treatment of novelty as cause suggests that whenever the Court announces a new principle of constitutional law to be applied retroactively, a State’s procedural default rule will have no effect. Far preferable, it seems to me, would be the adoption of the position of Justice Harlan, that new constitutional principles should, with rare exception, not be given retroactive application on habeas review. See Mackey v. United States, 401 U. S. 667, 688-689 (1971).