Court Opinion

ID: 9420183
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:53:17.295505+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:23.099673
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Douglas, Mr. Justice Murphy, and Mr. Justice Rutledge join,
concurring.
Where life is at stake one cannot be too careful. I’s had better be dotted and t’s crossed. And so I deem it proper to state my understanding of the opinion of the Court, on the basis of which I concur in it.
We granted certiorari to review a decision of the Supreme Court of California which dismissed habeas corpus proceedings brought in that court. We did so on the assumption that the case raised questions under the Fourteenth Amendment — more particularly, whether an unre-viewable determination by the superintendent of a State hospital, that one convicted of murder and found to have become insane after conviction had been restored to sanity and therefore was subject to execution, was consistent with the due process which the Fourteenth Amendment secures. The Court now finds that all that the California Supreme Court did was to hold that as a matter of California procedure the petitioner’s claim could not be passed on by the direct remedy of habeas corpus, but that there is available a special local remedy, labeled mandamus, whereby the petitioner can judicially test his present sanity. In short, the Court dismisses the writ of certiorari because the decision of the court below rests on *445a purely State ground in that there is a State remedy available, which has not been pursued, by means of which he can secure the rights he claims under the United States Constitution.
Of course I recognize the weight to be attached to the Attorney General’s views regarding the law of California. But the controlling voice on California law is that of the Supreme Court of California. Whatever may be the elegancies of procedure by which the matter is to be determined, our decision declining to consider the grave constitutional issues which we thought we had before us, is contingent upon a determination by the Supreme Court of California that the law of that State is what our decision presupposes it to be, namely, that California by a remedy which California chooses to call mandamus enables the present petitioner to secure a judicial determination of his present sanity. This means, of course, not the very restricted scope of relief which is normally associated with the traditional remedy of mandamus. It presupposes that California affords petitioner the means of challenging in a substantial way the ex parte finding of the Superintendent of the State Hospital for the Insane and enables him to secure judicial determination of the claims he has made in his petition for habeas corpus which, so the Court now holds, is not the proper way to proceed.
Upon this view I concur in the decision and opinion of the Court.