Court Opinion

ID: 9473986
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:45:09.463633+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:50.942140
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge, whom EAST-ERBROOK, Circuit Judge, joins,
concurring.
I hesitate to add to the pile of opinions in this case; separate opinions are the bane of the modern American judiciary. But the case so vividly illustrates the tenuous character of the modern law of federal habeas corpus for state prisoners, and so urgently underscores the need for a fresh approach to the entire subject, that I cannot resist commenting briefly (too briefly to do full justice to an immensely complex area) on what that approach might be, though I am mindful that judges at our level are not empowered to adopt it.
If I were writing on a clean slate I would not reach the question of harmless error in this case even if this were a review not of a state conviction challenged in a federal ha-beas corpus proceeding but a federal conviction challenged in a direct appeal. As Judge Easterbrook explains, the issue that petitioner Phelps presents with regard to the application of Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610, 96 S.Ct. 2240, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976), is a difficult one within the terms of that decision, which forbids the prosecutor, when the defendant takes the stand and gives exculpatory testimony, to comment on the defendant’s failure to have made his exculpatory statement when the police questioned him after his arrest. I hope I shall not be thought disrespectful if I suggest that Doyle v. Ohio is a questionable interpretation of the self-incrimination clause. It is very rare for a person who has been arrested and who has a story to tell to fail to tell it at the earliest possible opportunity, in the hope of being released rather than forced to defend against formal charges. See id. at 621-22, 96 S.Ct. at 2246 (Stevens, J., dissenting). He may have had a reason for not speaking up then, such as fear that the police would twist his words or a belief that it would be imprudent to give a statement before consulting counsel, but if so he can give that reason in rebuttal to the prosecutor’s effort to impeach his exculpatory testimony; why the impeachment itself should be considered either unfair comment on the veracity of the defendant’s testimony or a method of compelling a person to incriminate himself escapes me.
As Judge Easterbrook explains, since Doyle the Supreme Court has come around to the view that impeachment by silence is proper, thus leaving as the sole rationale for Doyle the fact that it buttresses the requirement of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 467-73, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 1624-27, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966), that the police promise a person whom they interrogate while in custody that there will be no sanctions if he keeps silent. There is a sanction — impeachment by silence — unless that impeachment is forbidden. It does not seem a big enough sanction to get excited about, though, especially since as Judge Easter-brook notes we are at two removes from the self-incrimination clause. The element of sanction is less an argument for forbidding the use of silence to impeach testimony by someone who received Miranda warnings than it is an argument against Miranda; the criticisms of that decision made years ago by Judge Friendly have yet to be answered. See Friendly, A Postscript on Miranda, in Benchmarks 266 (1967).
The case against Doyle is even stronger when Doyle is invoked, as it is generally and was in the present case, in a federal habeas corpus proceeding brought by a state prisoner. Doyle lies at the end of a long chain that connects it to the federal habeas corpus statute, and the intermediate links are (in varying degrees) weak, as well as the final link, Doyle itself.
The Habeas Corpus Act of 1867 empowers a federal district court to nullify the conviction of a state prisoner who “is in custody in violation of the Constitution ... of the United States,” thus forcing the state to either retry him or let him go. 28 U.S.C. § 2241(c)(3). Until 1953 the general rule was that “for purposes of habeas corpus a detention was not to be deemed ‘un*1417lawful’ if based upon the judgment of a competent state court which had afforded full corrective process for the litigation of questions touching on federal rights.” Ba-tor, Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, 76 Harv.L.Rev. 441, 499 (1963). But in the era ushered in by Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 73 S.Ct. 397, 97 L.Ed. 469 (1953), which is the era we find ourselves in today, if a federal constitutional error has been committed in the course of the state proceedings then (with certain qualifications) the federal court can order the prisoner’s conviction set aside.
The objections to this position are forcefully argued in Professor Bator’s article and need not be repeated here. The reasons why the Supreme Court nevertheless decided to make federal habeas corpus a means of plenary review of constitutional errors in state criminal proceedings appear to have been severely practical. First, the Supreme Court had neither the time, nor under the certiorari jurisdiction the obligation, to review every state criminal conviction in which the defendant raised a colorable claim of federal constitutional error. Brown v. Allen in effect delegated much of the Court’s review jurisdiction over state criminal convictions to the federal district courts and courts of appeals. Second, at the time Brown v. Allen was decided there were doubts about the fidelity of some state courts to the commands of the federal Constitution, and it was feared that those courts might use tendentious findings of fact to defeat federal constitutional claims, that such findings could not be reviewed effectively by an appellate court, and that therefore the factfinding powers of federal district courts had to be available to state prisoners in appropriate cases — which could only be in habeas corpus proceedings.
The first reason is more important today than when Brown v. Allen was decided more than 30 years ago and the second less important, but however these changes balance out probably even the Supreme Court itself could no longer return to the earlier regime. Brown v. Allen rests on an interpretation of a statute, the Habeas Corpus Act, not of the Constitution; and the Court is reluctant to reexamine its statutory interpretations, which unlike its constitutional interpretations can be corrected by Congress — although, realistically speaking, often only with great difficulty. Moreover, Congress in 1966 made amendments to the Habeas Corpus Act that had the effect of codifying Brown v. Allen, see 28 U.S.C. § 2254; its overruling would therefore pull the rug out from under Congress. But all this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Brown v. Allen rests on foundations by no means totally secure.
And accepting that Brown v. Allen will remain the law unless and until Congress amends the habeas corpus statute, it still would not follow that Phelps could prevail in this case. He would have to prove a violation of the Constitution, and as an original matter that would not be easy to do. A state may not deprive a person of his liberty without due process of law. But it is not obvious that a prosecutor’s comment (if that is what it was in this case) on a defendant’s failure to try to exculpate himself when he was arrested denies the defendant due process of law, even expansively construed. To get to such a conclusion one must bring to bear somehow the provision of the Fifth Amendment that “No person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”
The language and history of the Fourteenth Amendment do not suggest that in taking the words of the due process clause from the Fifth Amendment and applying them to the states the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment meant also to apply the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause to the states. But neither is it clear that all that the framers wanted to do was to make sure that state criminal defendants had notice of the criminal charges and an opportunity to rebut them. Such an interpretation would give such defendants no protection against tactics that would make notice and hearing empty formalities. An alternative interpretation views “due process of law” as a compendious summation of the basic elements of fair criminal procedure in Anglo-American jurisprudence. See, e.g., Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. *1418319, 324-25, 58 S.Ct. 149, 151-52, 82 L.Ed. 288 (1937). Among these is the centuries-old principle of not forcing criminal defendants to testify against themselves. Even Thomas Hobbes, staunch defender of authoritarian government though he was, wrote that “if a man be interrogated by the sovereign, or his authority, concerning a crime done by himself, he is not bound, without assurance of pardon to confess it; because no man ... can be obliged by covenant to accuse himself.” Leviathan, pt. 2, ch. 21 (1651).
It does not necessarily follow that the states should be bound by every twist and turn of case law embroidering the words of the self-incrimination clause and the other provisions of the Bill of Rights governing procedure in federal criminal trials; it follows only that due process of state law encompasses the essential principle behind the self-incrimination clause. “The due process clause forbids compulsion to testify by fear of hurt, torture or exhaustion,” or by “any other type of coercion that falls within the scope of due process.” Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 54, 67 S.Ct. 1672, 1677, 91 L.Ed. 1903 (1947) (footnotes omitted). But there is still the problem that the self-incrimination clause speaks of compulsion to testify “in any criminal case,” and this case concerns statements made (or not made) out of court, at the police station before any case had been brought. If, however, the clause were limited, as both its language and history imply, see, e.g., DeLuna v. United States, 308 F.2d 140, 149 (5th Cir.1962), to testimony inside the courtroom, it would not do much for liberty; the police could beat a confession out of the defendant before the trial started and then put the confession into evidence as an admission and thus circumvent the policy against compulsory self-incrimination. The forms of justice would be observed, but there would be no substance.
Hence it was natural to interpret the clause as reaching a defendant’s self-incriminating statement coerced outside the courtroom but used against him inside the courtroom, a step that had been taken in Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 542, 18 S.Ct. 183, 186, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897), with respect to confessions put into evidence in federal criminal trials. Early cases involving the states invalidated convictions procured by coerced confessions as denying due process directly, without mention of the Fifth Amendment, see, e.g., Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278, 56 S.Ct. 461, 80 L.Ed. 682 (1936); later cases based the inadmissibility of such confessions on the principles of the Fifth Amendment, as applied to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Miranda v. Arizona, supra, 384 U.S. at 458-67, 86 S.Ct. at 1619-24; Friendly, supra, at 270.
The next step was taken in Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609, 85 S.Ct. 1229, 14 L.Ed.2d 106 (1965), which forbade a state prosecutor to invite the jury to draw an adverse inference from the defendant’s failure to take the stand and defend himself. Even ignoring the fact that the jury will draw the inference anyway, regardless of what judge or prosecutor say, I find it hard to see how such an invitation can be thought a means of compelling a person to accuse himself; the pressure it exerts is to give exculpatory, not incriminating, testimony. In any event the connection with the fundamental policy of the self-incrimination clause is sufficiently tenuous to make this an area where the states should be allowed to experiment rather than forced into a federal straitjacket.
The last link in the chain that connects the present case with the Habeas Corpus Act, Doyle v. Ohio, originally was linked to the policy against compulsory self-incrimination through Griffin as well as Miranda. But with the former link severed, Doyle now depends just on Miranda — the most controversial variation on the theme of self-incrimination.
The chain is too long and has too many weak links to provide a firm basis for federal judicial intervention in the criminal process of the states in a case such as the present one. Bearing in mind the somewhat insecure foundations for nullifying in a federal habeas corpus proceeding a state prisoner’s conviction on the basis even of a coerced confession, I am hard pressed to *1419understand doing so not because a confession was coerced but because the prosecutor pointed out the inconsistency between the prisoner’s voluntary, exculpatory testimony in court and his equally voluntary, uncoerced silence when arrested. We are a long way from the Habeas Corpus Act, the due process clause, and the self-incrimination clause. What should have been a loose garment of federal limitations on state criminal procedure has become a stifling corset.
But as the web of technicalities has tightened, inevitably the role of “harmless error” has expanded. Very few judges would think the prosecutor’s misstep in this case (if it was a misstep, which is unclear) serious enough to justify setting aside the conviction of a man plainly guilty of a very serious crime, and, fortunately, the doctrine of harmless error is at hand to avoid such an unjust result. Contrary to popular belief, few defendants prevail in federal habeas corpus proceedings even though the procedural rules that the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have proliferated for the protection of criminal defendants are too numerous and uncertain to be applied correctly in most cases. The concept of harmless error makes the federal courts’ commitment to excessive standards for the protection of criminal defendants harmless — or nearly so, for it makes the criminal justice system more expensive to operate, and may provide an escape hatch for criminals in borderline cases and in other cases may improve their position in plea bargaining. But the concept of harmless error — or, rather, as Judge Easter-brook emphasizes, concepts — does not help make constitutional criminal procedure simple or understandable.
As I said earlier, I regard the basic structure of federal habeas corpus as beyond correction by any court and view with some sympathy the argument for a flexible interpretation both of due process of law in the Fourteenth Amendment and of compulsory self-incrimination in the Fifth Amendment. It is true that a powerful argument against Brown v. Allen and hence against plenary review on federal habeas corpus of constitutional errors in state criminal trials can be built from Professor Bator’s article of two decades ago and from Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion in Brown v. Allen, see 344 U.S. at 532-48, 73 S.Ct. at 423-431, though an argument which today can be made only to Congress. It is also true that the process by which it has come to be accepted that a state criminal defendant can get his conviction set aside by a federal district court if the state convicted him by means of a confession that had been coerced out of court is not so obvious as might appear to someone familiar only with recent judicial decisions; yet I have no serious quarrel with this result. But if I had my druthers (which emphatically I do not) I would stop there, and decide this appeal on the simple ground that the prosecutor’s comment on what Phelps said and failed to say at the police station cannot sensibly be viewed as a method of coercing an out-of-court confession. No pressure was brought to bear on Phelps to confess and he did not confess or make damaging admissions. That ought to be the end of the case. I look forward to the day when the Supreme Court will simplify constitutional criminal procedure and allow us to decide cases such as this on common-sense grounds, rather than making us dance an elaborate quadrille that finds us however in the same place when the music stops — with a conclusion that the defendant is not in custody in violation of the Constitution.