Court Opinion

ID: 9706322
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:40:27.082685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:21.599988
License: Public Domain

PAUL H. ANDERSON, Justice.
I respectfully dissent. I would not adopt Teague in total, rather I would, as the Nevada Supreme Court has done, adopt the basic approach set forth in Teag-ue but with some significant qualifications. See Colwell v. State, 118 Nev. 807, 59 P.3d 463 (2002).
The majority correctly states that in Danforth v. Minnesota, 552 U.S. —, 128 S.Ct. 1029, 169 L.Ed.2d 859 (2008), the United States Supreme Court held that its decisions do not limit our authority as a state supreme court to fashion our own retroactivity rule when reviewing state criminal convictions. The Court took this position recognizing that the rule it fashioned in Teague “was tailored to the unique context of federal habeas, and therefore had no bearing on whether states could provide broader relief in their own post-conviction proceedings.” Id. at 1039. In essence, the Court held that we may choose to adopt a retroactivity standard broader than the one articulated by the Court in Teague. We should do just that.
Certain aspects of the “approach to ret-roactivity set forth in Teague [are] sound in principle.” Colwell, 59 P.3d at 471. Teague addresses a valid concern that the “finality of convictions not be unduly disturbed.” Colwell, 59 P.3d at 471. Teague also attempts to provide a clear rule on when relief is to be retroactive. Thus, the Supreme Court in Teague properly attempted to address some of the deficiencies inherent in the Linkletter-Stovall test, a test that sometimes led to wide variations in results and drew criticism that the application of the test turned courts into legislatures. See Desist v. United States, 394 U.S. 244, 257, 89 S.Ct. 1030, 22 L.Ed.2d 248 (1969) (Harlan, J. dissenting).
The policy interests of finality and uniformity addressed by Teague are important, but I conclude that the Supreme Court has applied the Teague rule so narrowly and strictly that many cases involving constitutional safeguards that warrant collateral review have not or will not receive such review. Unlike the majority, I conclude that the fact there have been no “watershed” rules announced by the Court in the 19 years since it decided Teague sends a signal that the Teague test as applied by the Court is “unyielding or unworkable.” I acknowledge that Teague may be more workable and applicable in *501the context of preventing excessive interference by federal habeas courts in their review of state court decisions. Nevertheless, when reviewing state criminal convictions, we should not limit our discretion in deciding retroactivity so narrowly. We should recognize the Court’s acknowledgment that Teague is designed to address federal concerns and accept the Court’s invitation to formulate our own rule to suit our own needs.
In Colwell, the Nevada Supreme Court broadened Teague⅛ two exceptions. Teague’s first exception gives retroactive effect to a new rule if that rule establishes that it is unconstitutional to prosecute certain “primary, private individual conduct” as criminal. Colwell, 59 P.3d at 472. Col-well acknowledged that some conduct beyond primary, private individual conduct might also be protected from criminalization and warrant retroactivity. Id. Colwell also rejected the “bright-line requirement” in Teague that results from its narrow and strict application of the “watershed” or “bedrock” significance requirement. Rather, the Nevada court declared that “if accuracy is seriously diminished without the rule, the rule is significant enough to warrant retroactive application.” Id.
More specifically, the Nevada court defined its rule as follows:
Thus, consistent with the Teague framework, we will not apply a new constitutional rule of criminal procedure to finalized cases unless it falls within either of two exceptions. There is no bright-line rule for determining whether a rule is new, but there are basic guidelines to follow. As this court has stated, “When a decision merely interprets and clarifies an existing rule ... and does not announce an altogether new rule of law, the court’s interpretation is merely a restatement of existing law.” Similarly, a decision is not new if “it has simply applied a well-established constitutional principle to govern a case which is closely analogous to those which have been previously considered in the prior case law.” We consider too sweeping the proposition, noted above, that a rule is new whenever any other reasonable interpretation of prior law was possible. However, a rule is new, for example, when the decision announcing it overrules precedent, “or disapprove^] a practice this Court has arguably sanctioned in prior cases, or overturn[s] a longstanding practice that lower courts had uniformly approved.”
When a rule is new, it will still apply retroactively in two instances: (1) if the rule establishes that it is unconstitutional to proscribe certain conduct as criminal or to impose a type of punishment on certain defendants because of their status or offense; or (2) if it establishes a procedure without which the likelihood of an accurate conviction is seriously diminished.
Id. at 471-72 (internal citations omitted).
The majority rejects Nevada’s modified version of Teague on the ground that such a standard will lead to the same problems that led to the rejection of the Linkletter-Stovall rule. Further, the majority expresses concern about distorting the allocation of “very limited resources available to the criminal justice system” and asserts that the Nevada rule improperly expands retroactive application of new rules of constitutional procedure to cases “where the absence of the new rules seriously diminishes the accuracy of the trial but did not affect the fundamental fairness of the criminal proceeding.” (Emphasis added.) I do not share these concerns. Moreover, I fail to see how a trial that is conducted under a rule that seriously diminishes the accuracy of the trial is a “fundamentally fair trial.” As the majority says, although *502a defendant may not be entitled to a perfect trial, he is entitled to a fair trial.
Thus, I disagree with the majority’s decision to adopt Teague in total because the rule is too narrow and strict in its application. Rather, I would adopt as a template many of the sound principles embodied in the framework of the Teague test but, as the Nevada Supreme Court did, “reserve our prerogatives to define and determine within this framework whether a rule is new and whether it falls within the two exceptions to non-retroactivity.” Colwell, 59 P.3d at 471. I agree with the Nevada Court that “adaptation of the approach taken in Teague and its progeny” will provide us “with a fair and straightforward framework for determining retroactivity.” Id. at 472. Adopting a modified Teague standard would enable us, as the Oregon Supreme Court has said, to be “free to choose the degree of retroactivity or pros-pectivity which we believe appropriate to the particular rule under consideration, so long as we give federal constitutional rights at least as broad a scope as the United States Supreme Court requires.” State v. Fair, 263 Or. 383, 502 P.2d 1150, 1152 (1972).