Court Opinion

ID: 9426438
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:57.60043+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:00.844479
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall joins, dissenting.
I join my Brother Stevens’ dissent but add this separate dissent to record my disagreement with the plurality’s view that the Government’s refusal to furnish an indigent defendant a free trial transcript in a proceeding under 28 U. S. C. § 2255, upon merely a showing of in-digency, does not deny respondent equal protection of the laws secured against the Federal Government, as the plurality concedes, through the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. See Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 87 (1976); Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S. 636, 638 n. 2 (1975).
“[T]he central aim of our entire judicial system [is that] all people charged with crime must, so far as the law is concerned, 'stand on an equality before the bar of justice in every American court,’ ” Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S. 12, 17 (1956) (plurality opinion), for this is a "country dedicated to affording equal justice to all and *331special privileges to none in the administration of its criminal law.” Id., at 19. “Our decisions for more than a decade now have made clear that differences in access to the instruments needed to vindicate legal rights, when based upon the financial situation of the defendant, are repugnant to the Constitution.” Roberts v. LaVallee, 389 U. S. 40, 42 (1967). Thus, in Griffin, the Court held that “[djestitute defendants must be afforded as adequate appellate review as defendants who have money enough to buy transcripts,” 351 U. S., at 19, and that therefore the State must furnish the indigent defendant with a free trial transcript for purposes of direct appeal.
The Griffin principle of equality was not limited to transcripts for purposes of direct appellate review. In Smith v. Bennett, 365 U. S. 708 (1961), the Court invalidated a filing fee for state habeas corpus as applied to indigents. The invalidation was held to be required by an earlier decision holding that a State could not require an indigent to pay a filing fee before being allowed to appeal in one of its courts. Burns v. Ohio, 360 U. S. 252 (1959). Later, Lane v. Brown, 372 U. S. 477, 484 (1963), held that “Smith makes clear that the Griffin principle also applies to state collateral proceedings . ...”
The Griffin equality principle was next applied to appeals from state habeas proceedings. In Long v. District Court of Iowa, 385 U. S. 192 (1966), the Court, stating that “having established a post-conviction procedure, a State cannot condition its availability to an indigent upon any financial consideration,” held that an indigent defendant must be furnished a free transcript of his state habeas proceedings for purposes of appeal from a denial of that relief. Id., at 194. And in Gardner v. California, 393 U. S. 367 (1969), the Court went still further and required the furnishing of a transcript of a habeas proceeding for the purposes of a second such *332proceeding. Thus, the plurality’s opinion today that respondent may be required to show more than indigency before being entitled to his trial transcript for purposes of collateral review is a plain departure from Griffin and its progeny.
The denial in this case is particularly egregious, for one of respondent’s claims on the merits is that he was denied effective assistance of counsel. Substantiation of such a claim is virtually impossible without the aid of a trial transcript. Yet the plurality denigrates respondent’s claim as a “naked allegation.” Ante, at 327. Essentially, therefore, he is denied a transcript for making an unsubstantiated allegation, an allegation that obviously he cannot establish without a transcript.1
It bears emphasis that where, as here, denial of equal protection is the issue, it matters not, under our cases, that the indigent had a fair opportunity to present a defense and have his conviction reviewed on direct appeal. The unfairness born of discrimination denying equal protection is as offensive to the Constitution as any unfairness resulting from procedural deficiencies in the criminal system. Thus, I cannot accept the plurality’s argument that respondent could constitutionally be de*333nied a free transcript because “[Respondent in this case had an opportunity for direct appeal, and had he chosen to pursue it he would have been furnished a free transcript of the trial proceedings.” Ante, at 324. The Constitution demands that respondent, despite his indigency, be afforded the same opportunity for collateral review of his conviction as the nonindigent.2 “If [the Government] has a general policy of allowing [collateral relief], it cannot make lack of means an effective bar to the exercise of this opportunity. The [Government] cannot keep the word of promise to the ear of those illegally convicted and break it to their hope.” Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S., at 24 (Frankfurter, J., concurring in judgment).
The plurality’s reliance, ante, at 324, upon Ross v. Moffitt, 417 U. S. 600, 616 (1974), for the proposition that “[i]n the context of a criminal proceeding [equal protection] require[s] only 'an adequate opportunity to present [one’s] claims fairly’ ” is patently misplaced. This quotation from Boss, read in context, speaks not merely to equality of opportunity in the overall criminal process, but also to equality of opportunity at any stage of the process where the validity of the defendant’s restraint or conviction is the primary consideration.
*334I reject as wholly fallacious the argument that adequacy of opportunity to present claims at trial and on direct appeal so far diminishes the importance of collateral review, that discrimination between indigent and nonindigent in post-conviction proceedings is constitutionally tolerable. That argument is implicitly if not explicitly rejected in the unbroken line of our decisions that make no distinction, for purposes of equal protection analysis, between collateral proceedings and trials and direct appeals. Any distinction must necessarily be constitutionally intolerable where the stakes are no less than the constitutionality of a criminal conviction. Any distinction would also be plainly inconsistent with the explicit recognition given habeas corpus in Art. I, § 9, cl. 2, of the Constitution. See Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391, 399-403 (1963). And for federal prisoners, “history makes clear that § 2255 was intended to afford federal prisoners a remedy identical in scope to federal habeas corpus.” Davis v. United States, 417 U. S. 333, 343 (1974).
Today’s decision empties of all promise the Court’s assurance only six years ago that decisions applying Griffin “have pointedly demonstrated that the passage of time has heightened rather than weakened the attempts [by this Court] to mitigate the disparate treatment of indigents in the criminal process.” Williams v. Illinois, 399 U. S. 235, 241 (1970). 1 dissent.

 Respondent’s other allegation is insufficiency of the evidence. Two of our decisions plainly indicate that this allegation suffices to require provision of a verbatim transcript. See Mayer v. City of Chicago, 404 U. S. 189 (1971); Draper v. Washington, 372 U. S. 487 (1963). Mayer also indicated that an allegation of prejudicial prose-cutorial misconduct, 404 U. S., at 198, also requires provision of a transcript. That claim, for purposes of substantiation on appeal or collateral review, is like respondent’s first claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Mayer, 404 U. S., at 195, held that where the grounds of appeal are insufficiency of the evidence and prosecutorial misconduct, the defendant need only “make out a colorable need for a complete transcript” in order to be entitled to it.

 Indeed, in Burns v. Ohio, 360 U. S. 252 (1959), a filing fee for direct appeals was held invalid as applied to indigents, even though the indigent petitioner there had already received one appellate review of his conviction. As the Court stated:
“[T]he State argues that petitioner received one appellate review of his conviction in Ohio, while in Griffin, Illinois had left the defendant without any judicial review of his conviction. This is a distinction without a difference for, as Griffin holds, once the State chooses to establish appellate review in criminal cases, it may not foreclose indigents from access to any phase of that procedure because of their poverty.” Id., at 257.