Court Opinion

ID: 9428699
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:24:29.101377+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:14.757510
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
dissenting.
Once again the Court’s preoccupation with procedural niceties has needlessly complicated the disposition of a federal habeas corpus petition. Cf. Rose v. Lundy, ante, p. 509. Lurking in the background of this case is the question whether the failure to conduct a lineup has any bearing on the validity of a photographic identification. The Court may one day confront that question. For the present, however, it is more concerned with the Court of Appeals’ misunderstanding of the ill-defined mandate of Sumner v. Mata, 449 U. S. 539, and 28 U. S. C. § 2254(d).
We now seem to agree that § 2254(d) applies to a “basic, primary, or historical fact” and that it does not apply to a “mixed question of law and fact.” The articulation of this *601proposition certainly is an improvement on the Court’s opinion of last Term, which understandably confounded the Court of Appeals on remand. Judge Sneed in dissent read — incorrectly, it turns out — the Court’s opinion to apply § 2254(d) to mixed questions of law and fact. The panel majority read— correctly, it turns out — the Court’s opinion to apply § 2254(d) only to historical facts. The panel majority held that § 2254(d) simply was not implicated in this case because there was no conflict between its findings of historical facts and those of the California Court of Appeal. The disagreement today is whether that holding is correct. In my opinion, this question is more difficult than either the per curiam or Justice Brennan’s dissent indicates.* Indeed, the difficulty of the analysis behooves this Court either to “poin[t] the *602way” in a more extensive and reasoned fashion or to rely upon the good faith and good sense of the federal courts in applying the rather straightforward principle of § 2254(d) even though in particular cases its application might be unclear. The Court does neither today. Instead, it merely delays, for the sake of a procedural nicety, either the habeas corpus relief to which the Court of Appeals has held the respondent is entitled or a consideration of the merits of the only significant question that the petitioner has raised. I respectfully dissent from the Court’s summary disposition.

 The California Court of Appeal and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit worked from the same state trial court record. The state court made the rather brief findings “that there is no showing of influence by the investigating officers: that the witnesses had an adequate opportunity to view the crime; and that their descriptions are accurate.” App. to Pet. for Cert. C-8. The federal court analyzed the evidence in greater detail. It found that although the fight among witnesses and the perpetrators of the crime “would have at least provided an opportunity for the witnesses to observe the perpetrators of the crime[,]... the violence accompanying the incident and the threat presented by the knife would have, quite likely, diverted the witnesses’ attention”; that “the descriptions of the assailants were clearly not detailed descriptions”; and that “considerable pressure from both the prison officers and opposing prison factions had admittedly been brought to bear on both witnesses.” Mata v. Sumner, 611 F. 2d 754, 758-759 (1979).
Putting aside the problem of separating findings of historical fact from answers to mixed questions of law and fact, it is mostly an ineffectual exercise to attempt to decide whether the two sets of findings are conflicting. The first and second of the three findings of the federal court seem to supplement, but not contradict, the roughly corresponding findings of the state court. The third does conflict with the state court’s determination that there was “no showing of influence,” but the reason for the conflict is fully explained by the federal court’s reference to evidence in the record that the state court apparently overlooked or ignored. The Court of Appeals might have better complied with § 2254(d) by referring to this explanation. See § 2254(d)(8). In any event, since neither appellate court *602had the benefit of findings of fact by the judge who heard the evidence, it is a strange use of our scarce resources to review such trivial differences between two appellate courts’ analyses of this trial record.