Court Opinion

ID: 9463540
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:09:38.14621+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:09.818764
License: Public Domain

TRASK, Circuit Judge,
Dissenting:
I do not find section 5036 so ambiguous that it requires the construction the majority here would give it. In construing section 5036, the majority refers to section 5032. Section 5032 provides that a juvenile shall not be proceeded against in any court of the United States “unless the Attorney General, after investigation, certifies to an appropriate district court of the United States” that a state court does not have jurisdiction or refuses to assume jurisdiction over the juvenile. This certification is required to give jurisdiction to the United States District Court. While it is an action triggering device which authorizes the federal district court to proceed, - certification does not answer the question of how detention for purposes of section 5036 shall be measured.
Detention is a fact determination and a separate issue. Here, the certification was not made until January 26 (Clerk’s Record at 43). The trial commenced on February 19. The period between these two dates is well within the thirty day period set forth in section 5036. But certification could conceivably have been made ten days earlier or ten days later, and had it been made 10 days earlier, the State of Washington might have refused to surrender its prisoner to an informal request by the federal prosecutor or even to a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum. See Carbo v. United States, 364 U.S. 611, 81 S.Ct. 338, 5 L.Ed.2d 329 (1961).
The Supreme Court declared in Ponzi v. Fessendon, 258 U.S. 254, 260, 42 S.Ct. 309, 310, 66 L.Ed. 607 (1922), that:
“[t]he chief rule which preserves our two systems of courts from actual conflict of jurisdiction is that the court which first takes the subject-matter of the litigation into its control, whether this be person or property, must be permitted to exhaust its remedy, to attain which it assumed control, before the other court shall attempt to take it for its purpose.”
This recognition of the rights of the other jurisdictions appears to me to be a per*1284suasive argument that the period of detention of an independent state system should not be tacked to that of the federal system for the purpose of section 5036, and that Congress did not intend such a result.
The majority would remand to permit the district court to determine whether more than 30 days elapsed from the date that the prosecuting officer for the federal government “could have certified to the conditions of Section 5032, acting with reasonable diligence,” and the date of trial.
I point out again that the date of certification has no necessary relevance to the time of detention. Further, the certification procedure of section 5032 appears to express a concern that the federal government shall not intrude into juvenile matters unless the state does not have programs and services for meeting the needs of its own juveniles. Section 5032 does not address itself to speedy trial rights or to the period of detention set forth in section 5036.
Finally, I note that it appears entirely unclear from the record that more than 30 days of detention elapsed after the federal government obtained custody and the day of trial. While appellant in his brief directs his argument principally to the combined period of detention, he does observe that
“[i]t was eventually decided that the Federal government must assume jurisdiction and, on January 21, 1976, the Federal government officially assumed jurisdiction through a brief pre-arraignment hearing before Magistrate Lonny R. Suko (C. Tr. 41).”
The brief for the government likewise states that it assumed custody on January 21. If this be true then I would hold that the trial began within the allowable period of time, irrespective of the tacking problem.
I would affirm.