Court Opinion

ID: 9428691
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:24:27.313988+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:14.710500
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
concurring in the judgment.
The important issue before the Court in this case is whether the conservative “total exhaustion” rule espoused now by two Courts of Appeals, the Fifth and the Ninth Circuits, see ante, at 513, n. 5, is required by 28 U. S. C. §§ 2254(b) and (c), or whether the approach adopted by eight other Courts of Appeals — that a district court may review the exhausted claims of a mixed petition — is the proper interpretation of the statute. On this basic issue, I firmly agree with the majority of the Courts of Appeals.
I do not dispute the value of comity when it is applicable and productive of harmony between state and federal courts, nor do I deny the principle of exhaustion that §12254(b) and (c) so clearly embrace. What troubles me is that the “total. exhaustion” rule, now adopted by this Court, can be read ipto the statute, as the Court concedes, ante, at 516-517, only by sheer force; that it operates as a trap for the uneducated and indigent pro se prisoner-applicant; that it delays the resolution of claims that are not frivolous; and that it tends to increase, rather than to alleviate, the caseload burdens on both state and federal courts. To use the old expression, the Court’s ruling seems to me to “throw the baby out with the bath water.”
*523Although purporting to rely on the policies upon which the exhaustion requirement is based, the Court uses that doctrine as “a blunderbuss to shatter the attempt at litigation of constitutional claims without regard to the purposes that underlie the doctrine and that called it into existence.” Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 410 U. S. 484, 490 (1973). Those purposes do not require the result the Court reaches; in fact, they support the approach taken by the Court of Appeals in this case and call for dismissal of only the unexhausted claims of a mixed habeas petition. Moreover, to the extent that the Court’s ruling today has any impact whatsoever on the workings of federal habeas, it will alter, I fear, the litigation techniques of very few habeas petitioners.
I
A
The Court correctly observes, ante, at 516-517, that neither the language nor the legislative history of the exhaustion provisions of §§ 2254(b) and (e) mandates dismissal of a habeas petition containing both exhausted and unexhausted claims. Nor does precedent dictate the result reached here. In Picard v. Connor, 404 U. S. 270 (1971), for example, the Court ruled that “once the federal claim has been fairly presented to the state courts, the exhaustion requirement is satisfied.” Id., at 275 (emphasis supplied). .Respondent complied with the direction in Picard with respect to his challenges to the trial court’s limitation of cross-examination of the victim and to at least some of the prosecutor’s allegedly improper comments.
The Court fails to note, moreover, that prisoners are not compelled to utilize every available state procedure in order to satisfy the exhaustion requirement. Although this Court’s precedents do not address specifically the appropriate treatment of mixed habeas petitions, they plainly suggest that state courts need not inevitably be given every opportunity to safeguard a prisoner’s constitutional rights and to pro*524vide him relief before a federal court may entertain his ha-beas petition.1
B
In reversing the judgment of the Sixth Circuit, the Court focuses, as it must, on the purposes the exhaustion doctrine is intended to serve. I do not dispute the importance of the exhaustion requirement or the validity of the policies on which it is based. But I cannot agree that those concerns will be sacrificed by permitting district courts to consider exhausted habeas claims.
The first interest relied on by the Court involves an offshoot of the doctrine of federal-state comity. ■ The Court hopes to preserve the state courts’ role in protecting constitutional rights, as well as to afford those courts an opportunity to correct constitutional errors and — somewhat patronizingly — to “become increasingly familiar with and hospitable toward federal constitutional issues.” Ante, at 519. My proposal, however, is not inconsistent with the Court’s concern for comity: indeed, the state courts have occasion to rule first on every constitutional challenge, and *525have ample opportunity to correct any such error, before it is considered by a federal court on habeas.
In some respects, the Court’s ruling appears more destructive than solicitous of federal-state comity. Remitting a ha-beas petitioner to state court to exhaust a patently frivolous claim before the federal court may consider a serious, exhausted ground for relief hardly demonstrates respect for the state courts. The state judiciary’s time and resources are then spent rejecting the obviously meritless unexhausted claim, which doubtless will receive little or no attention in the subsequent federal proceeding that focuses on the substantial exhausted claim. I can “conceive of no reason why the State would wish to burden its judicial calendar with a narrow issue the resolution of which is predetermined by established federal principles.” Roberts v. LaVallee, 389 U. S. 40, 43 (1967).2
The second set of interests relied upon by the Court involves those of federal judicial administration — ensuring that a § 2254 petition is accompanied by a complete factual record to facilitate review and relieving the district courts of the responsibility for determining when exhausted and unex-*526hausted claims are interrelated. If a prisoner has presented a particular challenge in the state courts, however, the ha-beas court will have before it the complete factual record relating to that claim.3 And the Court’s Draconian approach is hardly necessary to relieve district courts of the obligation to consider exhausted grounds for relief when the prisoner also has advanced interrelated claims not yet reviewed by the state courts. When the district court believes, on the facts of the case before it, that the record is inadequate or that full consideration of the exhausted claims is impossible, it has always been free to dismiss the entire habeas petition pending resolution of unexhausted claims in the state courts. Certainly, it makes sense to commit these decisions to the discretion of the lower federal courts, which will be familiar with the specific factual context of each case.
The federal courts that have addressed the issue of interrelatedness have had no difficulty distinguishing related from unrelated habeas claims. Mixed habeas petitions have been dismissed in toto when “the issues before the federal court logically depend for their relevance upon resolution of an un-exhausted issue,” Miller v. Hall, 536 F. 2d 967, 969 (CA1 1976), or when consideration of the exhausted claim “would necessarily be affected ...” by the unexhausted claim, United States ex rel. McBride v. Fay, 370 F. 2d 547, 548 (CA2 1966). Thus, some of the factors to be considered in determining whether a prisoner’s grounds for collateral relief are interrelated are whether the claims are based on the same constitutional right or factual issue, and whether they require an understanding of the totality of the circumstances and therefore necessitate examination of the entire record. Compare Johnson v. United States District Court, 519 F. 2d 738, 740 (CA8 1975) (prisoner’s challenge to the voluntariness of his guilty plea intertwined with his claims that at the time *527of the plea he was mentally incompetent and without effective assistance of counsel); United States ex rel. DeFlumer v. Mancusi, 380 F. 2d 1018, 1019 (CA2 1967) (dispute regarding the voluntariness of the prisoner’s guilty plea “would necessarily affect the consideration of the coerced confession claim, because a voluntary guilty plea entered on advice of counsel is a waiver of all non-jurisdictional defects in any prior stage of the proceedings”); United States ex rel. McBride v. Fay, 370 F. 2d, at 548; and United States ex rel. Martin v. McMann, 348 F. 2d 896, 898 (CA2 1965) (defendant’s challenge to the voluntariness of his confession related to his claim that the confession was obtained in violation of his right to the assistance of counsel and without adequate warnings), with Miller v. Hall, 536 F. 2d, at 969 (no problem of interrelationship when exhausted claims involved allegations that the police lacked probable cause to search defendant’s van and had no justification for failing to secure a search warrant, and unexhausted claim maintained that the arresting officer had committed perjury at the suppression hearing); and United States ex rel. Levy v. McMann, 394 F. 2d 402, 404 (CA2 1968).
The Court’s interest in efficient administration of the federal courts therefore does not require dismissal of mixed ha-beas petitions. In fact, that concern militates against the approach taken by the Court today. In order to comply with the Court’s ruling, a federal court now will have to review the record in a § 2254 proceeding at least summarily in order to determine whether all claims have been exhausted. In many cases a decision on the merits will involve only negligible additional effort. And in other cases the court may not realize that one of a number of claims is unexhausted until after substantial work has been done. If the district court must nevertheless dismiss the entire petition until all grounds for relief have been exhausted, the prisoner will likely return to federal court eventually, thereby necessitating duplicative examination of the record and consideration of the exhausted *528claims — perhaps by another district judge. See Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion, post, at 545. Moreover, when the § 2254 petition does find its way back to federal court, the record on the exhausted grounds for relief may well be stale and resolution of the merits more difficult.4
The interest of the prisoner and of society in “preserving] the writ of habeas corpus as a ‘swift and imperative remedy in all cases of illegal restraint or confinement,’” Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 410 U. S., at 490, is the final policy consideration to be weighed in the balance. Compelling the habeas petitioner to repeat his journey through the entire state and federal legal process before receiving a ruling on his exhausted claims obviously entails substantial delay.5 And if the prisoner must choose between undergoing that delay and forfeiting unexhausted claims, see ante, at 520-521, society is likewise forced to sacrifice either the swiftness of habeas or its availability to remedy all unconstitutional imprisonments.6 Dismissing only unexhausted *529grounds for habeas relief, while ruling on the merits of all unrelated exhausted claims, will diminish neither the promptness nor the efficacy of the remedy and, at the same time, will serve the state and federal interests described by the Court.7
II
The Court’s misguided approach appears to be premised on the specter of “the sophisticated litigious prisoner intent upon a strategy of piecemeal litigation . . . ,” whose aim is to have more than one day in court. Galtieri v. Wainwright, 582 F. 2d 348, 369 (CA5 1978) (en banc) (dissenting opinion). Even if it could be said that the Court’s view accurately reflects reality, its ruling today will not frustrate the Perry Masons of the prison populations. To avoid dismissal, they will simply include only exhausted claims in each of many successive habeas petitions. Those subsequent petitions may be dismissed, as Justice Brennan observes, only if the prisoner has “abused the writ” by deliberately choosing, for purposes of delay, not to include all his claims in one petition. See post, at 535-536 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). And successive habeas petitions that meet the *530“abuse of the writ” standard have always been subject to dismissal, irrespective of the Court’s treatment of mixed petitions today. The Court’s ruling in this case therefore provides no additional incentive whatsoever to consolidate all grounds for relief in one § 2254 petition.
Instead of deterring the sophisticated habeas petitioner who understands, and wishes to circumvent, the rules of exhaustion, the Court’s ruling will serve to trap the unwary pro se prisoner who is not knowledgeable about the intricacies of the exhaustion doctrine and whose only aim is to secure a new trial or release from prison. He will consolidate all conceivable grounds for relief in an attempt to accelerate review and minimize costs. But, under the Court’s approach, if he unwittingly includes in a § 2254 motion a claim not yet presented to the state courts, he risks dismissal of the entire petition and substantial delay before a ruling on the merits of his exhausted claims.
The Court suggests that a prisoner who files a mixed ha-beas petition will have the option of amending or resubmitting his complaint after deleting the unexhausted claims. See ante, at 510, 520. To the extent that prisoners are permitted simply to strike unexhausted claims from a § 2254 petition and then proceed as if those claims had never been presented, I fail to understand what all the fuss is about. In that event, the Court’s approach is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Court of Appeals, which directs thé district court itself to dismiss unexhausted grounds for relief.
I fear, however, that prisoners who mistakenly submit mixed petitions may not be treated uniformly. A prisoner’s opportunity to amend a §2254 petition may depend on his awareness of the existence of that alternative or on a sympathetic district judge who informs him of the option and permits the amendment. See Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 15(a). If the prisoner is required to refile the petition after striking the unexhausted claims, he may have to begin the process anew and thus encounter substantial delay before his com*531plaint again comes to the district court’s attention. See Stevens, J., post, at 546, n. 15.
Adopting a rule that will afford knowledgeable prisoners more favorable treatment is, I believe, antithetical to the purposes of the habeas writ. Instead of requiring a habeas petitioner to be familiar with the nuances of the exhaustion doctrine and the process of amending a complaint, I would simply permit the district court to dismiss unexhausted grounds for relief and consider exhausted claims on the merits.
Ill
Although I would affirm the Court of Appeals’ ruling that the exhaustion doctrine requires dismissal of only the unex-hausted claims in a mixed habeas petition, I would remand the case for reconsideration of the merits of respondent’s constitutional arguments. As the Court notes, the District Court erred in considering both exhausted and unexhausted claims when ruling on Lundy’s § 2254 petition. See ante, at 511-513. The Court of Appeals attempted to recharacterize the District Court’s grant of relief as premised on only the exhausted claims and ignored the District Court’s conclusion that the exhausted and unexhausted claims were interrelated. See App. 95-96.8
Even were the Court of Appeals’ recharacterization accurate, that court affirmed the District Court on the ground that respondent’s constitutional rights had been “seriously impaired by the improper limitation of his counsel’s cross-examination of the prosecutrix and by the prosecutorial mis*532conduct.” Id., at 96. The court does not appear to have specified which allegations of prosecutorial misconduct it considered in reaching this conclusion, and the record does not reflect whether the court improperly took into account instances of purported misconduct that respondent has never challenged in state court. See ante, at 511-512, n. 3. This ambiguity is of some importance because the court’s general statement does not indicate whether the court would have granted habeas relief on the confrontation claim alone, or whether its judgment is based on the combined effect of the limitation of cross-examination and the asserted prose-cutorial misconduct.
I therefore would remand the case, directing that the courts below dismiss respondent’s unexhausted claims and examine those that have been properly presented to the state courts in order to determine whether they are interrelated with the unexhausted grounds and, if not, whether they warrant collateral relief.

 In Brown v. Allen, 844 U. S. 443, 447 (1953), the Court made clear that' the exhaustion doctrine does not foreclose federal habeas relief whénever a state remedy is available; once a prisoner has presented his claim to the highest state court on direct appeal, he need not seek collateral relief from the State. Additionally, in Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 410 U. S. 484 (1973), the Court permitted consideration of a § 2254 petition seeking to force the State to afford the prisoner a speedy trial. Although the defendant had not yet been convicted, and therefore obviously had not utilized all available state procedures, and although he could have raised his Sixth Amendment claim as a defense at trial, the Court found the interests underlying the exhaustion doctrine satisfied because the petitioner had presented his existing constitutional claim to the state courts and because he was not attempting to abort a state proceeding or disrupt the State’s judicial process. See id., at 491. Finally, in Roberts v. LaVallee, 389 U. S. 40 (1967), the Court held that an intervening change in the relevant state law, which had occurred subsequent to the prisoner’s exhaustion of state remedies and which suggested that the state courts would look favorably on the request for relief, did not necessitate a return to state court.

 The Court fails to mention two related state interests relied upon by the petitioner warden — ensuring finality of convictions and avoiding the mooting of pending state proceedings. The finality of a conviction in no way depends, however, on a federal court’s treatment of a mixed habeas petition. If a State is concerned with finality, it may adopt a rule directing defendants to present all their claims at one time; a prisoner’s failure to adhere to that procedural requirement, absent cause and prejudice, would bar subsequent federal habeas relief on additional grounds. See Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72 (1977); Murch v. Mottram, 409 U. S. 41 (1972). As long as the State permits a prisoner to continue challenging his conviction on alternative grounds, a federal court’s dismissal of a mixed ha-beas petition will provide no particular incentive for consolidation of all potential claims in a single state proceeding.
A pending state proceeding involving claims not included in the prisoner’s federal habeas petition will be mooted only if the federal court grants the applicant relief. Even in those cases, though, the state courts will be saved the trouble of undertaking the useless exercise of ruling on unex-hausted claims that are unnecessary to the disposition of the case.

 The district court is free, of course, to order expansion of the record. See 28 U. S. C. §2254 Rule 7.

 A related federal interest mentioned by the Court is avoiding piecemeal litigation and encouraging a prisoner to bring all challenges to his state-court conviction in one § 2254 proceeding. As discussed in Part II, infra,. however, the Court’s approach cannot promote that interest because Congress has expressly permitted successive habeas petitions unless the subsequent petitions constitute “an abuse of the writ.” 28 U. S. C. §2254 Rule 9(b).

 In United States ex rel. Irving v. Casscles, 448 F. 2d 741, 742 (CA2 1971), cert. denied, 410 U. S. 925 (1973), and United States ex rel. DeFlumer v. Mancusi, 380 F. 2d 1018, 1019 (CA2 1967), for. example, mixed habeas petitions were dismissed because the exhausted and unex-hausted claims were interrelated. In each case, the prisoner was unable to obtain a federal-court judgment on the merits of his exhausted claims for years. See United States ex rel. Irving v. Henderson, 371 F. Supp. 1266 (SDNY 1974); United States ex rel. DeFlumer v. Mancusi, 443 F. 2d 940 (CA2), cert. denied, 404 U. S. 914 (1971).

 The petitioner warden insists, however, that improved judicial efficiency will benefit those prisoners with meritorious claims because their petitions will not be lost in the flood of frivolous § 2254 petitions. Even if the Court’s approach were to contribute to the efficient administration of *529justice, the contours of the exhaustion doctrine have no relationship to the merits of a habeas petition: a prisoner with one substantial exhausted claim will be forced to return to state court to litigate his remaining challenges, whereas a petitioner with frivolous, but exhausted, claims will receive, it is to be hoped, a prompt ruling on the merits from the federal court. See Stevens, J., dissenting, post, at 545.

 Even the Fifth and Ninth Circuits, which require dismissal of mixed ha-beas petitions in the typical case, do not follow the extreme position the Court takes today. The Ninth Circuit permits district courts to consider the exhausted grounds in a mixed petition if the prisoner has a reasonable explanation for failing to exhaust the other claims or if the state courts have delayed in ruling on those claims. See Gonzales v. Stone, 546 F. 2d 807, 810 (1976). The Fifth Circuit will review the merits of exhausted claims contained in a mixed petition if the district court has considered those claims. See Galtieri v. Wainwright, 582 F. 2d 348, 361-362 (1978) (en banc).

 This Court implies approval of the District Court’s finding of interrelatedness, see ante, at 519, but I am not convinced that the District Court’s conclusion was compelled. Conceivably, habeas relief could be justified only on the basis of a determination that the cumulative impact of the four alleged errors so infected the trial as to violate respondent’s due process rights. But Lundy’s four claims, on their face, are distinct in terms of the factual allegations and legal conclusions on which they depend.