Court Opinion

ID: 9427622
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:24.854528+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:08.523359
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
dissenting.
In today’s decision, the Court professes to “agree that the guarantees of [the Speech or Debate] Clause are vitally important to our system of government and therefore are en*509titled to be treated by the courts with the sensitivity that such important values require.” Ante, at 506. Nonetheless, it refuses to hold mandamus an appropriate vehicle for assuring the protections of the Clause because “Helstoski could readily have secured review of the ruling complained of and all objectives now sought, by direct appeal to the Court of Appeals from the District Court order denying his motion to dismiss the indictment.” Ibid.
Mr. Helstoski may well be excused if he views the Court’s holding as if it were a line out of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” He cannot utilize mandamus because he should have sought a direct appeal. But he cannot seek a direct appeal, because that avenue is time barred. Ante, at 508 n. 4. Of course, the dilemma could have been short-circuited had Helstoski brought an immediate appeal at the time his motion for dismissal' of the indictment was denied. Unfortunately, he could not have known that avenue of relief was available until today — for we have never before held that the denial of a claim that an indictment violates the Speech or Debate Clause is an exception to the longstanding rule forbidding interlocutory appeals.* And, as the Court holds, today it is too late. Values as “vitally important” as those guaranteed by the Speech or Debate Clause are entitled to more sensitive treatment.

The Court makes the surprising assertion that Helstoski should have anticipated today’s holding on the basis of a footnote in a 1975 Third Circuit opinion dealing with a different issue. (That opinion, like this Court’s decision in Abney v. United States, 431 U. S. 651 (1977), was limited to the double jeopardy issue. Abney was announced far too late to have helped the defendant.) Although I agree with the Court’s extension of the Abney principle from double jeopardy claims to those based upon the Speech or Debate Clause, I do not regard the extension as obvious. Nor, apparently, does the Government, as it carefully refrains from endorsing that view. See Brief for United States 92. I certainly would not use it as a basis for penalizing a former Congressman in his assertion of a principle so “vitally important to our system of government.” Ante, at 506.