Court Opinion

ID: 9427393
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:34.404941+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:06.740880
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan and Mr. Justice Marshall join, dissenting.
The concept of a “false” not-guilty plea has no place in our jurisprudence.1 A defendant has a constitutional right to require the State to support its accusation with evidence.2 He is therefore given an unqualified right — before trial when he retains the presumption of innocence — to plead not guilty.3 *229Because the entry of such a plea cannot at once be criminally punishable and constitutionally protected, a statute that has no other purpose or effect than to penalize assertion of the right not to plead guilty is “patently unconstitutional.” The Court so held in United States v. Jackson, 390 U. S. 570, 581, and that holding is dispositive of this case.4
Today, however, the Court decides that a defendant who has been convicted after a full trial may be punished not only for the crime charged in the indictment but additionally for entering a “false” plea of not guilty. The holding in Jackson, though not specifically overruled, has been divorced from the rationale on which it rested.
New Jersey does not seriously contend that § 2A: 113-3 has any purpose or effect other than to penalize assertion of the right not to plead guilty. Its argument that the statute is justified by a valid state interest in conserving scarce prosecu-*230torial resources is simply a restatement of the obvious purpose of the law to motivate defendants to plead guilty instead of exercising their expensive right to trial. If appellee is correct in its assertion that the statute has been effective as a money-saving inducement to guilty pleas, that success is necessarily attributable to the deterrent effect of the penalty imposed on those who resist the inducement.
In its attempt to distinguish Jackson, the State argues that its statute imposes no penalty for “falsely” pleading not guilty because it provides the same maximum punishment regardless of the plea. That argument is beside the point because the statute provides a significantly more severe standard of punishment for the defendant who exercises his constitutional rights than for the one who submits without trial. For the former, a mandatory life sentence is prescribed • whereas for the latter, life is “only the maximum in a discretionary spectrum of length” that extends downward anywhere from a term of 30 years to no term at all. Dobbert v. Florida, 432 U. S. 282, 300. Whether viewed in light of the legislative purpose in enacting the statute or in light of its impact on the defendant’s choice of how to plead, this difference in punitive standards has the same “onerous” effect as if the maximum, as well as the minimum, penalty differed.5 Just as in Jackson, the *231statute subjects the defendant who stands trial to a substantial risk of greater punishment than the defendant who pleads guilty.6
Nor is this statutory scheme the equivalent of a plea bargain negotiated between defense counsel and the prosecutor. While such bargains serve a state interest in common with §2A: 113-3, they do so without penalizing the defendant’s assertion of his legal rights. In the bargaining process, indi*232vidual factors relevant to the particular case may be considered by the prosecutor in charging and by the trial judge in sentencing, regardless of the defendant’s plea;7 the process does not mandate a different standard of punishment depending solely on whether or not a plea is entered.8
Of even greater importance is the fact that a defendant who refuses a plea bargain will not be punished for his constitutionally protected recalcitrance; whatever punishment he receives will be for his conduct in committing the offense or offenses the State has proved at trial.9 In contrast, a defendant who faces a more severe range of statutory penalties simply because he has insisted on a trial, is subjected to punishment not only for the crime the State has proved but also for the “offense” of entering a “false” not-guilty plea.
Because the legislature, the voice of the community in iden*233tifying crimes and penalties,10 has inflexibly engraved the different standard of punishment in the statute itself, New Jersey may not disavow or disparage its policy of imposing a special punishment simply because a person has done what the law plainly allows him to do. As the Court reiterated last Term, the implementation of such a policy inevitably produces a due process violation of the most basic sort.11
The right of the defendant to stand absolutely mute before the bar of justice and to force the government to make its case without his aid has been accepted since the earliest days of the Republic.12 That silence, and its formal invocation by entry of a not-guilty plea, cannot retain the protection of the Fifth Amendment and be simultaneously a punishable offense. The same act cannot be both lawful and unlawful. That is the essence of the Court's holding in Jackson. I respectfully dissent from its repudiation.

 “[T]he plea is not evidence. Nor is it testimonial. It is not under oath. Nor is it subject to cross-examination. When it is 'not guilty,’ it has no effect as testimony or evidence .... The function of that plea is to put the Government to its proof and to preserve the right to defend. . . .
“If the plea were testimonial or evidentiary, the court would have no power to demand it. . . . But if, having used its power to extract the plea for its proper purpose, it can go further and over the defendant’s objection convert or pervert it into evidence, in substance if not in form it compels the defendant to testify in his own case. That it has no power to do.” Wood v. United States, 75 U. S. App. D. C. 274, 282-283, 128 F. 2d 265, 273-274 (1942) (Rutledge, J.).
See also Sorrells v. United States, 287 U. S. 435, 452 (not-guilty plea is not inconsistent with entrapment defense even though latter implies admission that the offense was committed); State v. Valentina, 71 N. J. L. 552, 556, 60 A. 177, 179 (1905) (not-guilty plea and confession of guilt are not inconsistent).

 Among the implications of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination is that “[g] overaments, state and federal, [may be] constitutionally compelled to establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not by coercion prove a charge against an accused out of his own mouth.” Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1, 7-8. As expressed by Dean Wigmore, the Fifth Amendment gives the individual the right to “requir[e] the government in its contest with the individual to shoulder the entire load.” 8 J. Wigmore, Evidence § 2251, p. 317 (McNaughten rev. ed. 1961), quoted in Murphy v. Waterfront Comm’n, 378 U. S. 52, 55.

 “Upon that plea the accused may stand, shielded by the presumption of his innocence, until it appears that he is guilty.” Davis v. United States, 160 U. S. 469, 485-486. See Byrd v. United States, 119 U. S. App. D. C. *229360, 362, 342 F. 2d 939, 941 (1965); United States v. Mayfield, 59 F. 118, 119 (ED La. 1893).
Long before the incorporation of the Fifth Amendment into the Fourteenth, the States had firmly enforced these principles:
“[A] plea of not guilty, to a criminal charge, at once calls to the defense of defendant the presumption of innocence, denies the credibility of evidence for the State, and casts upon the State the burden of establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. . . . These words are not mere formalities, but express vital principles of our criminal jurisprudence and criminal procedure. These principles ought not to be readily abandoned, or worn away by invasion.” State v. Hardy, 189 N. C. 799, 80-L-805, 128 S. E. 152, 155 (1925).

 “Our problem is to decide whether the Constitution permits the establishment of such a death penalty, applicable only to those defendants who assert the right to contest their guilt before a jury. The inevitable effect of any such provision is, of course, to discourage assertion of the Fifth Amendment right not to plead guilty and .to deter exercise of the Sixth Amendment right to demand a jury trial. If the provision had no other purpose or effect than to chill the assertion of constitutional rights by penalizing those who choose to exercise them, then it would be patently unconstitutional.” United States v. Jackson, 390 U. S., at 581 (footnote omitted).

 This conclusion was the predicate for the Court’s holding in Lindsey v. Washington, 301 U. S. 397. In that case the Court held that a change in statutory sentencing provisions for burglary could not be applied retroactively even though the new provisions did not increase the 15-year maximum sentence, but only made it mandatory:
“The effect of the new statute is to make mandatory what was before only the maximum sentence. . . .
“Removal of the possibility of a sentence of less than fifteen years . . . operates to [defendants’] detriment in the sense that the standard of punishment adopted by the new statute is more onerous than that of the old.” Id., at 400-401.
Accord, Dobbert v. Florida, 432 U. S. 282, 300 (“[0]ne is not barred from challenging a change in the penal code on ex post facto grounds simply because the sentence he received under the new law was not more onerous *231than that which he might have received under the old”). See also Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U. S. 586, 619 (Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment) (A statutory sentencing scheme under which “a defendant can plead not guilty only by enduring a semimandatory [death-penalty provision], rather than [the] purely discretionary, capital-sentencing provision” applicable to defendants who plead guilty creates a “disparity between a defendant’s prospects under the two sentencing alternatives [that] is . . . too great to survive under Jackson”).
Mr. Justice Stone’s opinion for the unanimous Court in Lindsey also disposes of appellee’s argument that the statute here is distinguishable from the one in Jackson because it does not make death the consequence of a “false” not-guilty plea: When “a punishment for murder of life imprisonment or death [is] changed to death alone,” it is “only a more striking instance of the detriment which ensues from the revision of a statute providing for a maximum and a minimum punishment by making the maximum compulsory.” 301 U. S., at 401. In either case, “[i]t is plainly to the substantial disadvantage of petitioners to be deprived of all opportunity to receive” less than the maximum. Id., at 402-403. See also Brady v. United States, 397 U. S. 742, 747-752, holding that a defendant who pleads guilty to avoid the death penalty is entitled to no different treatment from one who pleads guilty to avoid any other “maximum sentence authorized by law.”

 In one important respect, the statute invalidatedin Jackson was less onerous than the New Jersey statute involved in this case. The Jackson defendant could avoid the more severe penalty by merely forgoing his Sixth Amendment right to a jury and trying the case to the court alone. Here, however, the price of avoiding the statutory penalty for an incorrect plea of not guilty is the waiver not only of the right to a jury but also the right to put the government to its proof, to confront one’s accusers, and to present a defense. See Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U. S. 238, 243.

 See North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U. S. 711, 723. Whenever this flexibility and individualization has given way to prosecutorial or judicial vindictiveness against those who assert their rights, the Court has condemned the practice. Id., at 725. The message of Pearce, as well as Jackson; Brady v. United States, supra; Chaffin v. Stynchcombe, 412 U. S. 17; and Bordenkircher v. Hayes, 434 U. S. 357, is that where the legislature, prosecutor, judge, or all three “deliberately employ their charging and sentencing powers to induce [a] defendant to tender a plea of guilty/' Brady, supra, at 751 n. 8, and where they do so with the “objective [of] penalizing] a person’s reliance on his legal rights, [such action] is 'patently unconstitutional.’ ” Bordenkircher, supra, at 363, quoting Chaffin, supra, at 32-33, n. 20.

 This point was made most forcefully in Brady v. United States. In that case, the Court upheld a conviction under the same statute challenged in Jackson. However, petitioner in Brady, unlike respondent in Jackson, had not received a higher sentence as “the price of a jury trial.” 397 U. S., at 746. Instead, he had knowingly and voluntarily pleaded guilty and brought himself within the lower range of penalties provided for those who did not insist upon trial. The Court affirmed the conviction because the plea-bargaining process, even when buttressed by the invalid statute, was not “inherently coercive of guilty pleas.” Ibid.

 See Bordenkircher v. Hayes, supra, at 364.

 See Coker v. Georgia, 433 U. S. 584, 594. Cf. United States v. Hudson and Goodwin, 7 Cranch 32.

 “To punish a person because he has done what the law plainly allows him to do is a due process violation of the most basic sort.” Bordenkircher v. Hayes, supra, at 363.

 United States v. Hare, 26 P. Cas. 148 (No. 15,304) (CC Md. 1818); United States v. Gibert, 25 F. Cas. 1287 (No. 15,204) (CC Mass. 1834) (Story, J.). The days have long since passed when a refusal to plead qualified as an admission of guilt or an invitation for the extraction of a plea through torture or piene forte et dure. See McPhaul v. United States, 364 U. S. 372, 386-387 (Douglas, J., dissenting); In re Smith, 13 F. 25 (CC Mass. 1882). Today, it is universally accepted that silence at arraignment is equivalent to a plea of not guilty. See United States v. Beadon, 49 F. 2d 164 (CA2 1931), cert. denied, 284 U. S. 625.