Court Opinion

ID: 9481659
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:27:39.046285+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:29.628085
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Chief Judge,
concurring:
What a marvelous Catch-22 the law of federal habeas corpus now is! You lose in state court because your counsel did not make a timely objection. Your federal ha-beas petition is barred because no “objective factor externa] to the defense impeded [your] counsel’s efforts to comply with the State’s procedural rule,” Murray v. Carrier, 477 U.S. 478, 488, 106 S.Ct. 2639, 2645, 91 L.Ed.2d 397 (1986), and you therefore cannot show “cause” and “prejudice” un*425der Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72, 87, 97 S.Ct. 2497, 2506, 53 L.Ed.2d 594 (1977). And, since you have not raised the point that your trial counsel’s default was incompetency, that issue cannot be considered by the federal court. But if it is raised in a subsequent petition, it will be considered an abuse of the writ, McCleskey v. Zant, — U.S. -, -, 111 S.Ct. 1454, 1466-68, 113 L.Ed.2d 517 (1991), because it was not raised previously.
The dialogue between federal and state courts so penetratingly examined, for example, by the late Robert M. Cover and T. Alexander Aleinikoff in their seminal piece, Dialectical Federalism: Habeas Corpus and the Court, 86 Yale L.J. 1035, 1052 (1977), is now in a very real sense a monologue, much like it was at the time of Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309, 35 S.Ct. 582, 59 L.Ed. 969 (1915), and before Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86, 43 S.Ct. 265, 67 L.Ed. 543 (1923) and Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U.S. 103, 55 S.Ct. 340, 79 L.Ed. 791 (1935) led to Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 73 S.Ct. 397, 97 L.Ed. 469 (1953). Thus, no longer is it true that “no conviction can stand unless both [state and federal] tribunals concur.” 86 Yale L.J. at 1052. Rather, as long as the state courts approve, a conviction will more often than not be immune from federal court scrutiny, even where federal constitutional rights have clearly been violated.
So too has the Court turned back the clock with the guilt/innocence emphasis referred to in Murray v. Carrier, 477 U.S. at 496, 106 S.Ct. at 2649 and Smith v. Murray, 477 U.S. 527, 537-38, 106 S.Ct. 2661, 2667-68, 91 L.Ed.2d 434 (1986). As Cover and Aleinikoff so aptly point out, reducing analysis of a constitutional right to its functional level leads to a cost-benefit determination which is inconsistent with the very idea of a right. See 86 Yale L.J. at 1092-95. This is of course what happened to the exclusionary rule when the Court began to analyze it solely in terms of its deterrent effect, rather than as a constitutional requirement as it had previously been analyzed, for example, in Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 391-92, 398, 34 S.Ct. 341, 343-44, 346, 58 L.Ed. 652 (1914). See Oakes, The Exclusionary Rule — A Relic of the Past?, in Constitutional Government in America 151 (R. Collins ed. 1980).
To be sure, there are still some rights that prevent prosecution or punishment irrespective of guilt or innocence — assistance of counsel, double jeopardy, denial of speedy trial, breach of a plea agreement and the like. Perhaps Miranda rights still have some of that vitality, Minnick v. Mississippi, — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 486, 112 L.Ed.2d 489 (1990), though Massiah rights perhaps do not, Illinois v. Perkins, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 2394, 110 L.Ed.2d 243 (1990). But the continued focus on guilt or innocence, rather than the fairness of a trial, inevitably will, I fear, result in reduction of the given right’s content. Justice Brennan said it all in his dissent in Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976):
The Court ... argues that habeas relief for non-“guilt-related” constitutional claims is not mandated because such claims do not affect the “basic justice” of a defendant’s detention ...; this is presumably because the “ultimate goal” of the criminal justice system is “truth and justice.” This denigration of constitutional guarantees and constitutionally mandated procedures, relegated by the Court to the status of mere utilitarian tools, must appall citizens taught to expect judicial respect and support for their constitutional rights. Even if punishment of the “guilty” were society’s highest value — and procedural safeguards denigrated to this end — in a constitution that a majority of the members of this Court would prefer, that is not the ordering of priorities under the Constitution forged by the Framers, and this Court’s sworn duty is to uphold that Constitution and not to frame its own. The procedural safeguards mandated in the Framers’ Constitution are not admonitions to be tolerated only to the extent they serve functional purposes that ensure that the “guilty” are punished and the “innocent” freed; rather, every guarantee enshrined in the Constitution, our basic charter and the guarantor of our most precious liber*426ties, is by it endowed with an independent vitality and value, and this Court is not free to curtail those constitutional guarantees even to punish the most obviously guilty.
Id. at 523-24, 96 S.Ct. at 3066 (citations and footnote omitted) (emphasis in original).
I said the following in my Madison Lecture in 1979, The Proper Role of the Federal Courts in Enforcing the Bill of Rights, 54 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 911 (1979):
The point that I am making here is that our accusatorial system is constructed around a series of concerns about individual rights which set limits on the pursuit of truth and the precision of factfinding. On these concerns we have placed a higher value, having learned that not to do so is to permit and foster an oppressive state, since the people who direct or operate its prosecuting machinery may not be presumed always to act out of the highest motivations or with deepest principle. The ascertainment of “truth,” an elusive quest at best, then must sometimes yield to this higher value. It may be, as the Chief Justice said in dissent in Brewer v. Williams, “absurd,” “bizarre,” “remarkable,” “intolerable” that incriminating statements made in violation of the sixth amendment may not be admissible in evidence, but would it not be even more “bizarre” and “intolerable” if such evidence were admissible? Why stop with the fourth and sixth amendments? Why not admit confessions extracted involuntarily, as judged by present constitutional standards, at least if they turn out to be “true”?
Id. at 933-34 (citations and footnote omitted). But see Arizona v. Fulminante, — U.S. -, -, 111 S.Ct. 1246, 1262-64, 113 L.Ed.2d 302 (1991) (holding that admission of coerced confessions may constitute “harmless error”).
I join in the result of the majority’s opinion because I am bound to follow the Supreme Court. Whether I do so happily, the reader may be the judge.