Court Opinion

ID: 9480700
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:55:41.583221+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:50.843666
License: Public Domain

RONEY, Senior Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur in the result reached by the Court and all of the opinion, except that portion which holds that Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976), does not apply to any case where the state appellate court has not written an opinion on the Fourth Amendment issue and the state trial court did not set forth specific findings. I doubt if this is a very sound basis for deciding whether the defendant has received a full and fair hearing in the state appellate court. We affirm too many cases without opinion to suggest that a defendant has not received a full and fair hearing of every point asserted on appeal.
If the absence of an opinion makes it uncertain whether the appellate court has considered a particular argument, there being some other avenue to the result, then Stone v. Powell would not foreclose federal consideration if the issue turns the case in federal court. But if the defendant had a full opportunity to present the point, did present it, and the point had to be considered in order to reach the result obtained in the state court, then there should be a presumption that the court did in fact consider the argument and purposely rejected it after full consideration, regardless of the specific findings of the trial court.
As the Court points out, the state trial court gave Tukes a full and fair evidentiary hearing relating both to his coerced consent and invocation of counsel claims. The record reveals that the necessary material historical facts were developed at the suppression hearing, and, therefore, meaningful appellate review could have provided for the legal issues to be fully briefed and argued with the luxury of time for contemplation and research by counsel. In fact this Court has reviewed this issue on the same record that was before the state appellate court. Tukes raised the same Fourth Amendment claims before the state *519court of appeal as he does before this Court. This meets the holding in Stone v. Powell:
In sum, we conclude that where the State has provided an opportunity for full and fair litigation of a Fourth Amendment claim, a state prisoner may not be granted federal habeas corpus relief on the ground that evidence obtained in an unconstitutional search or seizure was introduced at his trial. In this context the contribution of the exclusionary rule, if any, to the effectuation of the Fourth Amendment is minimal and the substantial societal costs of application of the rule persist with special force, (footnotes omitted).
428 U.S. at 494-95, 96 S.Ct. at 3052-53.
As the federal courts deal with their caseloads by foregoing opinions reciting every issue argued by the parties, it is counterproductive to burden ourselves with the consideration of Fourth Amendment claims that were in fact fully and fairly considered by a state court and necessarily rejected by the denial of appellate relief. The state courts are every bit as overloaded as the federal courts, and we should give full recognition to their practices, just as we do to our own.
Since the Fourth Amendment argument is rejected on the merits, whether it is barred from consideration under Stone v. Powell does not control the outcome, just as in Agee v. White, 809 F.2d 1487 (11th Cir.1987). But the direction here will impose upon our already overburdened district courts the time-consuming consideration of Fourth Amendment claims which have already received full and fair consideration in the state courts, trial and appellate, a task that Stone v. Powell was intended to eliminate.