Court Opinion

ID: 9466382
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:14:00.757554+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:41.986028
License: Public Domain

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge,
Concurring:
I completely agree with the result and with substantially all of the discussion in the majority opinion, but am sufficiently concerned about some of the implications that could be drawn from the majority’s extensive characterization of our holding in Cooper v. United States, 594 F.2d 12 (4th Cir. 1979), that I write to note my own understanding of the relevance of that decision to the decision here.
Cooper is completely distinguishable. In that case, we undertook to deal head-on *838with the extent to which common law contract principles might properly be drawn upon to determine whether the constitutional rights to fairness in plea negotiations, recognized in Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257, 92 S.Ct. 495, 30 L.Ed.2d 427 (1971), had been violated. Recognizing the inevitable attractiveness and general utility of contract law analogies in defining the scope of constitutional right in a context having so many aspects of commercial “bargaining,” we nevertheless rejected the notion that common law contract analogies could properly be used as the exclusive determinant of constitutional right. Specifically, we held that while constitutional right would ordinarily be found to have arisen at any point where right measured by contract law would be found, it might arise earlier. Without attempting a general definition of the point short of contract right where constitutional right arose, we held on the specific facts of that case such a right had arisen and must be enforced.
Two critical aspects of the circumstances there presented are simply not present here and quite suffice to distinguish Cooper’s finding of right and violation. In Cooper there was no dispute that a specific, unambiguous proposal, not unreasonable on its face, had been made to the accused. Here the district court found, without clear error, that the proposal whose enforcement was sought by the defendant was not in fact made. In Cooper the apparent, and probably actual, authority of the person making the proposal to bind the very government pressing the charges in question was not in dispute. Here, there was no evidence of any actual authority in the state prosecutor to act on behalf of the United States, and no substantial evidence from which apparent authority based on the subjective and objective factors in play could validly have been found.
Underlying and giving content to the constitutional right defined and enforced in Cooper are expectations reasonably induced by government that its proposals respecting the liberty of persons accused of crime will be honored. Central to the assessment of reasonableness of expectations are the unambiguity and authority with which the proposals are made. Both of these critical elements in the constitutional fairness equation were present in Cooper and are lacking here. Consequently, the district court did not err in finding no constitutional right requiring enforcement.