Court Opinion

ID: 9426765
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:52.48924+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.995843
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, dissenting.
The Court’s opinion in this case serves the unusual purpose of supplying as good a line of reasoning as is available to support a two-paragraph per curiam opinion almost six years ago in Younger v. Gilmore, 404 U. S. 15 (1971), which made no pretense of containing any reasoning at all. The Court’s reasoning today appears to be that we have long held that prisoners have a “right of access” to the courts in order to file petitions for habeas corpus, and that subsequent decisions have expanded this concept into what the Court today describes as a “meaningful right of access.” So, we are told, the right of a convicted prisoner to “meaningful access” extends to requiring the State to furnish such prisoners law libraries to aid them in piecing together complaints to be filed in the courts. This analysis places questions of prisoner access on a “slippery slope,” and I would reject it because I believe that the early cases upon which the Court relies have a totally different rationale from that which underlies the present holding.
There is nothing in the United States Constitution which requires that a convict serving a term of imprisonment in a state penal institution pursuant to a final judgment of a court of competent jurisdiction have a “right of access” to the federal courts in order to attack his sentence. In the first *838case upon which the Court’s opinion relies, Ex parte Hull, 312 U. S. 546 (1941), the Court held invalid a regulation of the Michigan State prison which provided that “ ‘[a]ll legal documents, briefs, petitions, motions, habeas corpus proceedings and appeals’ ” which prisoners wish to file in court had to be first submitted to the legal investigator of the state parole board. If the documents were, in the opinion of this official, “ 'properly drawn,’ ” they would be directed to the court designated. Hull was advised that his petition addressed to this Court had been "intercepted” and referred to the legal investigator for the reason that it was “deemed to be inadequate.” This Court held that such a regulation was invalid, and said very clearly why:
“Whether a petition for writ of habeas corpus addressed to a federal court is properly drawn and what allegations it must contain are questions for that court alone to determine.” Id., at 549.
A number of succeeding cases have expanded on this barebones holding that an incarcerated prisoner has a right of physical access to a federal court in order to petition that court for relief which Congress has authorized it to grant. These cases, most of which are mentioned in the Court’s opinion, begin with Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S. 12 (1956), and culminate in United States v. MacCollom, 426 U. S. 317 (1976), decided last Term. Some, such as Griffin, supra, and Douglas v. California, 372 U. S. 353 (1963), appear to depend upon the principle that indigent convicts must be given a meaningful opportunity to pursue a state-created right to appeal, even though the pursuit of such a remedy requires that the State must provide a transcript or furnish counsel. Others, such as Johnson v. Avery, 393 U. S. 483 (1969), Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U. S. 396 (1974), and Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539 (1974), depend on the principle that the State, having already incarcerated the convict and thereby virtually eliminated his contact with people outside the prison walls, *839may not further limit contacts which would otherwise be permitted simply because such contacts would aid the incarcerated prisoner in preparation of a petition seeking judicial relief from the conditions or terms of his confinement. Clearly neither of these principles supports the Court’s present holding: The prisoners here in question have all pursued all avenues of direct appeal available to them from their judgments of conviction, and North Carolina imposes no invidious regulations which allow visits from all persons except those knowledgeable in the law. All North Carolina has done in this case is to decline to expend public funds to make available law libraries to those who are incarcerated within its penitentiaries.
If respondents’ constitutional arguments were grounded on the Equal Protection Clause, and were in effect that rich prisoners could employ attorneys who could in turn consult law libraries and prepare petitions for habeas corpus, whereas indigent prisoners could not, they would have superficial appeal. See Griffin, supra; Douglas, supra. I believe that they would nonetheless fail under Ross v. Moffitt, 417 U. S. 600 (1974). There we held that although our earlier cases had required the State to provide meaningful access to state-created judicial remedies for indigents, the only right on direct appeal was that “indigents have an adequate opportunity to present their claims fairly within the adversary system.” Id., at 612.
In any event, the Court’s opinion today does not appear to proceed upon the guarantee of equal protection of the laws, a guarantee which at least has the merit of being found in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It proceeds instead to enunciate a “fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts,” ante, at 828, which is found nowhere in the Constitution. But if a prisoner incarcerated pursuant to a final judgment of conviction is not prevented from physical access to the federal courts in order that he may file therein petitions for relief which Congress has authorized those courts *840to grant, he has been accorded the only constitutional right of access to the courts that our cases have articulated in a reasoned way. Ex parte Hull, supra. Respondents here make no additional claims that prison regulations invidiously deny them access to those with knowledge of the law so that such regulations would be inconsistent with Johnson, supra, Procunier, supra, and Wolff, supra. Since none of these reasons is present here, the “fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts” which the Court announces today is created virtually out of whole cloth with little or no reference to the Constitution from which it is supposed to be derived.
Our decisions have recognized on more than one occasion that lawful imprisonment properly results in a “retraction [of rights] justified by the considerations underlying our penal system.” Price v. Johnston, 334 U. S. 266, 285 (1948); Pell v. Procunier, 417 U. S. 817, 822 (1974). A convicted prisoner who has exhausted his avenues of direct appeal is no longer to be accorded every presumption of innocence, and his former constitutional liberties may be substantially restricted by the exigencies of the incarceration in which he has been placed. See Meachum v. Fano, 427 U. S. 215 (1976). Where we come to the point where the prisoner is seeking to collaterally attack a final judgment of conviction, the right of physical access to the federal courts is essential because of the congressional provisions for federal habeas review of state convictions. Ex parte Hull, supra. And the furnishing of a transcript to an indigent who makes a showing of probable cause, in order that he may have any realistic chance of asserting his right to such review, was upheld in United States v. MacCollom, supra. We held in Ross v. Moffitt, supra, that the Douglas holding of a right to counsel on a first direct appeal as of right would not be extended to a discretionary second appeal from an intermediate state appellate court to the state court of last resort, or from the state court of last resort to this Court. It would seem, a fortiori, to follow from that case that an *841incarcerated prisoner who has pursued all his avenues of direct review would have no constitutional right whatever to state appointed counsel to represent him in a collateral attack on his conviction, and none of our cases has ever suggested that a prisoner would have such a right. See Johnson v. Avery, 393 U. S., at 488. Yet this is the logical destination of the Court’s reasoning today. If “meaningful access” to the courts is to include law libraries, there is no convincing reason why it should not also include lawyers appointed at the expense of the State. Just as a library may assist some inmates in filing papers which contain more than the bare factual allegations of injustice, appointment of counsel would assure that the legal arguments advanced are made with some degree of sophistication.
I do not believe anything in the Constitution requires this result, although state and federal penal institutions might as a matter of policy think it wise to implement such a program. I conclude by indicating the same respect for Younger v. Gilmore, 404 U. S. 15 (1971), as has the Court, in relegating it to a final section set apart from the body of the Court’s reasoning. Younger supports the result reached by the Court of Appeals in this case, but it is a two-paragraph opinion which is most notable for the unbridged distance between its premise and its conclusion. The Court’s opinion today at least makes a reasoned defense of the result which it reaches, but I am not persuaded by those reasons. Because of that fact I would not have the slightest reluctance to overrule Younger and reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals in this case.