Court Opinion

ID: 9425171
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:13:58.159821+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:53.833547
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
dissenting.
Were I to reach the merits in this case, I would have considerable difficulty in subscribing to the Court’s further constitutionalization of the intricacies of the common law of evidence. I do not reach the merits, since I conclude that petitioner failed to properly raise in the Mississippi courts the constitutional issue that he seeks to have this Court decide.
Title 28 U. S. C. § 1257 provides in pertinent part as follows:
“Pinal judgments or decrees rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had, may be reviewed by the Supreme Court as follows:
“(3) By writ of certiorari, . . . where any title, right, privilege or immunity is specially set up or claimed under the Constitution, treaties or statutes of, or commission held or authority exercised under, the United States.”
We deal here with a limitation imposed by Congress upon this Court’s authority to review judgments of state courts. It is a jurisdictional limitation, Cardinale v. Louisiana, 394 U. S. 437, 438 (1969), that has always been interpreted with careful regard for the delicate nature of the authority conferred upon this Court to review the judgments of state courts of last resort:
“Upon like grounds the jurisdiction of this court to reexamine the final judgment of a state court *309cannot arise from mere inference, but only from averments so distinct and positive as to place it beyond question that the party bringing a case here from such court intended to assert a Federal right.” Oxley Stave Co. v. Butler County, 166 U. S. 648, 655 (1897).
In Street v. New York, 394 U. S. 576 (1969), cited by the Court in its n. 3, the following language from the earlier case of New York ex rel. Bryant v. Zimmerman, 278 U. S. 63, 67 (1928), was quoted:
“No particular form of words or phrases is essential, but only that the claim of invalidity and the ground therefor be brought to the attention of the state court with fair precision and in due time.” 394 U. S., at 584 (emphasis added).
The question of whether a constitutional issue has been raised in “due time” in the state courts is one generally left to state procedure, subject to the important condition that the state procedure give no indication “that there was an attempt on the part of the state court to evade the decision of Federal questions, duly set up, by unwarranted resort to alleged rules under local practice.” Louisville & Nashville R. Co. v. Woodford, 234 U. S. 46, 51 (1914). More recently, the Court has stated in Henry v. Mississippi, 379 U. S. 443, 447 (1965) that:
“These cases settle the proposition that a litigant’s procedural defaults in state proceedings do not prevent vindication of his federal rights unless the State’s insistence on compliance with its procedural rule serves a legitimate state interest.”
Since the Court in Henry was dealing with a rule of trial procedure from the State of Mississippi, its analysis in that case is particularly helpful in deciding this one. It was conceded by all parties there that the Mississippi *310rules required contemporaneous objection to evidentiary-rulings, and this Court commented:
“The Mississippi rule . . . clearly does serve a legitimate state interest. By immediately apprising the trial judge of the objection, counsel gives the court the opportunity to conduct the trial without using the tainted evidence. If the objection is well taken the fruits of the illegal search may be excluded from jury consideration, and a reversal and new trial avoided.” Id., at 448.
In that case, the petitioner had made his motion to exclude the evidence at the close of the State’s case, and this Court observed that a ruling on the motion at that point would very likely have prevented the possibility of reversal and new trial just as surely as a ruling on a motion made contemporaneously with the offer of the evidence.
Here, however, the record of the state proceedings shows that the first occasion on which petitioner’s counsel even hinted that his previous evidentiary objection had a constitutional basis was at the time he filed a motion for new trial. By delaying his constitutional contention until after the evidence was in and the jury had retired and returned a verdict of guilty against him, petitioner denied the trial court an opportunity to reconsider its evidentiary ruling in the light of the constitutional objection. While this Court in Henry expressed doubt as to the adequacy for federal purposes of Mississippi’s differing treatment of a motion to exclude at the close of the State’s case and an objection made contemporaneously with the offer of the evidence, there can be no doubt that the policy supporting Mississippi’s requirement of contemporaneous objection cannot be served equally well by a motion for new trial following the rendition of the jury’s verdict.
*311It is perfectly true, as the Court states in n. 3 of its opinion, that petitioner “objected during trial to each of the court’s rulings.” But this is only half the test; the litigant seeking to have a decision here on a constitutional claim must not only object or otherwise advise the lower court of his plaim that a ruling is error, but he must make it clear that his claim of error is constitutionally grounded. In Bailey v. Anderson, 326 U. S. 203 (1945), the petitioner argued in this Court that a state court condemnation award that failed to include interest from the date of possession denied him just compensation in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Court noted that in the state circuit court petitioner had requested that the award include interest from the date of taking, and that the circuit court without explanation had rejected this claim. But this Court went on to say:
“But throughout the proceedings in the circuit court appellant made no claim to interest on constitutional grounds, and made no attack on the constitutionality of the award or the court’s decree because of the asserted denial of interest.” Id., at 206.
Concluding from an examination of the opinion of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia that although appellant had raised his constitutional claim there, it had not been passed upon by that court, this Court held that the “appeal must be dismissed for want of any properly presented substantial federal question.” Id., at 207.
Neither the majority nor the dissenting opinions of the Supreme Court of Mississippi contain one syllable that refers expressly or by implication to any claim based on the Constitution of the United States. Those opinions did, of course, treat the evidentiary objections and proffers *312that this Court now holds to be of constitutional dimension, but it passed on them in terms of nonconstitu-tional evidentiary questions that are one of the staples of the business of appellate courts that regularly review claims of error in the conduct of trial. Since Mississippi requires contemporaneous objection to evidentiary rulings during the trial, it would have been entirely proper for the Supreme Court of Mississippi to conclude that even though petitioner might have asserted constitutional claims in his brief there, they had been raised too late to require consideration by it.
This Court said in Street v. New York:
“Moreover, this Court has stated that when, as here, the highest state court has failed to pass upon a federal question, it will be assumed that the omission was due to want of proper presentation in the state courts, unless the aggrieved party in this Court can affirmatively show the contrary.” 394 U. S., at 582.
If, by some extraordinarily lenient construction of the decisional requirement that the constitutional claim be made “in due time” in the state proceedings, the making of such a claim for the first time in a motion for a new trial were deemed timely, it is still extraordinarily doubtful that this petitioner adequately raised any constitutional claims in his motion for new trial. That motion consisted of the following pertinent points:
“3rd, the Court erred in refusing to declare Gable McDonald a hostile and adverse witness and permitting the Defendant to propound leading questions as on cross-examination.
“4th, the Court erred in refusing to permit the Defendant to introduce evidence corroborating the *313admission of Gable McDonald admitting the killing of Aaron Liberty.
“6th, the trial of the Defendant was not in accord with fundamental fairness guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and Article Three, Sections Fourteen and Twenty-Six of the Constitution of the State of Mississippi.”
It would have to be an extraordinarily perceptive trial judge who could glean from this motion that the separately stated third and fourth points, dealing as they do in customary terms of claims of trial error in the exclusion or admission of evidence, were intended to be bolstered by the generalized assertion of the violation of due process contained in a separately stated point. The contention of the sixth point, standing by itself, that “the trial of the Defendant was not in accord with fundamental fairness guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States” directs the trial court to no particular ruling or decision that he may have made during the trial; it is a bald assertion that the trial from beginning to end was somehow fundamentally unfair. Even the most lenient construction of that part of 28 U. S. C. § 1257 that requires that the “title, right, privilege or immunity” be “specially set up or claimed” could not aid petitioner in his claim that this point properly raised a federal constitutional issue.
This Court under the Constitution has the extraordinarily delicate but equally necessary authority to review judgments of state courts of last resort on issues that turn on construction of the United States Constitution or federal law. But before we undertake to tell a *314state court of last resort that its judgment is inconsistent with the mandate of the Constitution, it behooves us to make certain that in doing so we adhere to the congressional mandate that limits our jurisdiction. Believing as I do that petitioner has not complied with 28 U. S. C. § 1257 (3), I would dismiss the writ of certiorari.