Court Opinion

ID: 9492652
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:45:56.928695+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:24.350142
License: Public Domain

KLEINFELD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent.
Johnson was charged federally with bank robbery while he was in prison on a state conviction for rape. The Marshal therefore sent a detainer to the state prison. The operative language in the detain-er form (Form USM-16) says ‘When the subject is to be released from your custody, please notify this office at once so that we may assume custody if necessary.” Johnson, as the majority opinion accurately explains, did what he was supposed to do to get his bank robbery proceedings started promptly. But the Marshal’s office in Oregon mistakenly failed to forward his papers to the United States Attorney’s office and to the United States District Court. Johnson’s own lawyer, the Federal Defender, cured the Marshal’s defect with respect to the district court, as the majority persuasively explains.
But no one ever sent any paper to the United States Attorney in Oregon showing that Johnson demanded a speedy trial. The statute says that the paper has to be delivered to that office for Johnson to benefit from the statutory time limit (dismissal of the charges if trial is' late). The majority opinion holds that giving the form to the Marshal amounts to delivery to the United States Attorney. That holding has some appeal, because a man in prison, not free to walk down the street to the post office himself, ought to be able to count on a high government official like the U.S. Marshal to do what she is supposed to do with legal papers. On the other hand, there is some appeal to not giving “get out of jail free” cards to rapists and robbers when government officials make mistakes *1006in their paperwork. In this case, Johnson can probably be charged again, but in many detainer cases, the statute of limitations will bar reindictment if the Marshal fails to forward the papers. Congress has made the policy decision on which interest prevails — the government’s, unless both the district court and the United States Attorney actually receive the papers — and the Supreme Court has interpreted the statute against the prisoner even when he has done all he is supposed to do, so we are not free to reinterpret it. The majority opinion has some appeal, because Johnson reasonably counted on the Marshal to do her duty and she let him down. It also has some good practical suggestions. But I do not think precedent allows us to reverse.
The statute says that the prisoner shall be tried within 180 days “after he shall have caused to be delivered to the prosecuting officer and the appropriate court of the prosecuting officer’s jurisdiction written notice.... ”1 The United States Supreme Court held in Fex v. Michigan that the “180-day time period in Article 111(a) of the IAD does not commence until the prisoner’s request for final disposition of the charges against him has actually been delivered to the court and prosecuting officer.... ”2 In Fex, as in the case at bar, the prisoner had done what he was supposed to do, and the Court said of the delay “That result is bad,”3 but “the IAD unquestionably requires delivery,”4 the Court emphasizing delivery. There is no getting around that. No delivery to the United States Attorney, no dismissal of the charges.
The majority opinion holds that “delivery to the U.S. Marshal’s Service was, for purposes of the IAD, delivery to the U.S. Attorney.” Because the Supreme Court has emphasized “delivery” and used the adverb “actually” to modify “delivered,” I do not think we are free to dilute the requirement of actual delivery by this legal fiction. In United States v. Collins,5 the parties did not litigate whether service on the marshal sufficed for delivery to the prosecutor, but only whether it sufficed as delivery to the court. We held that it did not, because the statute and Fex require delivery to the court, and “the Marshals are not agents for the court for purposes of accepting every request they find thrust upon them.”6 Neither are they agents of the United States Attorney for purposes of accepting delivery.
In United States v. Paredes-Batista,7 a case like Collins where the prisoner did all he was supposed to do but the marshal failed to send on the papers, the Second Circuit held that Fex required actual delivery to the court. The Second Circuit expressed its disapproval of the marshal’s “flawed” procedures, but held that “these administrative failings did not entitle Batista to a dismissal.”8
Thus, no authority supports the majority opinion. Paredes-Batista includes advice to the marshal’s service on how to rewrite its form to tell the prisoner he is on his own and cannot count on the marshal (apparently that has been done), and suggests that some sort of estoppel might operate in the future if the form were not changed, but the majority opinion does not rely on failure to rewrite the form.
*1007The majority opinion’s justification for treating delivery to the marshal as though it were actual delivery to the United States Attorney is that the United States Attorney used the marshal to serve the detainer and instructed that the return be made to the marshal. The conclusion does not follow. If John Doe uses a process server to sue Richard Roe in an auto accident case, that does not make the process server John Doe’s agent for receipt of service if Richard Roe then sues John Doe. The hypothetical case is analogous; that the United States Attorney uses the marshal to serve a detainer does not make the marshal the United States Attorney’s agent for receipt of service.
The return language to which the majority opinion alludes does not make the marshal the prosecutor’s agent for receipt. It says “If the prisoner demands or does not demand a speedy trial at this time, please return both copies of this executed form with the receipted copies 2 and 3 of the Detainer to this office in the enclosed self-addressed envelope.” The marshal did not do what the United States Attorney asked her to do, and the language plainly does not say that receipt by the marshal is good enough.
There is nothing about a United States Marshal’s appointment and duties to suggest that she is an agent for receipt of service for the United States Attorney. A marshal has her own separate appointment and commission from the president.9 The United States Attorney does not have authority to superase the marshal; instead the director of the United States Marshal’s Service in Washington, D.C. supervises the local marshal.10 The marshal’s “primary” role is to provide security for and enforce orders of federal courts.11 Were her official duties enough to make her an agent for receipt of service, that “primary” role would make it much more plausible that the marshal would be an agent for the district court than for any other agency, yet we have already held in Collins that she is not. The marshal also “shah execute all lawful writs, process and orders issued under the authority of the United States,”12 which is probably the basis for her service of the detainer, but there is simply nothing in the statute that makes her an agent to receive service, notice or papers on behalf of the United States Attorney.
There is a practical reason why this distinction matters. Ordinarily in a federal courthouse, the district court has one office with a counter where the clerk receives papers, the United States Attorney another, and the United States Marshal a third. They are different physical spaces, different counters, different clerks, and different file cabinets. When a paper is delivered to one of these offices, the other two do not get it, and ordinarily have no notice of it unless the office to which it was delivered sends it to them. That is one of the practical results of separate presidential appointments, separate commissions, and separate supervision of employees. A United States Attorney could politely request the marshal in her district to please have her staff send the United States Attorney copies of prisoners’ answers to notices of detainer (indeed, that is just what the “please return both copies ... in the enclosed self-addressed envelope” language does), but if she were to walk into a marshal’s office and tell the personnel there how to process their papers, the marshal would probably point to her commission on the wall and tell the United States Attorney to supervise her own staff. The United States Attorney might, if she kept a good data base, notice that she had not received any papers back on a detain-er, and have someone ask the marshal’s office what had happened. But there is no way that papers delivered to another of*1008fice, in someone else’s file cabinet, subject to a staff she does not control, can be said to have been “actually” delivered to the United States Attorney. Fex says that the prisoner’s request, to start the time period, must have “actually been delivered,” and it was not, so we are required to affirm.

. 18 U.S.C.App. § 2, Art 111(a) (emphasis added).

. Fex v. Michigan, 507 U.S. 43, 52, 113 S.Ct. 1085, 122 L.Ed.2d 406 (1993) (emphasis added).

. Id. at 50, 113 S.Ct. 1085.

. Id. at 50, 113 S.Ct. 1085 (emphasis in original).

. United States v. Collins, 90 F.3d 1420 (9th Cir.1996).

. Id. at 1426.

. United States v. Paredes-Batista, 140 F.3d 367 (2d Cir.1998).

. Id. at 372.

. 28 U.S.C. § 561(c).

. 28 U.S.C. § 561(g).

. 28 U.S.C. § 566(a).

. 28 U.S.C. § 566(c).