Court Opinion

ID: 9427681
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:34.75174+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:09.030645
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
with whom The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Rehnquist join, concurring in the judgment.
The Constitution prohibits the criminal conviction of any person except upon proof sufficient to convince the trier of fact of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Cf. ante, at 309. This rule has prevailed in our courts “at least from our early years as a Nation.” In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358, 361.
Today the Court creates a new rule of law — one that has never prevailed in our jurisprudence. According to the Court, the Constitution now prohibits the criminal conviction of any person — including, apparently, a person against whom the facts have already been found beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury, a trial judge, and one or more levels of state appellate judges — except upon proof sufficient to convince a federal *327judge that a “rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” Ante, at 319.
The adoption of this novel constitutional rule is not necessary to the decision of this case. Moreover, I believe it is an unwise act of lawmaking. Despite its chimerical appeal as a new counterpart to the venerable principle recognized in Win-ship, I am persuaded that its precipitous adoption will adversely affect the quality of justice administered by federal judges. For that reason I shall analyze this new brainchild with some care.
I shall begin by explaining why neither the record in this case, nor general experience with challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence supporting criminal convictions, supports, much less compels, the conclusion that there is any need for this new constitutional precept. I shall next show that it is not logically compelled by either the holding or the analysis in In re Winship, supra. Finally, I shall try to demonstrate why the Court’s new rule — if it is not just a meaningless shibboleth — threatens serious harm to the quality of our judicial system.
I
It is, of course, part of this Court’s tradition that new rules of law emerge from the process of case-by-case adjudication of constitutional issues. Widespread concern that existing constitutional doctrine is unjust often provides the occasion, and is sometimes even relied upon as a justification, for the exercise of such lawmaking authority by the Court. Without entering the debate over the legitimacy of this justification for judicial action, it is at least certain that it should not be the basis for dramatic — indeed, for any — constitutional lawmaking efforts unless (1) those efforts are necessary to the decision of the case at hand and (2) powerful reasons favor a change in the law. See Ashwander v. TV A, 297 U. S. 288, 345-348 (Brandeis, J., concurring).
*328In this case, the Court’s analysis fails on both counts. It has accordingly formulated a new constitutional principle under the most dangerous possible circumstances — i. e., where the exercise of judicial authority is neither necessitated nor capable of being limited by “the precise facts to which [the rule is originally] to be applied,” Liverpool, N. Y. & P. S. S. Co. v. Emigration Comm’rs, 113 U. S. 33, 39, nor even by some broader set of identifiable experiences with the evil supposedly involved.
Most significantly, the Court has announced its new constitutional edict in a case in which it has absolutely no bearing on the outcome. The only factual issue at stake is whether petitioner intended to kill his victim. If the evidence is viewed “in the light most favorable to the prosecution,” ante, at 319— and, indeed, we may view it through the eyes of the actual factfinder, whose observations about the evidence are recorded in the trial transcript — there can be only one answer to that question no matter what standard of appellate review is applied. In Part IV of its opinion, the Court accepts this conclusion. There is, therefore, no need to fashion a broad new rule of constitutional law to dispose of this squalid but rather routine murder case. Under any view, the evidence is sufficient.
The Court’s new rule is adopted simply to forestall some hypothetical evil that has not been demonstrated, and in my view is not fairly demonstrable. Although the Judiciary has received its share of criticism — principally because of the delays and costs associated with litigation — I am aware of no general dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the factfinding process or the adequacy of the rules applied by state appellate courts when reviewing claims of insufficiency.
What little evidence the Court marshals in favor of a contrary conclusion is unconvincing. See ante, at 317-318, n. 10. The Court is simply incorrect in implying that there are a significant number of occasions when federal convictions are *329overturned on appeal because no rational trier of fact could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The two opinions of this Court cited ante, at 317, stand for no such proposition. In neither was a conviction reversed for insufficiency. See Glasser v. United States, 315 U. S. 60; Bronston v. United States, 409 U. S. 352.
Moreover, a study of the 127 federal criminal convictions that were reviewed by the various Courts of Appeals and reported in the most recent hardbound volume of the Federal Reporter, Second Series, Volume 589, reveals that only 3 were overturned on sufficiency grounds. And of those, one was overturned under a “no evidence” standard, while the other two, in which a total of only 3 out of 36 counts were actually reversed, arguably involved legal issues masquerading as sufficiency questions.1 It is difficult to believe that the federal courts will turn up more sufficiency problems than this on habeas review when, instead of acting as the first level of *330review, as in the cases studied, they will be acting as the second, third, or even fourth level of appellate review. In short, there is simply no reason to tinker with an elaborate mechanism that is now functioning well.
II
There is nothing in the facts of this case or, so far as the Court has demonstrated, in those of cases like it to warrant today’s excursion into constitutional rulemaking. The Court instead portrays its rule as the logical corollary of the principle recognized in Winship regarding the subjective state of mind that persons charged with the responsibility of evaluating the credibility of evidence must possess before they find the defendant guilty in a criminal case. But an examination of Winship reveals that it has nothing to do with appellate, much less habeas corpus, review standards; that the reasoning used in that case to reach its conclusion with respect to the trier of fact does not support, and indeed counsels against, the Court’s conclusion with respect to federal habeas judges; and that there is no necessary connection between the rule recognized in Winship and the rule invented by the Court today.
In distinct contrast to the circumstances of this case, the facts of Winship presented “a case where the choice of the standard of proof has made a difference: the [trial] judge below forthrightly acknowledged that he believed by a preponderance of the evidence [in], but was not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt” of, the juvenile’s guilt. 397 U. S., at 369 (Harlan, J., concurring). Because the trier of fact entertained such a doubt, this Court held that the juvenile was constitutionally entitled to the same verdict that an adult defendant in a criminal case would receive. In so holding, the Court merely extended to juveniles a protection that had traditionally been available to defendants in criminal trials in this Nation. Id., at 361.
But nothing in the Winship opinion suggests that it also *331bore on appellate or habeas corpus procedures. Although it repeatedly emphasized the function of the reasonable-doubt standard as describing the requisite “subjective state of certitude” of the “factfinder,”2 it never mentioned the question of how appellate judges are to know whether the trier of fact really was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, or, indeed, whether the factfinder-was a “rational” person or group of persons.
Moreover, the mode of analysis employed in Winship finds no counterpart in the Court’s opinion in this case. For example, in Winship, the Court pointed out the breadth of both the historical and the current acceptance of the reasonable-doubt trial standard.3 In this case, by contrast, the Court *332candidly recognizes that the Federal Courts of Appeals have “generally” rejected the habeas standard that it adopts today. Ante, at 316.4
The Winship court relied on nine prior opinions of this Court that bore directly on the issue presented. 397 U. S., at 362. Here, the Court purportedly relies on two prior decisions, but as is pointed out, supra, at 329, neither of these cases itself applied a “reasonable doubt” appellate standard to overturn a conviction, neither purported to be interpreting the Constitution, and neither expressed any view whatsoever on the appropriate standard in collateral proceedings such as are involved in this case.5 As the Court itself notes, we have instead repeatedly endorsed the “no evidence” test, and have continued to do so after Winship was decided. Vachon v. *333New Hampshire, 414 U. S. 478; Douglas v. Buder, 412 U. S. 430; Gregory v. Chicago, 394 U. S. 111; Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39; Thompson v. Louisville, 362 U. S. 199. See also Clyatt v. United States, 197 U. S. 207, 222.
The primary reasoning of the Court in Winship is also inapplicable here. The Court noted in that case that the reasonable-doubt standard has the desirable effect of significantly - reducing the risk of an inaccurate factfinding and thus of erroneous convictions, as well as of instilling confidence in the criminal justice system. 397 U. S., at 363-364. See also id., at 370-372 (Harlan, J., concurring). In this case, however, it would be impossible (and the Court does not even try) to demonstrate that there is an appreciable risk that a factfind-ing made by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and twice reviewed by a trial judge in ruling on directed verdict and post-trial acquittal motions and by one or more levels of appellate courts on direct appeal, as well as by two federal habeas courts under the Thompson “no evidence” rule, is likely to be erroneous.6 Indeed, the very premise of Win-ship is that properly selected judges and properly instructed juries act rationally, that the former will tell the truth when they declare that they are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt and the latter will conscientiously obey and understand the reasonable-doubt instructions they receive before retiring to reach a verdict, and therefore that either factfinder will itself provide the necessary bulwark against erroneous factual determinations. To presume otherwise is to make light of Winship. 7
*334Having failed to identify the evil against which the rule is directed, and having failed to demonstrate how it follows from the analysis typically used in due process cases of this character, the Court places all of its reliance on a dry, and in my view incorrect, syllogism: If Winship requires the factfinder to apply a reasonable-doubt standard, then logic requires a reviewing judge to apply a like standard
But, taken to its ultimate conclusion, this “logic” would require the reviewing court to “ask itself whether it believes that the evidence at the trial established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” Woodby v. INS, 385 U. S. 276, 282 (emphasis added). The Court, however, rejects this standard, as well as others that might be considered consistent with Win-ship. For example, it does not require the reviewing court to view just the evidence most favorable to the prosecution and then to decide whether that evidence convinced it beyond a reasonable doubt, nor whether, based on the entire record, rational triers of fact could be convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, and without explanation, it chooses a still narrower standard that merely asks whether, “after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” Ante, at 319.8 It seems to me that if “logic” allows *335this choice after Winship it should also allow the presumption that the Court has rejected — that trial judges and juries will act rationally and honestly in applying the reasonable-doubt standard, at least so long as the trial is free of procedural error and the record contains evidence tending to prove each of the elements of the offense.
Time may prove that the rule the Court has adopted today is the wisest compromise between one extreme that maximizes the protection against the risk that innocent persons will be erroneously convicted and the other extreme that places the greatest faith in the ability of fair procedures to produce just verdicts. But the Court’s opinion should not obscure the fact that its new rule is not logically compelled by the analysis or the holding in Winship or in any other precedent, or the fact that the rule reflects a new policy choice rather than the application of a pre-existing rule of law.
III
The Court cautions against exaggerating the significance of its new rule. Ante, at 321. It is true that in practice there may be little or no difference between a record that does not contain at least some evidence tending to prove every element of an offense and a record containing so little evidence that no rational factfinder could be persuaded of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, I think the Court is quite correct when it acknowledges that “most meritorious challenges to constitutional sufficiency of the evidence undoubtedly will be recognized in the state courts.” Ante, at 322. But this only means that the new rule will seldom, if ever, provide a convicted state prisoner with any tangible benefits. It does not mean that the rule will have no impact on the administration of justice. On the contrary,. I am persuaded that it will be seriously harmful both to the state and federal judiciaries.
*336The Court indicates that the new standard to be applied by federal judges in habeas corpus proceedings may be substantially the same as the standard most state reviewing courts are already applying. Ante, at 322. The federal district courts are therefore being directed simply to duplicate the reviewing function that is now being performed adequately by state appellate courts. In my view, this task may well be inconsistent with the prohibition — added by Congress to the federal habeas statute in order to forestall undue federal interference with state proceedings, see Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72, 80 — against overturning “a determination after a hearing on the merits of a factual issue, made by a State court of competent jurisdiction.” 28 U. S. C. § 2254 (d). See LaVallee v. Delle Rose, 410 U. S. 690. In any case, to assign a single federal district judge the responsibility of directly reviewing, and inevitably supervising, the most routine work of the highest courts of a State can only undermine the morale and the esteem of the state judiciary— particularly when the stated purpose of the additional layer of review is to determine whether the State’s factfinder is “rational.” 9 Such consequences are intangible but nonetheless significant.
*337The potential effect on federal judges is even more serious. Their burdens are already so heavy that they are delegating to staff assistants more and more work that we once expected judges to perform.10 The new standard will invite an unknown number of state prisoners to make sufficiency challenges that they would not have made under the old rule. Moreover, because the “rational trier of fact” must certainly base its'decisions on all of the evidence, the Court’s broader standard may well require that the entire transcript of the state trial be read whenever the factfinders’ rationality is challenged under the Court’s rule.11 Because this task will confront the courts of appeals as well as district courts, it will surely impose countless additional hours of unproductive labor on federal judges and their assistants.12 The increasing vol*338ume of work of this character has already led some of our most distinguished lawyers to discontinue or reject service on the federal bench.13 The addition of a significant volume *339of pointless labor can only impair the quality of justice administered by federal judges and thereby undermine “the respect and confidence of the community in applications of the . . . law.” In re Winship, 397 U. S., at 364.
For these reasons, I am unable to join the Court’s gratuitous directive to our colleagues on the federal bench.

In United States v. Tarr, 589 F. 2d 55 (CA1 1978), the court overturned one of two counts of which appellant was convicted because there was insufficient evidence to prove that he had the intent to aid and abet the unauthorized transfer of a machinegun in violation of 26 U. S. C. § 5861 (e) and 18 U. S. C. § 2. The court found “no evidence” that appellant had the requisite knowledge. 589 F. 2d, at 60.
In United States v. Whetzel, 191 U. S. App. D. C. 184, 589 F. 2d 707 (1978), the court overturned 2 of the 35 counts of appellant’s conviction because “the Government failed to offer proof that would permit a jury to reasonably infer that the merchandise [appellant] transported had a value of $5,000.” Id., at 188, 589 F. 2d, at 711. However, the basis for this determination was that the Government’s valuation method, which the trial court allowed the jury to consider, was legally erroneous. Similiarly, in United States v. Fearn, 589 F. 2d 1316 (CA7 1978), the court overturned the conviction based on a federal nonconstitutional rule, which surely would not apply in habeas review of state convictions, “that a conviction must rest upon firmer ground than the uncorroborated admission or confession of the accused.” Id., at 1321. The court did not independently analyze whether the uncorroborated confession involved in that case could itself have allowed a rational trier of fact to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

 In In re Winship, 397 U. S., at 364, the Court stated: “As we said in Speiser v. Randall, [357 U. S. 513,] 525-526: 'There is always in litigation a margin of error, representing error in factfinding, which both parties must take into account. Where one party has at stake an interest of transcending value — as a criminal defendant his liberty — this margin of error is reduced as to him by the process of placing on the other party the burden of . . . persuading the factfinder at the conclusion of the trial of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Due process commands that no man shall lose his liberty unless the Government has borne the burden of . . . convincing the factfinder of his guilt.’ To this end, the reasonable-doubt standard is indispensable, for it ‘impresses on the trier of fact the necessity of reaching a subjective state of certitude of the facts in issue.’ Dorsen & Rezneck, In Re Gault and the Future of Juvenile Law, 1 Family Law Quarterly, No. 4, pp. 1, 26 (1967).” (Emphasis added.)
Later on the same page, the Court added:
“It is also important in our free society that every individual going about his ordinary affairs have confidence that his government cannot adjudge him guilty of a criminal offense without convincing a proper factfinder of his guilt with utmost certainty.” Ibid, (emphasis added).
See also id., at 370 (Harlan, J., concurring) (“[A] standard of proof represents an attempt to instruct the factfinder concerning the degree of confidence our society thinks he should have in the correctness of factual conclusions for a particular type of adjudication”) (emphasis added).,

 The Court, relying on treatises that analyzed the law in all 50 States as well as in the federal system, determined both that the reasonable-doubt *332standard has prevailed at the trial level “at least from our early years as a Nation” and that it “is now accepted in common law jurisdictions as the measure of persuasion by which the prosecution must convince the trier of all the essential elements of guilt.” Id., 'at 361 (emphasis added). See also id., at 372 (Harlan, J., concurring) (“It is only because of the nearly complete and long-standing acceptance of the reasonable-doubt standard by the States in criminal trials that the Court has not before today had to hold explicitly that due process, as an expression of fundamental procedural fairness, requires a more stringent standard for criminal trials than for ordinary civil litigation”) (emphasis added).

 The Court has undertaken no systematic analysis of the standards for reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence that prevail either in state habeas corpus and other collateral proceedings or in state appellate courts. What sources I have discovered suggest that “varied standards” are in use and that each is “subject to shifting and elastic definitions.” Winningham, The Dilemma of the Directed Acquittal, 15 Vand. L. Rev. 699, 705-706 (1962). See ALI Code of Criminal Procedure, Commentary on §321, pp. 961-962 (1930); Rules of Criminal Procedure 481 (c), 522 (a) and commentary, 10 U. L. A. (1974).

 It hardly bears repeating that habeas corpus is not intended as a substitute for appeal, nor as a device for reviewing the merits of guilt determinations at criminal trials. See generally Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465. Instead, it is designed to guard against extreme malfunctions in the state criminal justice systems.

 As I discuss earlier, see supra, at 329, the incidence of factual error at the trial level in federal' courts appears to be exceedingly low, even when measured by the relatively strict appellate standard used by the Federal Courts of Appeals. Presumably the incidence of errors that survive that first level of review is even smaller.

 Indeed, the Court makes light of Winship by suggesting that, in the absence of its new habeas procedure, the result of that case is simply “a trial ritual.” Ante, at 316-317. Far more likely in my view is that the *334Court’s difficult-to-apply but largely unnecessary rule will itself result in a “collateral-attack ritual” that will undermine the integrity of both the state and federal judiciaries. See injra, at 336-339.

 So far as I can determine, this standard first appeared in our jurisprudence in Mr. Justice Stewart’s opinion dissenting from the Court’s denial of certiorari in Freeman v. Zahradnick, 429 U. S. 1111, 1112, 1113, 1114, 1116. At that time, it gave the impression of being somewhat narrower than — if only because it was stated quite differently from — the test used by the Courts of Appeals in reviewing federal convictions on direct appeal. See Curley v. United States, 81 U. S. App. D. C. 389, 392-393, 160 F. 2d 229, 232-233 (1947). Although the Court twice repeats the Freeman test, see ante, at 313, 319, it now appears either to equate that standard with the — in my view — broader federal direct-review standard, *335or to endorse both standards despite their differences. See ante, at 318, and nn. 11, 12.

 In the past, collateral review of state proceedings has been justified largely on the grounds (1) that federal judges have special expertise in the federal issues that regularly arise in habeas corpus proceeding, and (2) that they are less susceptible than state judges to political pressures against applying constitutional rules to overturn convictions. See, e. g., Bartels, Avoiding a Comity of Errors, 29 Stan. L. Rev. 27, 30 n. 9 (1976). Cf. Steffel v. Thompson, 415 U. S. 452, 464; Mitchum v. Foster, 407 U. S. 225, 242. But neither of these justifications has any force in the present context. State judges are more familiar with the elements of state offenses than are federal judges and should be better able to evaluate sufficiency claims. Moreover, of all decisions overturning convictions, the least likely to be unpopular and thus to distort state decisionmaking processes are ones based on the inadequacy of the evidence. Indeed, once federal courts were divested of authority to second-guess state courts on Fourth Amendment issues, which are 'far more likely to generate politically motivated *337state-court decisions, see Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465, a like result in this case would seem to be a fortiori.

 For example, the heavy federal workload has required the 13 regular and 7 senior judges on the Ninth Circuit to hire 30 staff attorneys and 33 law clerks to assist them in their labors.

 Additional burdens will also be imposed if the Court’s rule is extended to federal habeas proceedings reviewing federal criminal trials, as well as to ones reviewing state civil commitment proceedings in which we have recently required at least the “clear and convincing” test to be applied as a matter of federal constitutional law. Addington v. Texas, 441 U. S. 418.
This Court’s workload will also increase, of course, when its certiorari docket expands to accommodate the challenges generated by the Court’s new rule. The effect will be even greater if the Court’s opinion is read to require state appellate courts to apply the reasonable-doubt test on direct review and to require this Court to apply it when reviewing the decisions of those courts on certiorari.

 Professor Bator has persuasively explained how the law of diminishing returns inevitably makes it unwise to have duplicative review processes on the “merits” in criminal eases:
“[Iff a criminal judgment is ever to be final, the notion of legality must at some point include the assignment of final competences to determine legality. But, it may be asked, why should we seek a point at which such a judgment becomes final? Conceding that no process can assure ultimate truth, will not repetition of inquiry stand a better chance of approximat*338ing it? In view of the awesomeness of the consequences of conviction, shouldn't we allow redetermination of the merits in an attempt to make sure that no error has occurred?
“Surely the answer runs, in the first place, in terms of conservation of resources — and I mean not only simple economic resources, but aE of the inteUectual, moral, and political resources involved in the legal system. The presumption must be, it seems to me, that if a job can be well done once, it should not be done twice. If one set of institutions is as capable of performing the task at hand as another, we should not ask both to do it. The chaEenge really runs the other way: if a proceeding is held to determine the facts and law in a case, and the processes used in that proceeding are fitted to the task in a manner not inferior to those which would be used in a second proceeding, so that one cannot demonstrate that relitigation would not merely consist of repetition and second-guessing, why should not the first proceeding ‘count’? Why should we duplicate effort? After aE, it is the very purpose of the first go-around to decide the case. Neither it nor any subsequent go-around can assure ultimate truth. If, then, the previous determination is to be ignored, we must have some reasoned institutional justification why this should be so.
“Mere iteration of process can do other kinds of damage. I could imagine nothing more subversive of a judge’s sense of responsibEity, of the inner subjective conscientiousness which is so essential a part of the difficult and subtle art of judging well, than an indiscriminate acceptance of the notion that all the shots wEl always be caEed by someone else. Of course this does not mean that we should not have appeals. As we shall see, important functional and ethical purposes are served by allowing recourse to an appellate court in a unitary system, and to a federal supreme court in a federal system. The acute question is the effect it will have on a trial judge if we then aEow still further recourse where these purposes may no longer be relevant. What seems so objectionable is second-guessing merely for the sake of second-guessing, in the service of the Elusory notion that if we only try hard enough we wiE find the ‘truth.’ ” Bator, Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, 76 Harv. L. Rev. 441, 450-451 (1963).
See also F. James, CivE Procedure 518 (1965).

 The testimony of Griffin BeE at his confirmation hearings for Attorney General is particularly relevant. When asked by Senator Scott of Vir*339ginia why he had earlier resigned from his seat on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Judge Bell responded:
“I found it not to be a rewarding experience any longer. Whether it was because there was no more excitement after the 19f30’s, or whether it was because the case load changed, but the work load was oppressive. I would mot have minded the work load, but the character of the cases changed. It was almost like serving on a criminal court. I did not want to do that any longer.” Hearings on the Prospective Nomination of Griffin B. Bell, of Georgia, to be Attorney General, before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 95th Cong., 1st Sess., 27 (1977).