Court Opinion

ID: 9423959
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:09:44.639288+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:47.371864
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
dissenting.
I would affirm the Court of Appeals’ holding in this case, Wilson v. Harris, 378 F. 2d 141, that 28 U. S. C. § 2246 does not authorize discovery in habeas corpus proceedings. Upon affirmance I would not go further and write what appears to me to be in effect an advisory opinion directing the trial court to formulate some kind of new legal system for discovery in this kind of case. Fully agreeing with the Court’s statement that “[w]e have no power to rewrite the Rules by judicial interpretations,” I go further and doubt that we have power to *302direct lower courts to write new laws providing for discovery in habeas corpus cases. This is a complicated field of law making and I think we should not enter this field in the absence of some valid delegation of legislative power by the Congress. Since I cannot agree that. Congress has granted us such power, I am unable to go along with the Court’s opinion.
There have been many complaints among members of the bar about many Court-made rules of procedure and I would venture the suggestion that in no field have the number of those complaints exceeded the complaints in this particular field of discovery. I regret that I cannot “assume,” with the Court, that given blanket authority, “courts in the exercise of their discretion will [not] pursue or authorize pursuit of all allegations presented to them.” This case makes me skeptical about such an assumption. Here Walker was convicted in a state court of having marihuana in his possession. After exhausting all state remedies he asked the federal courts to let him out of jail. He apparently did not allege his innocence, does not now do so, and this Court apparently does not now consider the question of guilt or innocence in this case. What he does allege is that the trial court made an error in admitting certain evidence against him. It is not alleged that the evidence was not relevant against him or that the verdict resting on that evidence was not a truthful, honest verdict. We must, therefore, assume that he was and is guilty of the crime of which he was convicted. See my dissent in Kaufman v. United States, ante, p. 231, decided today. What is relevant, however, and all that is alleged, is that the evidence used against him, presumably the marihuana, was found on his premises as the result of a search made after a statement by a person to a policeman, which statement the allegations now charge “was not shown to have been reliable” and which was *303made by a person “who was in fact unreliable.” It may be possible that a new trial over this issue can establish that the person telling the officer that marihuana could be found on Walker’s premises was an “unreliable” person and that the statement he made was also “unreliable.” But the fact remains that the marihuana was found where the unreliable person’s unreliable statement told the officer it would be found. Consequently it appears to me that the present case against a defendant whose guilt has been proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt should not be taken as an appropriate one on which this Court lays the groundwork for a new and vast judicial legislative rule-making program.
Perhaps it might not be considered amiss mildly to suggest that in cases like this, where records contain no question at all about guilt, some convictions should at some time be treated as final and no longer subject to challenge, at least by collateral attack. Although I admit that Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U. S. 108 (1964), Spinelli v. United States, 393 U. S. 410 (1969), and other recent cases go a long way, I had not previously thought that even these cases could support what the Court is doing in this case.