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Justice White | 1,976 | 6 | majority | Hancock v. Train | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109467/hancock-v-train/ | this Act."[60] When the Conference Committee eliminated this subsection from the Senate amendment, it retained the definition of "person," which included a "State" in 302 (e), and added 304 (f) with the parenthetical phrase "including a requirement applicable by reason of section 118." This made clear that 118 was to be enforced through 304, and 304 is the only provision in the Act for state enforcement of the duties of a federal installation under 118. In short, 118 establishes the duty of federal installations to comply with state "," and 304 provides the means of enforcing that duty in federal court. In light of this *17 close relationship between the two sections, we find it significant that 304 (f) extends the enforcement power only to "a schedule or timetable of compliance, emission limitation, standard of performance or emission standard," and not to all state implementation measures. Thus circumscribed, the scope of the 304 power to enforce 118 strongly suggests that 118 duties themselves are similarly limited, for it seems most unlikely that in providing that a State might bring suit in district court to enforce the duties of federal installations under 118, the Congress would not make all of those duties enforceable in district court. Yet this is exactly what Kentucky argues, saying: "There can be no explanation for the existence of Section 118 if it imposes no obligations other than those imposed under Section 304."[61] The argument is defective on another count. Even if, standing alone, 304 could be read to require federal facilities to comply with the matters within 304 (f), the assumption that the two sections independently impose duties on federal installations conflicts with the legislative history. Section 304 (a) was first extended to apply to federal sources of pollution in Conference, at the same point at which the express provision for enforcement authority over federal installations was removed from 118.[62] Given this relationship between *18 the two measures, we cannot credit the argument that 118 was intended to impose on federal installations any broader duty to comply with state implementation measures than specified in 304. The absence in 304 of any express provision for enforcing state permit in federal court is therefore too substantial an indication that congressional understanding was that the "" federal facilities are obliged to meet under 118 did not include permit to be overcome by assertions to the contrary. V In view of the undoubted congressional awareness of the requirement of clear language to bind the United States,[63] our conclusion is that with respect to subjecting federal installations to state permit the |
Justice White | 1,976 | 6 | majority | Hancock v. Train | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109467/hancock-v-train/ | with respect to subjecting federal installations to state permit the Clean Air Act does not satisfy the traditional requirement that such intention be evinced with satisfactory clarity. Should this nevertheless be the desire of Congress, it need only amend the Act to make its intention manifest.[64] Absent such amendment, we can only conclude that to the extent it considered the matter in enacting 118 Congress has fashioned a compromise which, while requiring federal installations to abate their pollution to the same extent as any other air contaminant source and under standards which the States have prescribed, *1 stopped short of subjecting federal installations to state control. This conclusion does not mean that we are persuaded that the States are as able to administer their implementation plans as they would be if they possessed the degree of authority over federal installations urged here, although, as Kentucky acknowledged at oral argument, the EPA, acting under the impetus of Executive Order No. 117, 3 CFR 380 has promulgated guidelines for compliance by federal agencies with stationary source air pollution standards, which will lead to federal agencies' entering "consent agreements which are exactly identical in every respect to what a compliance schedule would have been."[65] The judgment of the of Appeals is Affirmed. |
per_curiam | 1,974 | 200 | per_curiam | United States v. Michigan Nat. Corp. | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2496261/united-states-v-michigan-nat-corp/ | This is an appeal from an order of the District Court dismissing without prejudice the Government's suit under 7 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S. C. 18, to enjoin a bank holding company's acquisition. Appellee Michigan National Corporation (MNC), a bank holding company that owns five Michigan banks, seeks control of four additional Michigan banks. The planned acquisition will take the following form. MNC will charter four "phantom" banks, initially having no assets or deposits, whose stock it will acquire. The four target banks will be merged with the phantom banks, thereby becoming subsidiary banks of the holding company. The form of the transaction brings it within the purview of two regulatory statutes. Section 3 of the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, as amended, 12 U.S. C. 1842, requires that an acquisition of a subsidiary bank by a holding company be approved by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Section 18 (c) (2) (A) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, as amended by the Bank Merger Act, 12 U.S. C. 1828 (c) (2) (A), requires approval of bank mergers by a designated agency, which in the case of an acquisition by a national bank is the Comptroller of the Currency. Each regulatory statute provides time limitations for antitrust suits challenging transactions that have gained administrative approval. The Bank Holding Company Act, 11, as amended, 12 U.S. C. 1849, provides that an antitrust suit arising from a holding company acquisition must be brought within 30 days of approval by the Federal Reserve Board. The Bank Merger Act, 12 U.S. C. 1828 (c) (6) and (7), establishes a similar 30-day period following approval of a merger by the designated administrative body.[1] Under both statutes, *3 transactions having administrative approval cannot go forward during the period within which an antitrust suit may be brought, or during the pendency of a timely antitrust suit unless the court otherwise orders. The expiration of the period without the filing of an antitrust suit, however, allows the transacting parties to consummate arrangements without fear of challenge. MNC made applications to both the Federal Reserve Board and the Comptroller for approval of its proposed transactions. Disapproval by either body would prevent MNC from completing the entire acquisition as planned. In October 1973 the Federal Reserve Board approved the acquisitions by the holding company. Without awaiting action by the Comptroller, the Government filed complaints under the Clayton Act to enjoin the acquisition; the suit was brought within the 30-day period prescribed by 11 of the Bank Holding Company Act. The District Court dismissed the complaints |
per_curiam | 1,974 | 200 | per_curiam | United States v. Michigan Nat. Corp. | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2496261/united-states-v-michigan-nat-corp/ | Bank Holding Company Act. The District Court dismissed the complaints without prejudice, ruling that the Government should bring a new lawsuit if and when the Comptroller approved the merger of the target banks with the "phantoms." The Government took a direct appeal to this Court, 15 U.S. C. 29. The District Court reasoned that the Government's suit was "premature," since a disapproval by the Comptroller would moot the Clayton Act claim. Whether viewed as a dismissal for lack of a "case or controversy" or as an exercise of equitable discretion, we believe the District Court's action was error. The view that the possibility of disapproval by the Comptroller deprived the District Court of an actual controversy to adjudicate, a position taken by appellees *4 below, cannot be squared with the many decisions permitting a federal court to stay proceedings in a case properly before it while awaiting the decision of another tribunal. This is the holding of Railroad which launched the abstention doctrine. Pullman held that where an order of the Texas Railroad Commission was challenged in a District Court as violative of the Fourteenth Amendment and as outside the Commission's authority under state law, the federal court should stay proceedings pending a resolution by the Texas courts of the state law question of the Commission's authority. In succeeding cases that have applied the Pullman doctrine, the common practice has been for the district court to retain jurisdiction but to stay proceedings while awaiting a decision in the state courts. See, e. g., ; Spector Motor Service, ; Government & Civic Employees Organizing ; Louisiana Power & Light ; ; Lake Carriers' That a favorable decision in the state court might moot the plaintiff's constitutional claim brought to the federal court was never thought to create any jurisdictional impediment. For jurisdictional purposes, it suffices that there is a "real and substantial controversy admitting of specific relief through a decree of a conclusive character, as distinguished from an opinion advising what the law would be upon a hypothetical state of facts." Aetna Life Insurance The same procedure has generally been followed when the resolution of a claim cognizable in a federal court *5 must await a determination by an administrative agency having primary jurisdiction. See Carnation ; General American Tank Car ; Mitchell Coal Dismissal rather than a stay has been approved where there is assurance that no party is prejudiced thereby.[2] See Far East In the present case we cannot say with assurance that the Government will not be prejudiced by a dismissal. Section 11 of the Bank Holding Company |
per_curiam | 1,974 | 200 | per_curiam | United States v. Michigan Nat. Corp. | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2496261/united-states-v-michigan-nat-corp/ | by a dismissal. Section 11 of the Bank Holding Company Act provides that "[a]ny action brought under the antitrust laws arising out of an acquisition, merger, or consolidation transaction" shall be commenced within the 30-day period following approval by the Board. 12 U.S. C. 1849 (b) (emphasis added). By the time the Comptroller approves the mergers, the 30-day period following Board approval may have long since expired.[3] By waiting *6 for approval of the Comptroller before filing its lawsuit, the Government runs the risk that complete relief will be barred by the provisions of 11. MNC disputes this, arguing that so long as the Government brings suit following the Comptroller's approval within the time prescribed by the Bank Merger Act, it will be able to challenge the merger of the target banks with the "phantoms," the only event which gives the transaction competitive significance. Congress does not appear to have considered expressly the application of the time limitations to transactions falling within both regulatory statutes.[4] While the question is not free from doubt, there is a procedure that preserves beyond doubt the Government's ability fully to pursue its Clayton Act suit and at the same time produces no hardship to the other party.[5] Where suit is brought after the first administrative decision and stayed until remaining administrative proceedings have concluded, judicial resources are conserved and both parties fully protected. The judgment of the District Court is vacated and the case remanded for the entry of further orders consistent with this opinion. So ordered. |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | The questions presented by this case are (1) whether a white defendant has standing to raise a Sixth Amendment *476 challenge to the prosecutor's exercise of peremptory challenges to exclude all black potential jurors from his petit jury, and (2) whether such exclusion violates his Sixth Amendment right to trial by an impartial jury. I Petitioner Daniel Holland was charged in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, with aggravated kidnaping, rape, deviate sexual assault, armed robbery, and aggravated battery. According to his allegations, a venire of 30 potential jurors was assembled, 2 of whom were black. Petitioner's counsel objected to those of the State's peremptory challenges that struck the two black venire members from the petit jury, on the ground that petitioner had a Sixth Amendment right to "be tried by a representative cross section of the community." App. 7-8. The trial judge overruled the objection, and petitioner was subsequently convicted of all except the aggravated battery charge. The convictions were reversed by the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, on grounds that are irrelevant here, but on further appeal by the State were reinstated by the Illinois Supreme Court, which rejected petitioner's Equal Protection Clause and Sixth Amendment challenges to the exclusion of the black jurors. We granted Holland's petition for certiorari asserting that the Sixth Amendment holding was error. II The threshold question is whether petitioner, who is white, has standing to raise a Sixth Amendment challenge to the exclusion of blacks from his jury. We hold that he does. In we said that to establish a prima facie Equal Protection Clause violation in the discriminatory exclusion of petit jurors, the defendant "must show that he is a member of a cognizable racial *477 group and that the prosecutor has exercised peremptory challenges to remove from the venire members of the defendant's race." (Emphasis added.) We have never suggested, however, that such a requirement of correlation between the group identification of the defendant and the group identification of excluded venire members is necessary for Sixth Amendment standing. To the contrary, our cases hold that the Sixth Amendment entitles every defendant to object to a venire that is not designed to represent a fair cross section of the community, whether or not the systematically excluded groups are groups to which he himself belongs. See, e. g., ; Thus, in we found standing in circumstances analogous to petitioner's: "The State first insists that a male, has no standing to object to the exclusion of women from his jury. But 's claim is that he was constitutionally entitled to a jury |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | claim is that he was constitutionally entitled to a jury drawn from a venire constituting a fair cross section of the community and that the jury that tried him was not such a jury by reason of the exclusion of women. was not a member of the excluded class; but there is no rule that claims such as presents may be made only by those defendants who are members of the group excluded from jury service." Of course, in this case petitioner seeks an extension of the fair-cross-section requirement from the venire to the petit jury but that variation calls into question the scope of the Sixth Amendment guarantee, not his standing to assert it. We proceed, then, to the merits of the claim. III Petitioner asserts that the prosecutor intentionally used his peremptory challenges to strike all black prospective jurors solely on the basis of their race, thereby preventing a distinctive group in the community from being represented *478 on his jury. This, he contends, violated the Sixth Amendment by denying him a "fair possibility" of a petit jury representing a cross section of the community. Petitioner invites us to remedy the perceived violation by incorporating into the Sixth Amendment the test we devised in to permit black defendants to establish a prima facie violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Under petitioner's approach, a defendant of any race could establish a prima facie violation of the Sixth Amendment by objecting to the use of peremptory challenges to exclude all blacks from the jury. The burden would then shift to the prosecutor to show that the exercise of his peremptory challenges was not based on intentional discrimination against the black potential jurors solely because of their race. Only if the prosecutor could then show nonracial grounds for the strikes would no Sixth Amendment violation be found. We reject petitioner's fundamental thesis that a prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges to eliminate a distinctive group in the community deprives the defendant of a Sixth Amendment right to the "fair possibility" of a representative jury. While statements in our prior cases have alluded to such a "fair possibility" requirement, satisfying it has not been held to require anything beyond the inclusion of all cognizable groups in the venire, see ; and the use of a jury numbering at least six persons, see ; A prohibition upon the exclusion of cognizable groups through peremptory challenges has no conceivable basis in the text of the Sixth Amendment, is without support in our prior decisions, and would undermine rather than further the constitutional guarantee of |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | and would undermine rather than further the constitutional guarantee of an impartial jury. It has long been established that racial groups cannot be excluded from the venire from which a jury is selected. That constitutional principle was first set forth not under the Sixth Amendment but under the Equal Protection Clause. *479 In that context, the object of the principle and the reach of its logic are not established by our common-law traditions of jury trial, but by the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition of unequal treatment in general and racial discrimination in particular. That prohibition therefore has equal application at the petit jury and the venire stages, as our cases have long recognized. Thus, in a decision rendered only 12 years after the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted, striking down a West Virginia law that excluded blacks from jury service, we said: "[I]t is hard to see why the statute of West Virginia should not be regarded as discriminating against a colored man when he is put upon trial for an alleged criminal offense against the State. It is not easy to comprehend how it can be said that while every white man is entitled to a trial by a jury selected from persons of his own race or color, or, rather, selected without discrimination against his color, and a negro is not, the latter is equally protected by the law with the former. Is not protection of life and liberty against race or color prejudice, a right, a legal right, under the constitutional amendment? And how can it be maintained that compelling a colored man to submit to a trial for his life by a jury drawn from a panel from which the State has expressly excluded every man of his race, because of color alone, however well qualified in other respects, is not a denial to him of equal legal protection?" Strauder, Four Terms ago, in we squarely held that race-based exclusion is no more permissible at the individual petit jury stage than at the venire stage not because the two stages are inseparably linked, but because the intransigent prohibition of racial discrimination contained in the Fourteenth Amendment applies to both of them. *480 Our relatively recent cases, beginning with hold that a fair-cross-section venire requirement is imposed by the Sixth Amendment, which provides in pertinent part: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." The fair-cross-section venire requirement is obviously not explicit in this |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | The fair-cross-section venire requirement is obviously not explicit in this text, but is derived from the traditional understanding of how an "impartial jury" is assembled. That traditional understanding includes a representative venire, so that the jury will be, as we have said, "drawn from a fair cross section of the community," But it has never included the notion that, in the process of drawing the jury, that initial representativeness cannot be diminished by allowing both the accused and the State to eliminate persons thought to be inclined against their interests which is precisely how the traditional peremptory-challenge system operates. As we described that system in (15): "[The peremptory challenge] is often exercised on grounds normally thought irrelevant to legal proceedings or official action, namely, the race, religion, nationality, occupation or affiliations of people summoned for jury duty. For the question a prosecutor or defense counsel must decide is not whether a juror of a particular race or nationality is in fact partial, but whether one from a different group is less likely to be." The Sixth Amendment requirement of a fair cross section on the venire is a means of assuring, not a representative jury (which the Constitution does not demand), but an impartial one (which it does). Without that requirement, the State could draw up jury lists in such manner as to produce a pool of prospective jurors disproportionately ill disposed towards one or all classes of defendants, and thus more likely to yield *481 petit juries with similar disposition. The State would have, in effect, unlimited peremptory challenges to compose the pool in its favor. The fair-cross-section venire requirement assures, in other words, that in the process of selecting the petit jury the prosecution and defense will compete on an equal basis. But to say that the Sixth Amendment deprives the State of the ability to "stack the deck" in its favor is not to say that each side may not, once a fair hand is dealt, use peremptory challenges to eliminate prospective jurors belonging to groups it believes would unduly favor the other side. Any theory of the Sixth Amendment leading to that result is implausible. The tradition of peremptory challenges for both the prosecution and the accused was already venerable at the time of Blackstone, see 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries 346-348 (1769), was reflected in a federal statute enacted by the same Congress that proposed the Bill of Rights, see Act of Apr. 30, 1790, ch. 9, 30, was recognized in an opinion by Justice Story to be part of the common law of the |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | Story to be part of the common law of the United States, see United and has endured through two centuries in all the States, see The constitutional phrase "impartial jury" must surely take its content from this unbroken tradition.[1] One could plausibly *482 argue that the requirement of an "impartial jury" impliedly compels peremptory challenges, but in no way could it be interpreted directly or indirectly to prohibit them. We have gone out of our way to make this clear in our opinions. In we said: "We have never invoked the fair-cross-section principle to invalidate *483 the use of either for-cause or peremptory challenges to prospective jurors, or to require petit juries, as opposed to jury panels or venires, to reflect the composition of the community at large." In we "emphasized that in holding that petit juries must be drawn from a source fairly representative of the community we impose no requirement that petit juries actually chosen must mirror the community and reflect the various distinctive groups in the population. Defendants are not entitled to a jury of any particular composition." Accord, -364, and n. 20. The fundamental principle underlying today's decision is the same principle that underlay which rejected the claim that allowing challenge for cause, in the guilt phase of a capital trial, to jurors unalterably opposed to the death penalty (so-called "Witherspoon-excludables") violates the fair-cross-section requirement. It does not violate that requirement, we said, to disqualify a group for a reason that is related "to the ability of members of the group to serve as jurors in a particular case." The "representativeness" constitutionally required at the venire stage can be disrupted at the jury-panel stage to serve a State's "legitimate interest." In the legitimate interest was "obtaining a single jury that can properly and impartially apply the law to the facts of the case at both the guilt and sentencing phases of a capital trial." Here the legitimate interest is the assurance of impartiality that the system of peremptory challenges has traditionally provided. The rule we announce today is not only the only plausible reading of the text of the Sixth Amendment, but we think it best furthers the Amendment's central purpose as well. Although the constitutional guarantee runs only to the individual and not to the State, the goal it expresses is jury impartiality with respect to both contestants: neither the defendant nor the State should be favored. This goal, it seems to us, *484 would positively be obstructed by a petit jury cross-section requirement which, as we have described, would cripple the device of peremptory |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | as we have described, would cripple the device of peremptory challenge. We have acknowledged that that device occupies "an important position in our trial procedures," and has indeed been considered "a necessary part of trial by jury," Peremptory challenges, by enabling each side to exclude those jurors it believes will be most partial toward the other side, are a means of "eliminat[ing] extremes of partiality on both sides," ib thereby "assuring the selection of a qualified and unbiased jury,"[2] Petitioner seeks to minimize the harm that recognition of his claim would cause to the peremptory challenge system by assuring us that the striking of identifiable community groups other than blacks need not be accorded similar treatment. That is a comforting assurance, but the theory of petitioner's case is not compatible with it. If the goal of the Sixth Amendment is representation of a fair cross section of the community on the petit jury, then intentionally using peremptory challenges to exclude any identifiable group should be impermissible which would, as we said in "likely require the elimination of peremptory challenges." JUSTICE MARSHALL argues that prohibiting purposeful peremptory challenge of members of distinctive groups "would leave the peremptory challenge system almost entirely untouched" because the Court is unlikely to recognize many groups as "distinctive." Post, at 502. Misplaced optimism on this subject is cost free to those who in any event "would *485. eliminat[e] peremptory challenges entirely in criminal cases," but we see no justification for indulging it. To support his prediction, JUSTICE MARSHALL states that the only groups the Court has recognized as distinctive thus far have been women and certain racial groups, post, at 502 (citing ). That is true enough, but inasmuch as those groups happen to constitute all the groups we have considered in the venire context, what it demonstrates is not how difficult it is to meet our standards for distinctiveness, but how few groups are systematically excluded from the venire. As we have discussed, however, many groups are regularly excluded from the petit jury through peremptory challenge. itself suggests, quite rightly, that even so exotic a group as "Witherspoon-excludables" would be a distinctive group whose rejection at the venire stage would violate the Sixth Amendment. If, as JUSTICE MARSHALL would have it, rejection at the venire stage and rejection at the panel stage are one and the same, there is every reason to believe that many commonly exercised bases for peremptory challenge would be rendered unavailable. Dispassionate analysis does not bear out JUSTICE MARSHALL's contentions that we have "ignor[ed] precedent after precedent," post, at 503, |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | that we have "ignor[ed] precedent after precedent," post, at 503, "reject[ed] the principles underlying a whole line of cases," ib and suffer from "selective amnesia with respect to our cases in this area," post, at 500. His dissent acknowledges that the fair-cross-section decisions it discusses and "referr[ed] to exclusion of prospective jurors from venires, not their exclusion from petit juries by means of peremptory challenges," post, at 4. It nonetheless counts those cases as "well-grounded precedents," post, at 490, because "the particular context does not affect the analysis," post, at 4. That may be the dissent's view, but it was assuredly not the view expressed in the cases themselves. As noted earlier, all three *486 of those opinions specifically disclaimed application of their analysis to the petit jury. See Last Term, in we were asked to decide the very same question we decide today "whether," as JUSTICE O'CONNOR's plurality opinion put it, "the Sixth Amendment's fair cross section requirement should now be extended to the petit jury." We did not reach that question because the four-Justice plurality, with JUSTICE WHITE agreeing as to the result, held that "new constitutional rules of criminal procedure will not be applicable to those cases which have become final before the new rules are announced," and found that in asserting a fair-cross-section requirement at the petit jury stage petitioner was urging adoption of such a "new rule," at 301 that is, a rule producing a result "not dictated by [prior] precedent," Though there were four Justices in dissent, only two of them expressed the view that a petit jury fair-cross-section requirement was compelled by prior precedent. See In short, there is no substance to the contention that what we hold today "ignor[es] precedent after precedent." JUSTICE MARSHALL's dissent rolls out the ultimate weapon, the accusation of insensitivity to racial discrimination which will lose its intimidating effect if it continues to be fired so randomly. It is not remotely true that our opinion today "lightly set[s] aside" the constitutional goal of "eliminat[ing] racial discrimination in our system of criminal justice." Post, at 503-504. The defendant in this case is not a black man, but a convicted white rapist who seeks to use the striking of blacks from his jury to overturn his conviction. His Sixth Amendment claim would be just as strong if the object of the exclusion had been, not blacks, but postmen, or lawyers, or clergymen, or any number of other identifiable groups. Race as such has nothing to do with the legal issue in this case. We do |
Justice Scalia | 1,990 | 9 | majority | Holland v. Illinois | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112358/holland-v-illinois/ | do with the legal issue in this case. We do not hold that the systematic exclusion of *487 blacks from the jury system through peremptory challenges is lawful; it obviously is not, see We do not even hold that the exclusion of blacks through peremptory challenges in this particular trial was lawful. Nor do we even hold that this particular (white) defendant does not have a valid constitutional challenge to such racial exclusion.[3] All we hold is that he does not have a valid constitutional challenge based on the Sixth Amendment which no more forbids the prosecutor to strike jurors on the basis of race than it forbids him to strike them on the basis of innumerable other generalized characteristics. To be sure, as JUSTICE MARSHALL says, the Sixth Amendment sometimes operates "as a weapon to combat racial discrimination," post, at 504, n. 2 just as statutes against murder sometimes operate that way. But it is no more reasonable to portray this as a civil rights case than it is to characterize a proposal for increased murder penalties as an antidiscrimination law. Since only the Sixth Amendment claim, and not the equal protection claim, is at issue, the question before us is not whether the defendant has been unlawfully discriminated against because he was white, or whether the excluded jurors have been unlawfully discriminated *488A against because they were black, but whether the defendant has been denied the right to "trial by an impartial jury." The earnestness of this Court's commitment to racial justice is not to be measured by its willingness to expand constitutional provisions designed for other purposes beyond their proper bounds. The judgment of the Illinois Supreme Court is Affirmed. |
Justice Douglas | 1,973 | 10 | dissenting | United Air Lines, Inc. v. Mahin | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/108737/united-air-lines-inc-v-mahin/ | The Court today makes a break with the history of the Commerce Clause that has been largely responsible for creating in this Nation a great common market. One *633 protective device this Court has used to keep the national channels of commerce open against hostile state legislation has been the constitutional ban on state taxation levied on interstate activities. In 1873, in Case of State Freight Tax, we held unconstitutional a state tax "so far as it applies to articles taken up in the State and carried out of it" While there are ways in which interstate commerce can be required to pay its way, we have not until today abandoned the basic principle that a State may not tax interstate activities. That is what is done here, for the Illinois tax is levied on filling the fuel tanks of airplanes taking off for interstate or foreign journeys. If Illinois can tax that segment of the interstate activity, there is no reason why she may not tax the takeoff itself. The filling of fuel tanks to make an interstate or foreign journey is as indispensable a part and parcel of the interstate or foreign journey as using the runways for that purpose. The Supreme Court of Illinois sustained the Illinois Use Tax[1] on all aviation fuel loaded aboard United's interstate and foreign flights departing from Chicago. United purchases fuel outside Illinois and stores it in Illinois temporarily for its interstate and foreign operations. The use tax exempts from the tax property purchased outside Illinois, temporarily stored in the State, and used solely outside the State.[2] Until 1963 the temporary storage exception was construed by the Illinois Department of Revenue so as to subject to the use tax only that fuel loaded on departing flights that was actually burned over Illinois. In 1963 the Department changed its prior ruling and announced: "[T]emporary storage ends and a taxable use occurs when the fuel is taken out of storage facilities *634 and is placed into the tank of the airplane, railroad engine or truck. At this point, the fuel is converted into its ultimate use, and, therefore, a taxable use occurs in Illinois." The Supreme Court of Illinois upheld that construction and application of the use tax against the claim that it violates the Commerce Clause, saying that United's storage becomes something more than temporary storage for safekeeping "prior to its use solely outside of Illinois." The taxable event is the act of loading the fuel aboard United's aircraft in Illinois preparatory to their interstate or foreign journey. The majority states that the |
Justice Douglas | 1,973 | 10 | dissenting | United Air Lines, Inc. v. Mahin | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/108737/united-air-lines-inc-v-mahin/ | their interstate or foreign journey. The majority states that the Supreme Court of Illinois concluded that either the storage of the gasoline itself or the withdrawal therefrom is a use which may be taxed without offending the Federal Constitution. But that statement of the Supreme Court of Illinois was made in its discussion of the exemption from the use tax which, as relevant here, provides: "[T]he temporary storage, in this State, of tangible personal property which is acquired outside this State and which, subsequent to being brought into this State and stored here temporarily, is used solely outside this State." Ill. Rev. Stat., c. 120, 9.3 (1971). That means that the temporary-storage exemption would extend, not merely to storage on the ground, but also to its loading aboard the transportation vehicles, such as trucks or railroad cars, and to its transportation from the State. It is thus obvious that, unless the means of removing the property from the State is included in the scope of the temporary storage, it would be a nullity, as appellant maintains. Since in this case, there is no tax if fuel is withdrawn from storage and taken from the State by other means, it is clear that neither the storage nor the removal from storage is what makes the fuel taxable. The majority properly notes that, as a matter of state *635 law and the Illinois court's interpretation thereof, it is the "consumption" wholly without the State that makes the exception operable. Conversely, I read the Illinois opinion to mean that, as a matter of state law, it is at least partial consumption within the State that brings the tax on all the fuel into play. That is so even if only a small portion of the fuel is consumed within the State, while the remainder is consumed out of State during an interstate or foreign flight. The inescapable conclusion from the state court's interpretation of this state law is that the act of loading the fuel into the fuel tanks of the interstate aircraft solely for use as the motive power is the taxable event. If that event were used to tax fuel used on an intrastate flight, no problem under the Commerce Clause would arise. But loading is part of the interstate activity when planes prepare for an interstate journey, just as loading is a part of the shipment of goods by rail or water interstate (Puget Sound Stevedoring ; ) and just as local pickups of parcels and local delivery of parcels in interstate movement are not permissible grounds "for a state |
Justice Douglas | 1,973 | 10 | dissenting | United Air Lines, Inc. v. Mahin | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/108737/united-air-lines-inc-v-mahin/ | in interstate movement are not permissible grounds "for a state license, privilege or occupation tax." Railway Express In Richfield Oil we held invalid a state sales tax levied on the delivery of fuel oil into a ship for overseas carriage. We said "[t]he incident which gave rise to the accrual of the tax was a step in the export process." A like result was reached in Michigan-Wisconsin Pipe Line where a State sought to impose a severance tax on the transfer of gas from a refinery pipeline to an interstate pipeline. We noted that the "taxable incidence" was the taking of gas from a local plant "for the purpose of immediate interstate transmission." *636 We, therefore, held it unconstitutional, since it was a tax "on the exit of the gas from the State." The present tax is analogous to the tax on the privilege of carrying on an exclusively interstate business which we struck down in Spector Motor A tax upon an integral part of interstate commerce is a tax that no State by reason of the Commerce Clause is empowered to impose, unless authorized by Congress. at The fuel in United's planes propels the interstate flights; because it is the source of the motive power, it is essential to the interstate journey. It is, therefore, indisputably a part and parcel of the interstate movement. involved an Arkansas statute which prohibited any truck or automobile from entering the State with more than 20 gallons of gasoline in its tank unless an excise tax were paid on the gasoline. The Court held the tax unconstitutional because it imposed a tax on "gasoline to be immediately transported over the roads of Arkansas for consumption beyond." Similarly, Illinois imposes its tax on all of the fuel loaded into airplane tanks, whether or not that fuel is consumed out of State. In on which the Illinois Supreme Court relied in disapproving the earlier construction of the statute, a ferry boat operated between Illinois and Kentucky, having its office in Illinois and buying all its fuel there. Kentucky sought to tax that portion of the fuel used in Kentucky. This Court invalidated the tax, saying it was "exacted as the price of the privilege of using an instrumentality of interstate commerce." If that tax is invalid, it follows a fortiori that Illinois may not tax the movement of airplanes from Illinois to California, from Illinois to Europe, or from Illinois to any other out-of-state point. *637 It is now well settled that interstate commerce can be required to pay its way, Illinois Central R. ; |
Justice Douglas | 1,973 | 10 | dissenting | United Air Lines, Inc. v. Mahin | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/108737/united-air-lines-inc-v-mahin/ | be required to pay its way, Illinois Central R. ; Western Live ; Greyhound ; Northwestern Cement a result commonly reached by formulae which allocate to the taxing State business derived from operations within the State. Railway Express Yet, when pieces or segments of an interstate business are taxed, our cases reveal discrimination in approving or disapproving taxes that may be imposed. A State may not exact a license tax for the privilege of carrying on interstate commerce. ; As stated in Berwind-White, taxes "which are aimed at or discriminate against [interstate] commerce or impose a levy for the privilege of doing it, or tax interstate transportation or communication or their gross earnings, or levy an exaction on merchandise in the course of its interstate journey" are within the ban, since they may "so readily be made the instrument of impeding or destroying interstate commerce." Sales within the State, however, are taxable, though the goods have reached the market by interstate channels. Magnano ; The sales tax in Berwind-White was on the "transfer of title or possession, or both," at And we sustained the tax because of "a local activity" which we described as "delivery of goods within the state upon their purchase for consumption," As a consequence, an out-of-state buyer who purchases goods in New York City and takes them with him pays the tax, while if he has them shipped to him, he pays no sales tax. Although "delivery of goods" within the State may be taxed, "solicitation" within the State for out-of-state *638 confirmation and shipment into the State may not be. ; West Point Grocery v. Opelika, In Dunbar-Stanley a tax was sustained on out-of-state photographers, since their activities were not soliciting orders for an out-of-state house but taking photographs within the State. The use tax came into being to complement the sales tax, i. e., to fill in gaps where the States could not constitutionally tax interstate arrivals or departures. See Henneford v. Silas Mason Thus, goods may be taxed at the end of their interstate journey, where the tax does not discriminate against interstate commerce. 2-583; Felt & Tarrant v. Gallagher, (use tax on storage, use, or other consumption); Southern Pacific v. Gallagher, (storage and use). Use taxes imposed on storage or withdrawal from storage have consistently been sustained. Eastern Air ; Gregg Dyeing v. Query, ; Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis R. v. Wallace, ; Nice distinctions are often necessary because, although all taxes on interstate carriers "in an ultimate sense, come out of interstate commerce" ), the constitutional ban relates only to |
Justice Douglas | 1,973 | 10 | dissenting | United Air Lines, Inc. v. Mahin | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/108737/united-air-lines-inc-v-mahin/ | of interstate commerce" ), the constitutional ban relates only to "a direct imposition on that very freedom of commercial flow which for more than a hundred and fifty years has been the ward of the Commerce Clause." at For Illinois to tax the storage of fuel within its borders is, of course, constitutionally permissible, even though in time the fuel may be used in interstate or foreign commerce. In the use tax was "not levied upon the consumption of gasoline in furnishing motive power for respondent's *639 interstate planes." The tax was "applied to the stored gasoline as it is withdrawn from the storage tanks at the airport and placed in the planes." "It is at the time of withdrawal alone that `use' is measured for the purposes of the tax." (Italics added.) At that time, the gasoline was not irrevocably committed to interstate commerce, for it might be diverted to planes on intrastate journeys. By contrast, the taxable event on which Illinois levies her tax is not storage for future use, or withdrawal from storage, but only loading in the tanks of planes preparing for interstate or foreign journeys. It is, therefore, inescapably a tax on the actual motive power for an interstate or foreign journey. Taxing the fuel loaded in a plane destined for an interstate or foreign journey is, in other words, taxing the privilege of using a facility in commerce, because the motive power[3] represented by the fuel has become part and parcel of the facility. The decision today marks a break with our constitutional tradition, which, absent an Act of Congress, has led this Court consistently to hold that the free flow of interstate commerce is a ward of the Commerce Clause. Without that free flow of commerce we would not have the great common market we enjoy today. I would reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Illinois. MR. |
per_curiam | 1,976 | 200 | per_curiam | Youakim v. Miller | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109422/youakim-v-miller/ | As part of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, 42 U.S. C. 601 et seq., the State of Illinois provides federally subsidized foster care (AFDC-FC) payments of $105 per month for a dependent child placed with unrelated foster parents. Under Illinois' administration of the program no foster care payments are made to foster parents who are related to the foster child. Related foster parents are eligible, however, to receive payments under the State's regular AFDC program for the support of dependent children in the amount of $63 per month. These payments are made without regard to the financial circumstances of the family caring for the child. In addition, as an exception to the State's regular policy, related foster parents, upon an adequate showing of financial need, may receive supplemental payments for child care which bring the payments in connection with the related foster child to approximately $105 per month. Appellants are Linda Youakim and her husband, Marcel, and Linda's four minor brothers and sisters, Timothy, Mary Lou, Larry, and Sherry Robertson. Since 1972, the Youakims have been foster parents of Timothy and Mary Lou. Larry and Sherry have been living in separate, unrelated foster care facilities since 1969. Because Linda is related to Timothy and Mary Lou, the Youakims were ineligible for AFDC-FC foster care payments. They did apply for and receive the smaller AFDC payments for both children. Alleging injury resulting from financial inability to provide adequate care for Timothy and Mary Lou and to bring Larry and Sherry into their foster family, appellants filed suit in the District Court against the state officials on behalf of themselves and all other persons similarly situated. Their complaint described the suit as an action to enjoin *233 enforcement of the foster care payment scheme on the ground that it denied related foster families the equal protection of the laws and likewise discriminated against wards of the State and relatives who could not provide an adequate foster home without full foster care payments. They asked that a three-judge District Court convene and enjoin the enforcement of the Illinois statutes and regulations. The three-judge court "approved" the Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 23 (b) (2) class, granted appellees' motion for summary judgment, and ultimately held that the "Illinois scheme does not deny plaintiffs equal protection of the laws." The jurisdictional statement filed here expressly challenged the Illinois scheme both on equal protection grounds and on the ground of conflict with the Social Security Act. We noted probable jurisdiction. Although the jurisdictional statement as to which we noted probable jurisdiction presented |
per_curiam | 1,976 | 200 | per_curiam | Youakim v. Miller | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109422/youakim-v-miller/ | jurisdictional statement as to which we noted probable jurisdiction presented the question of conflict between the Illinois law and the Social Security Act, it appears that the Supremacy Clause claim was not presented to the District Court as an independent ground for invalidating the state law. The complaint described the suit as one seeking an injunction on equal protection grounds. The sole ground for relief expressly claimed in each of the three causes of action which the complaint purported to allege, as well as in the prayer for relief, was that the Illinois program denied appellants equal protection of the laws. It does not appear from the record in the District Court that as the case developed appellants rested on the Supremacy Clause as a separate basis for their injunction claim. Nor did the District Court address the relationship between state and federal law independently of the equal protection issue. *234 Ordinarily, this Court does not decide questions not raised or resolved in the lower court. ; But as and Brotherhood of for example, demonstrate, the rule is not inflexible. Cf. Its usual formulation is: "It is only in exceptional cases coming here from the federal courts that questions not pressed or passed upon below are reviewed." Here, as we shall describe, the circumstances justify our dealing with the issue of conflict between state and federal statutes at least to the extent of vacating the judgment below and remanding the case for consideration of the claim that the Illinois foster care program is in conflict with the Social Security Act. Initially, it should be noted that the statutory issue is not foreign to the subject matter of the complaint. Attacks on state welfare statutes often combine Equal Protection Clause and Supremacy Clause issues. The latter question could surely have been pursued under the complaint filed in this case, which, as part of the "facts" incorporated by reference in each of the three causes of action, alleged that the Illinois program was in conflict with the policy of the United States expressed in sub-chapter IV of the Social Security Act, as amended, 42 U.S. C. 601 et seq., specifically with the federal policy of encouraging the care of children in their own homes or in the homes of relatives wherever possible. It is also apparent that the District Court was of the view that under "serious equal protection problems" might arise if "a state attempts to rely on the concept of fiscal *235 integrity to limit beyond statutory standards the class eligible to receive federally subsidized payments." 374 F. Supp., at |
per_curiam | 1,976 | 200 | per_curiam | Youakim v. Miller | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109422/youakim-v-miller/ | eligible to receive federally subsidized payments." 374 F. Supp., at For this reason, the District Court compared federal and state law, and concluded: "Far from being inconsistent with the federal scheme, the Illinois scheme in general seems to parallel it. Thus the federal statute makes the same classification as the Illinois statute." Had appellants relied on the Supremacy Clause issue as a separate ground for decision it would appear that the claim would have been rejected by the District Court. In light of these circumstances, the case is at most only marginally subject to the rule that this Court will not consider issues "not pressed or passed upon" in the court below. Beyond these considerations, on October 25, after the filing of the jurisdictional statement but before we noted probable jurisdiction, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued Program Instruction APA-PI-75-9 stating that under the controlling federal law, "[w]hen a child has been removed from his home by judicial determination and is placed in foster care under the various conditions specified the foster care rate of payment prevails regardless of whether or not the foster home is operated by a relative." Also, in response to appellants' jurisdictional statement, the Solicitor General filed a statement in this Court urging that the Illinois foster care program was inconsistent with the Social Security Act insofar as it provided higher payments to unrelated foster parents than to those who were related. Neither the appellants nor the District Court had the benefit of either of these developments when the case was in the lower court. The interpretation of a statute by an agency charged with its enforcement is a substantial factor to be considered in construing the statute, New York Dept. of Social ; Columbia Broadcasting System, U.S. 94, ; Investment Co. ; and appellants[1] now wish to press the issue of conflict between state and federal law. We think that it is appropriate to afford them the opportunity to do so, but that the claim should be aired first in the District Court. Vacating the judgment and remanding the case for this purpose will require the District Court first to decide the statutory issue, and if appellants prevail on that question, it will be unnecessary for either the District Court or this Court to reach the equal protection issue at all. A remand is thus consistent with our usual practice of avoiding decisions on constitutional matters if a case may be resolved on other grounds.[2] *237 The action we take here is similar to the order the Court entered in There, rather than |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | During petitioner’s trial on state criminal charges, the courtroom was occupied by potential jurors and closed to the public for two days of the jury selection process. De- fense counsel neither objected to the closure at trial nor raised the issue on direct review. And the case comes to the Court on the assumption that, in failing to object, defense counsel provided ineffective assistance. In the direct review context, the underlying constitu- tional violation—the courtroom closure—has been treated by this Court as a structural error, i.e., an error entitling the defendant to automatic reversal without any inquiry into prejudice. The question is whether invalidation of the conviction is required here as well, or if the prejudice inquiry is altered when the structural error is raised in the context of an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim. I In 2003, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed in Boston. A witness saw a young fleeing the scene of the crime and saw him pull out a pistol. A baseball hat fell off of his head. The police recovered the hat, which featured a 2 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court distinctive airbrushed Detroit Tigers logo on either side. The hat’s distinctive markings linked it to 16-year-old Kentel Weaver. He is the petitioner here. DNA obtained from the hat matched petitioner’s DNA. Two weeks after the crime, the police went to petition- er’s house to question him. He admitted losing his hat around the time of the shooting but denied being involved. Petitioner’s mother was not so sure. Later, she questioned petitioner herself. She asked whether he had been at the scene of the shooting, and he said he had been there. But when she asked if he was the shooter, or if he knew who the shooter was, petitioner put his head down and said nothing. Believing his response to be an admission of guilt, she insisted that petitioner go to the police station to confess. He did. Petitioner was indicted in Massachusetts state court for first-degree murder and the unlicensed possession of a handgun. He pleaded not guilty and pro- ceeded to trial. The pool of potential jury members was large, some 60 to people. The assigned courtroom could accommodate only 50 or 60 in the courtroom seating. As a result, the trial judge brought all potential jurors into the courtroom so that he could introduce the case and ask certain prelim- inary questions of the entire venire panel. Many of the potential jurors did not have seats and had to stand in the courtroom. After the preliminary questions, the potential jurors who |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | the courtroom. After the preliminary questions, the potential jurors who had been standing were moved outside the courtroom to wait during the individual questioning of the other potential jurors. The judge acknowledged that the hallway was not “the most comfortable place to wait” and thanked the potential jurors for their patience. 2 Tr. II– 103 (Apr. 10, 2006). The judge noted that there was simply not space in the courtroom for everybody. As all of the seats in the courtroom were occupied by the venire panel, an officer of the court excluded from the courtroom any member of the public who was not a poten- Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) 3 Opinion of the Court tial juror. So when petitioner’s mother and her minister came to the courtroom to observe the two days of jury selection, they were turned away. All this occurred before the Court’s decision in Presley v. Georgia, Presley made it clear that the public-trial right extends to jury selection as well as to other portions of the trial. at 213–215. Before Presley, Massachusetts courts would often close courtrooms to the public during jury selection, in particu- lar during murder trials. In this case petitioner’s mother told defense counsel about the closure at some point during jury selection. But counsel “believed that a courtroom closure for [ jury selec- tion] was constitutional.” Crim. No. 2003–11293 (Super. Ct. Mass., Feb. 22, 2013), App. to Pet. for Cert. 49a. As a result, he “did not discuss the matter” with petitioner, or tell him “that his right to a public trial included the [jury voir dire],” or object to the closure. During the ensuing trial, the government presented strong evidence of petitioner’s guilt. Its case consisted of the incriminating details outlined above, including peti- tioner’s confession to the police. The jury convicted peti- tioner on both counts. The court sentenced him to life in prison on the murder charge and to about a year in prison on the gun-possession charge. Five years later, petitioner filed a motion for a new trial in Massachusetts state court. As relevant here, he argued that his attorney had provided ineffective assistance by failing to object to the courtroom closure. After an eviden- tiary hearing, the trial court recognized a violation of the right to a public trial based on the following findings: The courtroom had been closed; the closure was neither de minimis nor trivial; the closure was unjustified; and the closure was full rather than partial (meaning that all members of the public, rather than only some of them, had been excluded |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | public, rather than only some of them, had been excluded from the courtroom). The trial court fur- 4 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court ther determined that defense counsel failed to object be- cause of “serious incompetency, inefficiency, or inatten- tion.” at 63a ). On the other hand, petitioner had not “offered any evidence or legal argument establishing prejudice.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 64a. For that reason, the court held that petitioner was not entitled to relief. Petitioner appealed the denial of the motion for a new trial to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The court consolidated that appeal with petitioner’s direct appeal. As noted, there had been no objection to the clo- sure at trial; and the issue was not raised in the direct appeal. The Supreme Judicial Court then affirmed in relevant part. Although it recognized that “[a] violation of the Sixth Amendment right to a public trial constitutes structural error,” the court stated that petitioner had “failed to show that trial counsel’s conduct caused preju- dice warranting a new trial.” 54 N.E. 3d 495, 520 (2016). On this reasoning, the court rejected petitioner’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. There is disagreement among the Federal Courts of Appeals and some state courts of last resort about whether a defendant must demonstrate prejudice in a case like this one—in which a structural error is neither preserved nor raised on direct review but is raised later via a claim alleging ineffective assistance of counsel. Some courts have held that, when a defendant shows that his attorney unreasonably failed to object to a structural error, the defendant is entitled to a new trial without further in- quiry. See, e.g., (CA6 2009); 64–65 (CA1 200); 1043–1044 (D. C. 2013); 125, 112 P.3d 5, Other courts have held that the defendant is entitled to relief only if he or she can Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) 5 Opinion of the Court show prejudice. See, e.g., 38 (CA11 2006); United 9–80 (CA2 2013); S.E.2d 1, 180–181 This Court granted certio- rari to resolve that disagreement. 580 U. S. (201). The Court does so specifically and only in the context of trial counsel’s failure to object to the closure of the courtroom during jury selection. II This case requires a discussion, and the proper applica- tion, of two doctrines: structural error and ineffective assistance of counsel. The two doctrines are intertwined; for the reasons an error is deemed structural may influ- ence the proper standard used to evaluate an ineffective- assistance claim premised on the failure to object to that error. |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | claim premised on the failure to object to that error. A The concept of structural error can be discussed first. In this Court “adopted the general rule that a constitutional error does not automatically require reversal of a conviction.” Ari- (citing Chap- If the government can show “beyond a rea- sonable doubt that the error complained of did not contribute to the verdict obtained,” the Court held, then the error is deemed harmless and the defendant is not entitled to reversal. The Court recognized, however, that some errors should not be deemed harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. at 23, n. 8. These errors came to be known as structural errors. See –310. The pur- pose of the structural error doctrine is to ensure insistence on certain basic, constitutional guarantees that should define the framework of any criminal trial. Thus, the 6 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court defining feature of a structural error is that it “affect[s] the framework within which the trial proceeds,” rather than being “simply an error in the trial process itself.” at 310. For the same reason, a structural error “def[ies] analysis by harmless error standards.” (inter- nal quotation marks omitted). The precise reason why a particular error is not amen- able to that kind of analysis—and thus the precise reason why the Court has deemed it structural—varies in a sig- nificant way from error to error. There appear to be at least three broad rationales. First, an error has been deemed structural in some instances if the right at issue is not designed to protect the defendant from erroneous conviction but instead protects some other interest. This is true of the defendant’s right to conduct his own defense, which, when exercised, “usu- ally increases the likelihood of a trial outcome unfavorable to the defendant.” 1, n. 8 That right is based on the fundamental legal principle that a defendant must be allowed to make his own choices about the proper way to protect his own liberty. See (195). Because harm is irrelevant to the basis underlying the right, the Court has deemed a violation of that right structural error. See United States v. 548 U.S. 140, 149, n. 4 (2006). Second, an error has been deemed structural if the effects of the error are simply too hard to measure. For example, when a defendant is denied the right to select his or her own attorney, the precise “effect of the violation cannot be ascertained.” ). Because the government will, as a result, find it almost impossible to show that the error was “harmless beyond |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | almost impossible to show that the error was “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt,” Chap, the efficiency costs of letting the government try to make the showing are unjustified. Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) Opinion of the Court Third, an error has been deemed structural if the error always results in fundamental unfairness. For example, if an indigent defendant is denied an attorney or if the judge fails to give a reasonable-doubt instruction, the resulting trial is always a fundamentally unfair one. See Gideon v. Wainwright, (right to an attorney); (right to a reasonable-doubt instruction). It there- fore would be futile for the government to try to show harmlessness. These categories are not rigid. In a particular case, more than one of these rationales may be part of the ex- planation for why an error is deemed to be structural. See e.g., at 280–282. For these purposes, however, one point is critical: An error can count as structural even if the error does not lead to fundamental unfairness in every case. See (rejecting as “inconsistent with the reasoning of our precedents” the idea that structural errors “always or necessarily render a trial fundamentally unfair and unreliable” (emphasis deleted)). B As noted above, a violation of the right to a public trial is a structural error. See It is relevant to determine why that is so. In particular, the question is whether a public-trial violation counts as structural be- cause it always leads to fundamental unfairness or for some other reason. In the state court prohibited the public from viewing a weeklong suppression hearing out of concern for the privacy of persons other than those on trial. See at 41–43. Although it recog- nized that there would be instances where closure was justified, this Court noted that “such circumstances will be rare” and that the closure in question was unjustified. 8 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court 48. Still, the Court did not order a new trial. at 49–50. Instead it ordered a new suppression hearing that was open to the public. If the same evidence was found admissible in that renewed pretrial proceeding, the Court held, no new trial as to guilt would be neces- sary. This was despite the structural aspect of the violation. Some 25 years after the decision, the Court issued its per curiam ruling in Presley v. Georgia. 558 U.S. 209. In that case, as here, the courtroom was closed to the public during jury voir dire. Unlike here, however, there was a trial objection to the closure, and the issue was raised on direct |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | to the closure, and the issue was raised on direct appeal. –211. On review of the State Supreme Court’s decision allowing the closure, this Court expressed concern that the state court’s reasoning would allow the courtroom to be closed during jury selection “whenever the trial judge decides, for whatever reason, that he or she would prefer to fill the courtroom with potential jurors rather than spectators.” Although the Court expressly noted that courtroom closure may be ordered in some circumstances, the Court also stated that it was “still incumbent upon” the trial court “to consider all reasonable alternatives to closure.” –216. These opinions teach that courtroom closure is to be avoided, but that there are some circumstances when it is justified. The problems that may be encountered by trial courts in deciding whether some closures are necessary, or even in deciding which members of the public should be admitted when seats are scarce, are difficult ones. For example, there are often preliminary instructions that a judge may want to give to the venire as a whole, rather than repeating those instructions (perhaps with uninten- tional differences) to several groups of potential jurors. On the other hand, various constituencies of the public— the family of the accused, the family of the victim, mem- Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) 9 Opinion of the Court bers of the press, and other persons—all have their own interests in observing the selection of jurors. How best to age these problems is not a topic discussed at length in any decision or commentary the Court has found. So although the public-trial right is structural, it is subject to exceptions. See Simonson, The Criminal Court Audience in a Post-Trial World, 2219–2222 (2014) (discussing situations in which a trial court may order a courtroom closure). Though these cases should be rare, a judge may deprive a defendant of his right to an open courtroom by making proper factual findings in support of the decision to do so. See The fact that the public-trial right is subject to these exceptions suggests that not every public-trial violation results in fundamental unfairness. A public-trial violation can occur, moreover, as it did in Presley, simply because the trial court omits to make the proper findings before closing the courtroom, even if those findings might have been fully supported by the evidence. See 558 U.S., It would be unconvincing to deem a trial fundamentally unfair just because a judge omitted to announce factual findings before making an otherwise valid decision to order the courtroom temporarily closed. As a result, it would be |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | the courtroom temporarily closed. As a result, it would be likewise unconvincing if the Court had said that a public-trial violation always leads to a fundamentally unfair trial. Indeed, the Court has not said that a public-trial viola- tion renders a trial fundamentally unfair in every case. In the two cases in which the Court has discussed the rea- sons for classifying a public-trial violation as structural error, the Court has said that a public-trial violation is structural for a different reason: because of the “difficulty of assessing the effect of the error.” 548 U.S., ; see also The public-trial right also protects some interests that do not belong to the defendant. After all, the right to an 10 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court open courtroom protects the rights of the public at large, and the press, as well as the rights of the accused. See, e.g., Press-Enterprise ; Richmond News- papers, So one other factor leading to the classification of structural error is that the public-trial right furthers interests other than protecting the defendant against unjust conviction. These precepts confirm the conclusion the Court now reaches that, while the public-trial right is important for fundamental reasons, in some cases an unlawful closure might take place and yet the trial still will be fundamen- tally fair from the defendant’s standpoint. III The Court now turns to the proper remedy for address- ing the violation of a structural right, and in particular the right to a public trial. Despite its name, the term “struc- tural error” carries with it no talisic significance as a doctrinal matter. It means only that the government is not entitled to deprive the defendant of a new trial by showing that the error was “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.” Chap, 386 U.S., Thus, in the case of a structural error where there is an objection at trial and the issue is raised on direct appeal, the defendant gener- ally is entitled to “automatic reversal” regardless of the error’s actual “effect on the outcome.” The question then becomes what showing is necessary when the defendant does not preserve a structural error on direct review but raises it later in the context of an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim. To obtain relief on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel, the defendant as a general rule bears the burden to meet two standards. First, the defendant must show deficient perforce— that the attorney’s error was “so serious that counsel was Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) 11 Opinion of the Court not functioning as the ‘counsel’ guaranteed the defendant |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | the Court not functioning as the ‘counsel’ guaranteed the defendant by the Sixth Amendment.” v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 68 Second, the defendant must show that the attorney’s error “prejudiced the defense.” The prejudice showing is in most cases a necessary part of a claim. The reason is that a defendant has a right to effective representation, not a right to an attor- ney who performs his duties “mistake-free.” Gonzalez- 548 U.S., at 14. As a rule, therefore, a “violation of the Sixth Amendment right to effective representation is not ‘complete’ until the defendant is prejudiced.” (emphasis deleted); see also 128 (2011); 30 That said, the concept of prejudice is defined in different ways depending on the context in which it appears. In the ordinary case, prejudice means “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.” But the Court cautioned that the prejudice inquiry is not meant to be applied in a “me- chanical” fashion. For when a court is evalu- ating an ineffective-assistance claim, the ultimate inquiry must concentrate on “the fundamental fairness of the proceeding.” Petitioner therefore argues that under a proper interpretation of even if there is no showing of a reasonable probability of a different outcome, relief still must be granted if the convicted person shows that attorney errors rendered the trial fundamentally unfair. For the analytical purposes of this case, the Court will assume that petitioner’s interpretation of is the correct one. In light of the Court’s ultimate holding, however, the Court need not decide that question here. As explained above, not every public-trial violation will in fact lead to a fundamentally unfair trial. See at 10. Nor can it be said that the failure to object to a public- trial violation always deprives the defendant of a reason- 12 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court able probability of a different outcome. Thus, when a de- fendant raises a public-trial violation via an ineffective- assistance-of-counsel claim, prejudice is not shown automatically. Instead, the burden is on the de- fendant to show either a reasonable probability of a differ- ent outcome in his or her case or, as the Court has as- sumed for these purposes, see to show that the particular public-trial violation was so serious as to render his or her trial fundamentally unfair. Neither the reasoning nor the holding here calls into question the Court’s precedents determining that certain errors are deemed structural and require reversal because they cause fundamental unfairness, either to the defend- ant in the specific case or by |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | to the defend- ant in the specific case or by pervasive undermining of the systemic requirements of a fair and open judicial process. See Murray, A Contextual Approach to Harmless Error Review, 130 Harv. L. Rev. 191, (201) )). Those precedents include 508 U.S., at 28– (failure to give a reasonable-doubt instruction); Tumey v. Ohio, 23 U.S. 510, 535 (192) (biased judge); and Vasquez v. 44 U.S., at 261–264 (exclusion of grand jurors on the basis of race). See (describing each of these errors as structural). This Court, in addition, has granted automatic relief to defendants who prevailed on claims alleging race or gender discrimination in the selec- tion of the petit jury, see 46 U.S. 9, ; J. E. 511 U.S. 12, 145–146 (1994), though the Court has yet to label those errors structural in express terms, see, e.g., The errors in those cases necessitated automatic Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) 13 Opinion of the Court reversal after they were preserved and then raised on direct appeal. And this opinion does not address whether the result should be any different if the errors were raised instead in an ineffective-assistance claim on collateral review. The reason for placing the burden on the petitioner in this case, however, derives both from the nature of the error, see –12, and the difference between a public-trial violation preserved and then raised on direct review and a public-trial violation raised as an ineffective- assistance-of-counsel claim. As explained above, when a defendant objects to a courtroom closure, the trial court can either order the courtroom opened or explain the reasons for keeping it closed. See –9. When a defendant first raises the closure in an ineffective- assistance claim, however, the trial court is deprived of the chance to cure the violation either by opening the courtroom or by explaining the reasons for closure. Furthermore, when state or federal courts adjudicate errors objected to during trial and then raised on direct review, the systemic costs of remedying the error are diminished to some extent. That is because, if a new trial is ordered on direct review, there may be a reasonable chance that not too much time will have elapsed for wit- ness memories still to be accurate and physical evidence not to be lost. There are also advantages of direct judicial supervision. Reviewing courts, in the regular course of the appellate process, can give instruction to the trial courts in a familiar context that allows for elaboration of the rele- vant principles based on review of an adequate record. For instance, in this case, |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | review of an adequate record. For instance, in this case, the factors and circumstances that might justify a temporary closure are best considered in the regular appellate process and not in the context of a later proceeding, with its added time delays. When an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim is raised in postconviction proceedings, the costs and uncertainties 14 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court of a new trial are greater because more time will have elapsed in most cases. The finality interest is more at risk, see –694 (noting the “profound importance of finality in criminal proceedings”), and direct review often has given at least one opportunity for an appellate review of trial proceedings. These differ- ences justify a different standard for evaluating a struc- tural error depending on whether it is raised on direct review or raised instead in a claim alleging ineffective assistance of counsel. In sum, “[a]n ineffective-assistance claim can function as a way to escape rules of waiver and forfeiture and raise issues not presented at trial,” thus undermining the final- ity of jury verdicts. 105 (2011). For this reason, the rules governing ineffec- tive-assistance claims “must be applied with scrupulous care.” IV The final inquiry concerns the ineffective-assistance claim in this case. Although the case comes on the as- sumption that petitioner has shown deficient perforce by counsel, he has not shown prejudice in the ordinary sense, i.e., a reasonable probability that the jury would not have convicted him if his attorney had objected to the closure. It is of course possible that potential jurors might have behaved differently if petitioner’s family had been present. And it is true that the presence of the public might have had some bearing on juror reaction. But here petitioner offered no “evidence or legal argument establishing preju- dice” in the sense of a reasonable probability of a different outcome but for counsel’s failure to object. App. to Pet. for Cert. 64a; see In other circumstances a different result might obtain. If, for instance, defense counsel errs in failing to object Cite as: 582 U. S. (201) 15 Opinion of the Court when the government’s main witness testifies in secret, then the defendant might be able to show prejudice with little more detail. See Even in those circumstances, however, the burden would remain on the defendant to make the prejudice showing, because a public-trial violation does not always lead to a fundamen- tally unfair trial, see In light of the above assumption that prejudice can be shown by a demonstration of fundamental unfairness, see the remaining question is whether petitioner |
Justice Kennedy | 2,017 | 4 | majority | Weaver v. Massachusetts | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4403801/weaver-v-massachusetts/ | of fundamental unfairness, see the remaining question is whether petitioner has shown that counsel’s failure to object rendered the trial fundamentally unfair. See The Court concludes that petitioner has not made the showing. Although petitioner’s mother and her minister were indeed excluded from the courtroom for two days during jury selection, petitioner’s trial was not conducted in secret or in a remote place. Cf. In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 25, 269, n. 22 (1948). The closure was limited to the jury voir dire; the courtroom remained open during the eviden- tiary phase of the trial; the closure decision apparently was made by court officers rather than the judge; there were y members of the venire who did not become jurors but who did observe the proceedings; and there was a record made of the proceedings that does not indicate any basis for concern, other than the closure itself. There has been no showing, furthermore, that the po- tential harms flowing from a courtroom closure came to pass in this case. For example, there is no suggestion that any juror lied during voir dire; no suggestion of misbehav- ior by the prosecutor, judge, or any other party; and no suggestion that any of the participants failed to approach their duties with the neutrality and serious purpose that our system deds. It is true that this case comes here on the assumption that the closure was a Sixth Amendment violation. And it must be recognized that open trials ensure respect for the 16 WEAVER v. MASSACHUSETTS Opinion of the Court justice system and allow the press and the public to judge the proceedings that occur in our Nation’s courts. Even so, the violation here did not pervade the whole trial or lead to basic unfairness. In sum, petitioner has not shown a reasonable probabil- ity of a different outcome but for counsel’s failure to object, and he has not shown that counsel’s shortcomings led to a fundamentally unfair trial. He is not entitled to a new trial. * * * In the criminal justice system, the constant, indeed unending, duty of the judiciary is to seek and to find the proper balance between the necessity for fair and just trials and the importance of finality of judgments. When a structural error is preserved and raised on direct review, the balance is in the defendant’s favor, and a new trial generally will be granted as a matter of right. When a structural error is raised in the context of an ineffective- assistance claim, however, finality concerns are far more pronounced. For this reason, |
Justice Scalia | 1,989 | 9 | majority | Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112226/midland-asphalt-corp-v-united-states/ | Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e)(2) prohibits public disclosure by Government attorneys of "matters occurring before the grand jury" except in certain specified circumstances. This case presents the question whether a district court order denying a criminal defendant's motion to dismiss an indictment for an alleged violation of Rule 6(e) is immediately appealable. I On January 23, a federal grand jury in the Western District of New York returned an indictment against petitioners Midland Asphalt Corporation, a business engaged in the sale of liquid bituminous material used to resurface roads, and Albert C. Litteer, Midland's president and part owner. The indictment alleged that they had violated 1 of the Sherman Act, as amended, 15 U.S. C. 1, by conspiring with other unindicted persons to allocate contracts and to submit collusive bids to the State of New York and certain counties in western New York. On July 21, petitioners moved to dismiss the indictment on grounds which included an alleged violation by federal prosecutors of Rule 6(e)(2). Petitioners' Rule 6(e) allegations arose from the following facts: When the grand jury that ultimately returned the Sherman Act indictment was sitting, Midland and another company under investigation brought suit seeking to have the Government pay for the cost of compliance with grand jury subpoenas. In re Grand Jury Subpoenas to Midland Asphalt Corp. and Krantz Asphalt Co., Civ. No. 85-633E (WDNY, Feb. 12, 1985) (In re Grand Jury Subpoenas). In *796 that action Midland filed a motion asking that the District Court compel the Government to retain its rough and final notes of witness interviews. In response, the Government filed a memorandum in which it agreed to retain rough notes and final reports prepared by prosecutors and other Government personnel during its investigation of the western New York road-paving business. Approximately one year later, the defendants in a separate criminal case, also involving allegations of asphalt contract bid rigging in western New York State, United v. Allegany Bitumens, Inc., Crim. No. 86-59C filed a similar motion to require the Government to preserve its interview notes. Again the Government filed a memorandum agreeing to do so, noting that it had already made such a commitment to the District Court, and attaching a copy of its earlier memorandum in the In re Grand Jury Subpoenas case. Petitioners' motion to dismiss the indictment in the present case alleged that the Government's filing, in Allegany Bitumens, of its memorandum from the In re Grand Jury Subpoenas case, publicly "disclose[d] matters occurring before the grand jury" in violation of Rule 6(e)(2). Specifically, the motion alleged that the memorandum |
Justice Scalia | 1,989 | 9 | majority | Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112226/midland-asphalt-corp-v-united-states/ | of Rule 6(e)(2). Specifically, the motion alleged that the memorandum disclosed the nature and focus of the investigation, the name of a grand jury witness, and the fact that the witness was to testify as an individual and not as a document custodian for Midland. Finding that the prosecution had not violated Rule 6(e)(2), the District Court denied petitioners' motion to dismiss the indictment. On appeal in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the Government moved to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, contending that the District Court's order declining to dismiss the indictment was not a "final decision" under 28 U.S. C. 1291. Petitioners responded that this Court's decision in United in which we that an alleged violation of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(d) was rendered harmless beyond a *797 reasonable doubt by a petit jury's guilty verdict, would make district court orders denying motions to dismiss indictments based on alleged violations of Rule 6(e) "effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment," Coopers & and hence immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine, see The Court of Appeals rejected petitioners' contention on the ground that Rule 6(d), the subsection at issue in Mechanik, exists primarily "to protect the person under investigation from being indicted in the absence of probable cause," whereas Rule 6(e) serves the different function of "protect[ing] society's interest in keeping secret the identity of grand jury witnesses and persons under investigation," It concluded that "Mechanik [would not] preclud[e] a federal court of appeals from exercising post-trial review of an order denying a motion to dismiss an indictment for violation of Rule 6(e)," that denials of motions to dismiss indictments for alleged violations of Rule 6(e) are therefore not immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine, and that the Government's motion to dismiss the appeal in the case before it should be granted. We granted certiorari to resolve a disagreement among the Courts of Appeals.[1] *798 II In the Judiciary Act of 1789, the First Congress established the principle that only "final judgments and decrees" of the federal district courts may be reviewed on appeal. The statute has changed little since then: 28 U.S. C. 1291 today provides that federal courts of appeals "shall have jurisdiction of appeals from all final decisions of the district courts except where a direct review may be had in the Supreme Court." For purposes of this provision, a final judgment is normally deemed not to have occurred "until there has been a decision by the District Court that `ends the litigation on the merits and leaves nothing for |
Justice Scalia | 1,989 | 9 | majority | Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112226/midland-asphalt-corp-v-united-states/ | `ends the litigation on the merits and leaves nothing for the court to do but execute the judgment.' " Van quoting In criminal cases, this prohibits appellate review until after conviction and imposition of sentence. ; Since petitioners have not yet even been tried, much less convicted or sentenced, it is plain that the District Court's order denying their motion to dismiss falls within this prohibition. In we carved out a narrow exception to the normal application of the final judgment rule, which has come to be known as the collateral order doctrine. This exception considers as "final judgments," even though they do not "end the litigation on the merits," decisions "which finally determine claims of right separate from, and collateral to, rights asserted in the action, too important to be denied review and too independent of the cause itself to require that appellate jurisdiction be deferred until the whole case is adjudicated." *799 To fall within the limited class of final collateral orders, an order must (1) "conclusively determine the disputed question," (2) "resolve an important issue completely separate from the merits of the action," and (3) "be effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment." Coopers & at We have interpreted the collateral order exception "with the utmost strictness" in criminal cases. Although we have had numerous opportunities in the 40 years since Cohen to consider the appealability of prejudgment orders in criminal cases, we have found denials of only three types of motions to be immediately appealable: motions to reduce bail, motions to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, and motions to dismiss under the Speech or Debate Clause, These decisions, along with the far more numerous ones in which we have refused to permit interlocutory appeals, manifest the general rule that the third prong of the Coopers & test is satisfied only where the order at issue involves "an asserted right the legal and practical value of which would be destroyed if it were not vindicated before trial." United We have little difficulty concluding that an order denying a motion to dismiss an indictment for an alleged violation of Rule 6(e) does not satisfy our "stringent conditions for qualification as an immediately appealable collateral order." Whether a violation of Rule 6(e) will be reviewable on appeal following conviction, as the Court of Appeals below 840 F.2d, at or will be rendered harmless as a matter of law by the conviction, as the Ninth Circuit has decided, United a district court order declining to dismiss an indictment for an alleged violation of the Rule fails one or the |
Justice Scalia | 1,989 | 9 | majority | Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112226/midland-asphalt-corp-v-united-states/ | an alleged violation of the Rule fails one or the other of the final two requirements set out in *800 Coopers & If Mechanik is not extended beyond violations of Rule 6(d), and if Rule 6(e) violations can accordingly provide the basis for reversal of a conviction on appeal, it is obvious that they are not "effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment." Coopers & 437 U. S., at If, on the other hand, Mechanik is applied to bar postconviction review of alleged violations of Rule 6(e), it will be because the purpose of that Rule is the same as the purpose of Rule 6(d), namely, to "protec[t] against the danger that a defendant will be required to defend against a charge for which there is no probable cause to believe him guilty," Mechanik, which danger has demonstrably been avoided whenever there is a guilty verdict at trial. If this latter analysis is correct, however, orders denying motions to dismiss for Rule 6(e) violations cannot be said to "resolve an important issue completely separate from the merits of the action," Coopers & at but rather involve "considerations enmeshed in the merits of the dispute," Van and would "affect or be affected by" the decision on the merits of the case, Thus, whatever view one takes of the scope of Mechanik (an issue we need not resolve here), the present order is not immediately appealable. Petitioners attempt to avoid this reasoning by suggesting that orders of this sort, even if theoretically reviewable after conviction, are "effectively unreviewable," Coopers & at once trial has been because they pertain to a right "the practical value of which [is] destroyed if it [is] not vindicated before trial," at namely, the right not merely not to be convicted, but not to be tried at all "on an indictment returned by a grand jury whose decision to indict was substantially influenced by the government's violation of 6(e)." Brief for Petitioner 24. We do not agree. It is true that deprivation of the right not to be tried satisfies the Coopers & *801 requirement of being "effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment." See One must be careful, however, not to play word games with the concept of a "right not to be tried." In one sense, any legal rule can be said to give rise to a "right not to be tried" if failure to observe it requires the trial court to dismiss the indictment or terminate the trial. But that is assuredly not the sense relevant for purposes of the exception to |
Justice Scalia | 1,989 | 9 | majority | Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112226/midland-asphalt-corp-v-united-states/ | not the sense relevant for purposes of the exception to the final judgment rule. "Certainly, the fact that this Court has dismissal of the indictment to be the proper remedy when the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial has been violated. does not mean that a defendant enjoys a `right not to be tried' which must be safeguarded by interlocutory appellate review. Dismissal of the indictment is the proper sanction when a defendant has been granted immunity from prosecution, when his indictment is defective, or, usually, when the only evidence against him was seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Obviously, however, this has not led the Court to conclude that such defendants can pursue interlocutory appeals." at n. 7. There is a "crucial distinction between a right not to be tried and a right whose remedy requires the dismissal of charges." United v. Hollywood Motor Car Co., 458 U.S. A right not to be tried in the sense relevant to the Cohen exception rests upon an explicit statutory or constitutional guarantee that trial will not occur as in the Double Jeopardy Clause ("nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb"), see or the Speech or Debate Clause ("[F]or any Speech or Debate in either House, [the Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other Place"), see Neither Rule 6(e) nor the Constitution affords such a guarantee in the event of a violation of grand jury secrecy. *802 The text of Rule 6(e) contains no hint that a governmental violation of its prescriptions gives rise to a right not to stand trial. To be sure, we last Term in Bank of Nova Scotia v. United that a district court has authority in certain circumstances to dismiss an indictment for violations of Rule 6(e). But as just noted, that has nothing to do with a "right not to be tried" in the sense relevant here. As for the Grand Jury Clause of the Fifth Amendment, that reads in relevant part as follows: "No person shall be to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury." That does indeed confer a right not to be tried (in the pertinent sense) when there is no grand jury indictment. Undoubtedly the common-law protections traditionally associated with the grand jury attach to the grand jury required by this provision including the requisite secrecy of grand jury proceedings. But that is far from saying that every violation of those |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | In these cases we consider an alleged conspiracy to eliminate price competition among chiropractors, by means of a "peer review committee" that advised an insurance company whether particular chiropractors' treatments and fees were "necessary" and "reasonable." The question presented is whether the alleged conspiracy is exempt from federal antitrust laws as part of the "business of insurance" within the meaning of the McCarran-Ferguson Act.[1] I Petitioners are the New York State Chiropractic Association (NYSCA), a professional association of chiropractors, and the Union Labor Life Insurance (ULL), a Maryland insurer doing business in New York. As required by New York law, ULL's health insurance policies cover certain holder claims for chiropractic treatments. But certain ULL policies limit the company's liability to "the reasonable charges" for "necessary medical care and services." *123 App. 19a, 22a Accordingly, when presented with a holder claim for reimbursement for chiropractic treatments, ULL must determine whether the treatments were necessary and whether the charges for them were reasonable. In making some of these determinations, ULL has arranged with NYSCA to use the advice of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee. The Committee was established by NYSCA in 191, primarily to aid insurers in evaluating claims for chiropractic treatments.[2] It is composed of 10 practicing New York chiropractors, who serve on a voluntary basis. At the request of an insurer, the Committee will examine a chiropractor's treatments and charges in a particular case, and will render an opinion on the necessity for the treatments and the reasonableness of the charges made for them. The opinion will be based upon such considerations as the treating chiropractor's experience and specialty degrees; the location of his office; the number of visits and time spent with the patient; the patient's age, occupation, general physical condition, and history of previous treatment; and X-ray findings. Respondent is a chiropractor licensed and practicing in the State of New York. On a number of occasions his treatments of ULL holders, and his charges for those treatments, have been referred by ULL to the Committee, which has sometimes concluded that his treatments were unnecessary or his charges unreasonable. Petitioners assert that respondent has treated his patients "in a manner calculated to maximize the number of treatments for a particular condition, and that his fees for these treatments are unusually high." Respondent, for his part, contends that the members of the Committee "practice `antiquated' techniques that they seek to impose on their more innovative competitors." *124 This dispute resulted in the present suit, brought by respondent in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Respondent |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | District Court for the Southern District of New York. Respondent alleged that the peer review practices of petitioners violated 1 of the Sherman Act.[3] In particular, he claimed that petitioners and others had used the Committee as the vehicle for a conspiracy to fix the prices that chiropractors, including respondent, would be permitted to charge for their services. He concluded that he had been restrained from providing his chiropractic services to the public freely and fully, and that would-be recipients of chiropractic services had been deprived of the benefits of competition. Respondent requested, inter alia, declaratory and injunctive relief against ULL's continued use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee in evaluating holders' claims. After extensive discovery, the District Court granted petitioners' motion for summary judgment dismissing respondent's complaint, concluding that ULL's use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee was exempted from antitrust scrutiny by the McCarran-Ferguson Act. App. to Pet. for Cert. in No. 81-, pp. 20a-3a. The court noted that three requirements must be met in order to obtain the McCarran-Ferguson exemption: The challenged practices (1) must constitute the "business of insurance," (2) must be regulated by state law, and (3) must not amount to a "boycott, coercion, or intimidation." at 2a-28a. In the court's view, all three of these requirements were satisfied in the present case. In particular, the court held that petitioners' peer review practices constituted the "business of insurance" because they served "to define the precise extent of ULL's *125 contractual obligations under [its] policies." at 29a-30a. Moreover, the court determined that the peer review practices "involve[d] the spreading of risk, an indispensable element of the `business of insurance.'" at 30a.[4] Respondents' Sherman Act claim was accordingly dismissed with prejudice. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Relying upon this Court's recent opinion in Group Life & Health Ins. the Court of Appeals concluded that the District Court had erred in holding that ULL's use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee constituted the "business of insurance."[5] Accordingly, the Court of Appeals remanded the action for further proceedings. We granted certiorari to resolve a conflict among the Courts of Appeals on the question presented.[6] *126 II The only issue before us is whether petitioners' peer review practices are exempt from antitrust scrutiny as part of the "business of insurance." "It is axiomatic that conduct which is not exempt from the antitrust laws may nevertheless be perfectly legal." Group Life & Health Ins. Thus in deciding these cases we have no occasion to address the merits of respondent's Sherman Act claims. However, the Sherman Act does express a "longstanding congressional |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | claims. However, the Sherman Act does express a "longstanding congressional commitment to the of free markets and open competition." Community Communications v. Boulder, ; see also United Accordingly, our precedents consistently hold that exemptions from the antitrust laws must be construed narrowly. This principle applies not only to implicit exemptions, see Group Life & Health Ins. but also to express statutory exemptions, see United (19). In Royal this Court had occasion to reexamine the scope of the express antitrust exemption provided for the "business of insurance" by 2(b) of the McCarran-Ferguson Act. We hold that decision of the question before us is controlled by Royal The principal petitioner in Royal was a Texas insurance company, Blue Shield, that offered policies entitling insured persons to purchase prescription drugs for $2 each from any pharmacy participating in a "Pharmacy Agreement" with Blue Shield; holders were also allowed to purchase prescription drugs from a nonparticipating pharmacy, but in that event they would have to pay full price for the drugs and would be reimbursed by Blue Shield for only a part of that price. Blue Shield offered Pharmacy Agreements to all licensed pharmacies in Texas, but participating pharmacies were required to sell prescription drugs to Blue *12 Shield's holders for $2 each, and were reimbursed only for their cost in acquiring the drugs thus sold. "Thus, only pharmacies that [could] afford to distribute prescription drugs for less than this $2 markup [could] profitably participate in the plan." Respondents in Royal were the owners of nonparticipating pharmacies. They sued Blue Shield and several participating pharmacies under 1 of the Sherman Act, alleging that the Pharmacy Agreements were the instrument by which Blue Shield had conspired with participating pharmacies to fix the retail prices of prescription drugs. Respondents also alleged that the Agreements encouraged Blue Shield's holders to avoid nonparticipating pharmacies, thus constituting an unlawful group boycott. The District Court granted summary judgment to Blue Shield and the other petitioners, holding that the challenged Agreements were exempt under 2(b) of the McCarran-Ferguson Act. But the Court of Appeals disagreed, holding that the Agreements were not the "business of insurance" within the meaning of that Act, and This Court affirmed. Looking to "the structure of the Act and its legislative history," the Court discussed three characteristics of the business of insurance that Congress had intended to exempt through 2(b). First, after noting that one "indispensable characteristic of insurance" is the "spreading and underwriting of a holder's risk," -212,[] the Court observed that parts *128 of the legislative history of the McCarran-Ferguson Act "strongly suggest that Congress |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | legislative history of the McCarran-Ferguson Act "strongly suggest that Congress understood the business of insurance to be the underwriting and spreading of risk," The Court then dismissed Blue Shield's contention that its Pharmacy Agreements involved such activities. "The Pharmacy Agreements are merely arrangements for the purchase of goods and services by Blue Shield. By agreeing with pharmacies on the maximum prices it will pay for drugs, Blue Shield effectively reduces the total amount it must pay to its holders. The Agreements thus enable Blue Shield to minimize costs and maximize profits. Such cost-savings arrangements may well be sound business practice, and may well inure ultimately to the benefit of holders in the form of lower premiums, but they are not the `business of insurance.'" Second, the Court identified "the contract between the insurer and the insured" as "[a]nother commonly understood aspect of the business of insurance." The Court noted that, in enacting the McCarran-Ferguson Act, Congress had been concerned with the "`relationship between insurer and insured, the type of which could be issued, its reliability, interpretation, and enforcementthese were the core of the "business of insurance."'" -216, quoting The Court then rejected Blue Shield's argument that its Pharmacy Agreements were so closely related to the "reliability, interpretation, and enforcement" of its policies as to fall within the intended scope of 2(b): "This argument proves too much." "At the most, the petitioners have demonstrated that the Pharmacy Agreements result in cost savings to Blue Shield which may be reflected in lower premiums if the cost savings are passed on to holders. But, in that sense, every business decision made by an insurance company has some impact on its reliability, its ratemaking, *129 and its status as a reliable insurer [and thus] could be included in the `business of insurance.' Such a result would be plainly contrary to the statutory language, which exempts the `business of insurance' and not the `business of insurance companies.'" Finally, the Court noted that in enacting the McCarran-Ferguson Act, "the primary concern of both representatives of the insurance industry and the Congress was that cooperative ratemaking efforts be exempt from the antitrust laws." This was so because of "the widespread view that it [was] very difficult to underwrite risks in an informed and responsible way without intra-industry cooperation." The Court was thus reluctant to extend the 2(b) exemption to the case before it, "because the Pharmacy Agreements involve parties wholly outside the insurance industry." "There is not the slightest suggestion in the legislative history that Congress in any way contemplated that arrangements such as the Pharmacy Agreements |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | any way contemplated that arrangements such as the Pharmacy Agreements in this case, which involve the mass purchase of goods and services from entities outside the insurance industry, are the `business of insurance.'" In sum, Royal identified three criteria relevant in determining whether a particular practice is part of the "business of insurance" exempted from the antitrust laws by 2(b): first, whether the practice has the effect of transferring or spreading a holder's risk; second, whether the practice is an integral part of the relationship between the insurer and the insured; and third, whether the practice is limited to entities within the insurance industry. None of these criteria is necessarily determinative in itself, but examining the arrangement between petitioners NYSCA and ULL with respect to all three criteria, we do not hesitate to conclude that it is not a part of the "business of insurance." *130 Plainly, ULL's use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee plays no part in the "spreading and underwriting of a holder's risk." Group Life & Health Ins. 440 U. S., Both the "spreading" and the "underwriting" of risk refer in this context to the transfer of risk characteristic of insurance. See n. And as the Court of Appeals below observed: "The risk that an insured will require chiropractic treatment has been transferred from the insured to [ULL] by the very purchase of insurance. Peer review takes place only after the risk has been transferred by means of the and then it functions only to determine whether the risk of the entire loss (the insured's cost of treatment) has been transferred to [ULL]that is, whether the insured's loss falls within the limits." Petitioner ULL argues that the Court of Appeals' analysis is "semantic and unrealistic." Brief for Petitioner ULL 1. Petitioner reasons that "[i]t is inconceivable that Congress would have included risk transfer within the `business of insurance' but excluded a device that helps `determine whether the risk has been transferred' and acts as `an aid in determining the scope of the transfer.'" We find no merit in this argument, because the challenged peer review arrangement is logically and temporally unconnected to the transfer of risk accomplished by ULL's insurance policies. The transfer of risk from insured to insurer is effected by means of the contract between the partiesthe insurance and that transfer is complete at the time that the contract is entered. See 9 G. Couch, Cyclopedia of Insurance Law 39:53, 39:63 (2d ed. 1962). If the limits coverage to "necessary" treatments and "reasonable" charges for them, then that limitation is the measure of the risk |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | them, then that limitation is the measure of the risk that has actually been transferred to the insurer: To the extent that *131 the insured pays unreasonable charges for unnecessary treatments, he will not be reimbursed, because the risk of incurring such treatments and charges was never transferred to the insurer, but was instead always retained by the insured. Petitioner's argument contains the unspoken premise that the transfer of risk from an insured to his insurer actually takes place not when the contract between those parties is completed, but rather only when the insured's claim is settled. This premise is contrary to the fundamental principle of insurance that the insurance defines the scope of risk assumed by the insurer from the insured. See 39:3; R. Keeton, Insurance Law 5.1(a) (191). Turning to the second Royal criterion, it is clear that ULL's use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee is not an integral part of the relationship between insurer and insured. In the first place, the challenged arrangement between ULL and NYSCA is obviously distinct from ULL's contracts with its holders. In this sense the challenged arrangement resembles the Pharmacy Agreements in Royal There the Court rejected the proposition that the Agreements were "`between insurer and insured.'" Group Life & Health Ins. quoting 393 U. S., at Rather, it recognized those Agreements as "separate contractual arrangements between Blue Shield and pharmacies engaged in the sale and distribution of goods and services other than insurance." Similarly, ULL's use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee is a separate arrangement between the insurer and third parties not engaged in the business of insurance. Petitioner ULL argues that the challenged peer review practices satisfy this criterion because peer review "directly involves the `interpretation' and `enforcement' of the insurance contract." Brief for Petitioner ULL 16. But this argument is essentially identical to one made and rejected in *132 Royal Blue Shield there contended that its Pharmacy Agreements "so closely affect[ed] the `reliability, interpretation, and enforcement' of the insurance contract as to fall within the exempted area." This Court noted, however: "The benefit promised to Blue Shield holders is that their premiums will cover the cost of prescription drugs except for a $2 charge for each prescription. So long as that promise is kept, holders are basically unconcerned with arrangements made between Blue Shield and participating pharmacies." Similarly, when presented with holder claims for reimbursement, ULL must decide whether the claims are covered by its policies. But these decisions are entirely ULL's, and its use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee as an aid in its decisionmaking process is a |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110772/union-labor-life-ins-co-v-pireno/ | Committee as an aid in its decisionmaking process is a matter of indifference to the holder, whose only concern is whether his claim is paid, not why it is paid. As in Royal petitioners have shown, at the most, that the challenged peer review practices result in "cost savings to [ULL] which may be reflected in lower premiums if the cost savings are passed on to holders." To grant the practices a 2(b) exemption on such a showing "would be plainly contrary to the statutory language, which exempts the `business of insurance' and not the `business of insurance companies.'" at 21. Finally, as respects the third Royal criterion, it is plain that the challenged peer review practices are not limited to entities within the insurance industry. On the contrary, ULL's use of NYSCA's Peer Review Committee inevitably involves third parties wholly outside the insurance industrynamely, practicing chiropractors. Petitioners do not dispute this fact, but instead deprecate its importance. They argue that we should not conclude "that ULL's use of the peer review process is outside the scope of the `business *133 of insurance' simply because NYSCA is not an insurance company." Brief for Petitioner ULL 25. In petitioners' view: "There is nothing in the McCarran-Ferguson Act that limits the `business of insurance' to the business of insurance companies. As this Court has stated, `[the Act's] language refers not to the persons or companies who are subject to state regulation, but to laws "regulating the business of insurance."' National" Asserting that "the [New York] Superintendent of Insurance effectively can regulate the peer review process through his authority over the claims adjustment procedures of ULL," petitioners conclude that the process is part of the "business of insurance" despite the necessary involvement of third parties outside the insurance industry. We may assume that the challenged peer review practices need not be denied the 2(b) exemption solely because they involve parties outside the insurance industry. But the involvement of such parties, even if not dispositive, constitutes part of the inquiry mandated by the Royal analysis. As the Court noted there, 2(b) was intended primarily to protect "intra-industry cooperation" in the underwriting of 440 U.S., Arrangements between insurance companies and parties outside the insurance industry can hardly be said to lie at the center of that legislative concern. More importantly, such arrangements may prove contrary to the spirit as well as the letter of 2(b), because they have the potential to restrain competition in noninsurance markets. Indeed, the peer review practices challenged in the present cases assertedly realize precisely this potential: Respondent's claim is that |
Justice White | 1,992 | 6 | majority | Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112728/keeney-v-tamayo-reyes/ | Respondent is a Cuban immigrant with little education and almost no knowledge of English. In 1984, he was charged with murder arising from the stabbing death of a man who had allegedly attempted to intervene in a confrontation between respondent and his girlfriend in a bar. Respondent was provided with a defense attorney and interpreter. The attorney recommended to respondent that he plead nolo contendere to first-degree manslaughter. Ore. Rev. Stat. 163.8(1)(a) (1987). Respondent signed a plea form that explained in English the rights he was waiving by entering the plea. The state court held a plea hearing, at which petitioner was represented by counsel and his interpreter. The judge asked the attorney and interpreter if they had explained to respondent the rights in the plea form and the consequences of his plea; they responded in the affirmative. The judge then explained to respondent, in English, the rights he would waive by his plea, and asked the interpreter to translate. Respondent indicated that he understood his rights and still wished to plead nolo contendere. The judge accepted his plea. Later, respondent brought a collateral attack on the plea in a state-court proceeding. He alleged his plea had not been knowing and intelligent and therefore was invalid because his translator had not translated accurately and completely for him the mens rea element of manslaughter. He also contended that he did not understand the purposes of the plea form or the plea hearing. He contended that he did not know he was pleading no contest to manslaughter, but rather that he thought he was agreeing to be tried for manslaughter. *4 After a hearing, the state court dismissed respondent's petition, finding that respondent was properly served by his trial interpreter and that the interpreter correctly, fully, and accurately translated the communications between respondent and his attorney. App. 51. The State Court of Appeals affirmed, and the State Supreme Court denied review. Respondent then entered Federal District Court seeking a writ of habeas corpus. Respondent contended that the material facts concerning the translation were not adequately developed at the state-court hearing, implicating the fifth circumstance of and sought a federal evidentiary hearing on whether his nolo contendere plea was unconstitutional. The District Court found that the failure to develop the critical facts relevant to his federal claim was attributable to inexcusable neglect and that no evidentiary hearing was required. App. to Pet. for Cert. 37, 38. Respondent appealed. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recognized that the alleged failure to translate the mens rea element of firstdegree manslaughter, if proved, would |
Justice White | 1,992 | 6 | majority | Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112728/keeney-v-tamayo-reyes/ | the mens rea element of firstdegree manslaughter, if proved, would be a basis for overturning respondent's plea, and determined that material facts had not been adequately developed in the state postconviction court, apparently due to the negligence of postconviction counsel. The court held that and required an evidentiary hearing in the District Court unless respondent had deliberately bypassed the orderly procedure of the state courts. Because counsel's negligent failure to develop the facts did not constitute a deliberate bypass, the Court of Appeals ruled that respondent was entitled to an evidentiary hearing on the question whether the mens rea element of first-degree manslaughter was properly explained to him.[1] *5 We granted certiorari to decide whether the deliberate bypass standard is the correct standard for excusing a habeas petitioner's failure to develop a material fact in state-court proceedings. We reverse. Because the holding of that `s deliberate bypass standard is applicable in a case like this had not been reversed, it is quite understandable that the Court of Appeals applied that standard in this case. However, in light of more recent decisions of this Court, Townsend `s holding in this respect must be overruled.[2]Fay v. *6 Noia was itself a case where the habeas petitioner had not taken advantage of state remedies by failing to appeala procedural default case. Since that time, however, this Court has rejected the deliberate bypass standard in state procedural default cases and has applied instead a standard of cause and prejudice. In we acknowledged a federal court's power to entertain an application for habeas even where the claim has been procedurally waived in state proceedings, but nonetheless examined the appropriateness of the exercise of that power and recognized, as we had in Fay, that considerations of comity and concerns for the orderly administration of criminal justice may in some circumstances require a federal court to forgo the exercise of its habeas corpus -539. We held that a federal habeas petitioner is required to show cause for his procedural default, as well as actual prejudice. In we rejected the application of Fay `s standard of "knowing waiver" or "deliberate bypass" to excuse a petitioner's failure to comply with a state contemporaneous-objection rule, stating that the state rule deserved more respect than the Fay standard accorded We observed that procedural that contribute to error-free state trial proceedings are thoroughly desirable. We applied a cause-and-prejudice standard to a petitioner's failure to object at trial and limited *7 Fay to its -88, and n. 12. We have consistently reaffirmed that the "cause-and-prejudice" standard embodies the correct accommodation between the competing |
Justice White | 1,992 | 6 | majority | Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112728/keeney-v-tamayo-reyes/ | the "cause-and-prejudice" standard embodies the correct accommodation between the competing concerns implicated in a federal court's habeas ; In we held that the same standard used to excuse state procedural defaults should be applied in habeas corpus cases where abuse of the writ is claimed by the government. This conclusion rested on the fact that the two doctrines are similar in purpose and design and implicate similar concerns. -494. The writ strikes at finality of a state criminal conviction, a matter of particular importance in a federal system. citing Federal habeas litigation also places a heavy burden on scarce judicial resources, may give litigants incentives to withhold claims for manipulative purposes, and may create disincentives to present claims when evidence is 499 U.S., -492. See also ; Again addressing the issue of state procedural default in we described Fay as based on a conception of federal/state relations that undervalued the importance of state procedural and went on to hold that the cause-andprejudice standard applicable to failure to raise a particular claim should apply as well to failure to appeal at all. "All of the State's interestsin channeling the resolution of claims to the most appropriate forum, in finality, and in having an opportunity to correct its own errorsare implicated whether a prisoner defaults one claim or all of them." We therefore applied the cause-and-prejudice standard uniformly to state procedural defaults, eliminating the "irrational" distinction between Fay and subsequent In light of these decisions, it is similarly *8 irrational to distinguish between failing to properly assert a federal claim in state court and failing in state court to properly develop such a claim, and to apply to the latter a remnant of a decision that is no longer upheld with regard to the former. The concerns that motivated the rejection of the deliberate bypass standard in Coleman, and other cases are equally applicable to this case.[3] As in cases of state procedural default, application of the cause-andprejudice standard to excuse a state prisoner's failure to develop material facts in state court will appropriately accommodate concerns of finality, comity, judicial economy, and channeling the resolution of claims into the most appropriate forum. Applying the cause-and-prejudice standard in cases like this will obviously contribute to the finality of convictions, for requiring a federal evidentiary hearing solely on the basis of a habeas petitioner's negligent failure to develop facts in *9 state-court proceedings dramatically increases the opportunities to relitigate a conviction. Similarly, encouraging the full factual development in state court of a claim that state courts committed constitutional error advances comity by allowing a |
Justice White | 1,992 | 6 | majority | Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112728/keeney-v-tamayo-reyes/ | state courts committed constitutional error advances comity by allowing a coordinate jurisdiction to correct its own errors in the first instance. It reduces the "inevitable friction" that results when a federal habeas court "overturn[s] either the factual or legal conclusions reached by the state-court system." Also, by ensuring that full factual development takes place in the earlier, state-court proceedings, the cause-andprejudice standard plainly serves the interest of judicial economy. It is hardly a good use of scarce judicial resources to duplicate factfinding in federal court merely because a petitioner has negligently failed to take advantage of opportunities in state-court proceedings. Furthermore, ensuring that full factual development of a claim takes place in state court channels the resolution of the claim to the most appropriate forum. The state court is the appropriate forum for resolution of factual issues in the first instance, and creating incentives for the deferral of factfinding to later federal-court proceedings can only degrade the accuracy and efficiency of judicial proceedings. This is fully consistent with, and gives meaning to, the requirement of exhaustion. The Court has long held that state prisoners must exhaust state remedies before obtaining federal habeas relief. Ex parte Royall, 7 U.S. 241 The requirement that state prisoners exhaust state remedies before a writ of habeas corpus is granted by a federal court is now incorporated in the federal habeas statute.[4] 28 U.S. C. *10 2254. Exhaustion means more than notice. In requiring exhaustion of a federal claim in state court, Congress surely meant that exhaustion be serious and meaningful. The purpose of exhaustion is not to create a procedural hurdle on the path to federal habeas court, but to channel claims into an appropriate forum, where meritorious claims may be vindicated and unfounded litigation obviated before resort to federal court. Comity concerns dictate that the requirement of exhaustion is not satisfied by the mere statement of a federal claim in state court. Just as the State must afford the petitioner a full and fair hearing on his federal claim, so must the petitioner afford the State a full and fair opportunity to address and resolve the claim on the merits. Cf. Finally, it is worth noting that applying the cause-andprejudice standard in this case also advances uniformity in the law of habeas corpus. There is no good reason to maintain in one area of habeas law a standard that has been rejected in the area in which it was principally enunciated. And little can be said for holding a habeas petitioner to one standard for failing to bring a claim in state court |
Justice White | 1,992 | 6 | majority | Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112728/keeney-v-tamayo-reyes/ | standard for failing to bring a claim in state court and excusing the petitioner under another, lower standard for failing to develop the factual basis of that claim in the same forum. A different rule could mean that a habeas petitioner would not be excused for negligent failure to object to the introduction of the prosecution's evidence, but nonetheless would be excused for negligent failure to introduce any evidence of his own to support a constitutional claim.[5] * Respondent Tamayo-Reyes is entitled to an evidentiary hearing if he can show cause for his failure to develop the facts in state-court proceedings and actual prejudice resulting from that failure. We also adopt the narrow exception *12 to the cause-and-prejudice requirement: A habeas petitioner's failure to develop a claim in state-court proceedings will be excused and a hearing mandated if he can show that a fundamental miscarriage of justice would result from failure to hold a federal evidentiary hearing. Cf. ; The State concedes that a remand to the District Court is appropriate in order to afford respondent the opportunity to bring forward evidence establishing cause and prejudice, Brief for Petitioner 21, and we agree that respondent should have that opportunity. Accordingly, the decision of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the cause is remanded to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. So ordered. |
Justice Stevens | 1,981 | 16 | dissenting | Connecticut Bd. of Pardons v. Dumschat | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110525/connecticut-bd-of-pardons-v-dumschat/ | "Liberty from bodily restraint always has been recognized as the core of the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause from arbitrary governmental action." (opinion of POWELL, J.). *469 The liberty that is worthy of constitutional protection is not merely "a statutory creation of the State," 4 U.S. 539, Surely the Court stumbles when it states that liberty "must be found in statutes or other rules defining the obligations of the authority charged with exercising clemency," ante, at 465, or when it implies that liberty has "its roots in state law," To some of us, it is "self-evident" that individual liberty has far deeper roots.[1] Moreover, the deprivation of liberty that follows conviction of a criminal offense is not total; the individual possesses a residuum of constitutionally protected liberty even while he is in the legal custody of the State.[2] The question this case presents is not whether these respondents are mere slaves, wholly divested of any constitutionally protected interest in liberty; rather, the question is whether the decision by the Connecticut Board of Pardons refusing to commute their life sentences constitutes a deprivation of liberty entitling respondents to the protection of the Due Process Clause. *470 The facile answer to that question is that the distinction between a refusal to grant freedom on the one hand and the imposition of a sentence or the revocation of a parole on the other forms the basis for a determination whether due process is implicated. Only the imposition of sentence or revocation of parole is obviously a deprivation of liberty. But in practice, as JUSTICE POWELL has explained, that distinction is far less satisfactory than it first appears.[3] In my judgment, it provides an insufficient answer to the question presented by this case because the distinction does not correctly evaluate the character of the deprivation of liberty that occurs when a person is convicted of a crime. If the conviction were effective to terminate the defendant's liberty, he would thereafter retain no constitutional right to procedural safeguards against arbitrary action. The process of sentencing, parole release, parole revocation, and ultimate discharge could all be totally arbitrary. But no State asserts such total control over the convicted offender, and this Court has unequivocally held that the Constitution affords protection at different stages of the postconviction *471 process.[4] The basic reason the constitutional protection applies at these stages is that liberty itself survives to some extent and its deprivation is a continuous process rather than an isolated event. This case involves the State of Connecticut's process for determining when a relatively small group of |
Justice Stevens | 1,981 | 16 | dissenting | Connecticut Bd. of Pardons v. Dumschat | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110525/connecticut-bd-of-pardons-v-dumschat/ | Connecticut's process for determining when a relatively small group of serious offenders will be released from custody. Routinely that process includes three determinations: the judge imposes a life sentence; the Board of Pardons in due course commutes that sentence; and finally the Board of Parole discharges the prisoner from custody. Each of these three decisions is a regular and critical component of the decisionmaking process employed by the State of Connecticut to determine the magnitude of its deprivation of the prisoner's liberty.[5] In my opinion the Due Process Clause applies to each step and denies the State the power to act arbitrarily.[6] *472 Whether the refusal to provide the inmates with a statement of reasons is a procedural shortcoming of constitutional magnitude is, admittedly, fairly debatable. Judges often decide difficult and important cases without explaining their reasons, and I would not suggest that they thereby commit constitutional error. But the ordinary litigant has other substantial procedural safeguards against arbitrary decision-making in the courtroom. The prison inmate has few such protections. Indeed, as in this case, often he is not even afforded the protection of written standards to govern the exercise of the powers of the Board of Pardons. His protection is somewhat analogous to that of the litigant in the earliest days of our common-law history. The judges then were guided by few written laws, but developed a meaningful set of rules by the process of case-by-case adjudication. Their explanations of why they decided cases as they did provided guideposts for future decisions and an assurance to litigants that like cases were being decided in a similar way. Many of us believe that those statements of reasons provided a better guarantee of justice than could possibly have been described in a code written in sufficient detail to be fit for Napoleon. As JUSTICE MARSHALL has pointed out, "the obligation to justify a decision publicly would provide the assurance, critical to the appearance of fairness that the Board's decision is not capricious," see I therefore believe the Court of Appeals correctly concluded that in this context a brief statement of reasons is an essential element of the process that is due these respondents. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent. |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been judicially found to have violated the Fifth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in connection with the selection of sites for public housing in the city of Chicago. The issue before us is whether the remedial order of the federal trial court may extend beyond Chicago's territorial boundaries. I This extended litigation began in 1966 when the respondents, six Negro tenants in or applicants for public housing in Chicago, brought separate actions on behalf of themselves and all other Negro tenants and applicants similarly situated against the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and HUD.[1] The complaint filed against CHA in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleged that between 1950 and 1965 substantially all of the sites for family public housing selected by CHA and approved by the Chicago City Council were "at the time of such selection, and are now," located "within the areas known as the Negro Ghetto." The respondents further alleged that CHA deliberately selected the sites to "avoid the placement of Negro families in white neighborhoods" in violation of federal statutes and the Fourteenth Amendment. In a companion suit against HUD the respondents claimed that it had "assisted in the carrying on and continues to assist in the carrying on of a racially discriminatory public housing system within the City of Chicago" by providing *287 financial assistance and other support for CHA's discriminatory housing projects.[2] The District Court stayed the action against HUD pending resolution of the CHA suit.[3] In February 1969, the court entered summary judgment against CHA on the ground that it had violated the respondents' constitutional rights by selecting public housing sites and assigning tenants on the basis of Uncontradicted *288 evidence submitted to the District Court established that the public housing system operated by CHA was racially segregated, with four overwhelmingly white projects located in white neighborhoods and with 99 1/2% of the remaining family units located in Negro neighborhoods and 99% of those units occupied by Negro tenants.[5] In order to prohibit future violations and to remedy the effects of past unconstitutional practices, the court directed CHA to build its next 700 family units in predominantly white areas of Chicago and thereafter to locate at least 75% of its new family public housing in predominantly white areas inside Chicago or in Cook County.[6] In addition, CHA was ordered to modify its tenant-assignment and site-selection procedures and to use its best efforts to increase the supply of dwelling units as rapidly as possible in |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | the supply of dwelling units as rapidly as possible in conformity with the judgment. *289 The District Court then turned to the action against HUD. In September 1970, it granted HUD's motion to dismiss the complaint for lack of jurisdiction and failure to state a claim on which relief could be granted. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed and ordered the District Court to enter summary judgment for the respondents, holding that HUD had violated both the Fifth Amendment and 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S. C. 2000d, by knowingly sanctioning and assisting CHA's racially discriminatory public housing program.[7] On remand, the trial court addressed the difficult problem of providing an effective remedy for the racially segregated public housing system that had been created by the unconstitutional conduct of CHA and HUD.[8]*290 The court granted the respondents' motion to consolidate the CHA and HUD cases and ordered the parties to formulate "a comprehensive plan to remedy the past effects of unconstitutional site selection procedures." The order directed the parties to "provide the Court with as broad a range of alternatives as seem feasible" including "alternatives which are not confined in their scope to the geographic boundary of the City of Chicago." After consideration of the plans submitted by the parties and the evidence adduced in their support, the court denied the respondents' motion to consider metropolitan area relief and adopted the petitioner's *291 proposed order requiring HUD to use its best efforts to assist CHA in increasing the supply of dwelling units and enjoining HUD from funding family public housing programs in Chicago that were inconsistent with the previous judgment entered against CHA. The court found that metropolitan area relief was unwarranted because "the wrongs were committed within the limits of Chicago and solely against residents of the City" and there were no allegations that "CHA and HUD discriminated or fostered racial discrimination in the suburbs." On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, with one judge dissenting, reversed and remanded the case for "the adoption of a comprehensive metropolitan area plan that will not only disestablish the segregated public housing system in the City of Chicago but will increase the supply of dwelling units as rapidly as possible." Shortly before the Court of Appeals announced its decision, this Court in had reversed a judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that had approved a plan requiring the consolidation of 54 school districts in the Detroit metropolitan area to remedy racial discrimination in the operation of |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | metropolitan area to remedy racial discrimination in the operation of the Detroit public schools. Understanding Milliken "to hold that the relief sought there would be an impractical and unreasonable overresponse to a violation limited to one school district," the Court of Appeals concluded that the Milliken decision did not bar a remedy extending beyond the limits of Chicago in the present case because of the equitable and administrative distinctions between a metropolitan public housing plan and the consolidation of numerous local school districts. -936. In addition, the appellate court found that, in contrast to Milliken, there was evidence of suburban discrimination and *292 of the likelihood that there had been an "extra-city impact" of the petitioner's "intra-city discrimination." -940. The appellate court's determination that a remedy extending beyond the city limits was both "necessary and equitable" rested in part on the agreement of the parties and the expert witnesses that "the metropolitan area is a single relevant locality for low rent housing purposes and that a city-only remedy will not work." HUD subsequently sought review in this Court of the permissibility in light of Milliken of "inter-district relief for discrimination in public housing in the absence of a finding of an inter-district violation."[9] We granted certiorari to consider this important question. In this Court considered the proper scope of a federal court's equity decree in the context of a school desegregation case. The respondents in that case had brought an action alleging that the Detroit public school system was segregated on the basis of race as the result of official conduct and sought an order establishing " `a unitary, nonracial school system.' " After finding that constitutional violations committed by the Detroit School Board and state officials had contributed to racial segregation in the Detroit schools, the trial court had proceeded to the formulation of a remedy. Although there had been neither proof of unconstitutional actions on the part of neighboring school districts nor a demonstration that the Detroit violations had produced significant segregative effects in those districts, the court established *293 a desegregation panel and ordered it to prepare a remedial plan consolidating the Detroit school system and 53 independent suburban school districts.[10] The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the desegregation order on the ground that, in view of the racial composition of the Detroit school system, the only feasible remedy required "the crossing of the boundary lines between the Detroit School District and adjacent or nearby school districts." This Court reversed the Court of Appeals, holding that the multidistrict remedy contemplated by the desegregation order |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | holding that the multidistrict remedy contemplated by the desegregation order was an erroneous exercise of the equitable authority of the federal courts. Although the Milliken opinion discussed the many practical problems that would be encountered in the consolidation of numerous school districts by judicial decree, the Court's decision rejecting the metropolitan area desegregation order was actually based on fundamental limitations on the remedial powers of the federal courts to restructure the operation of local and state governmental entities. That power is not plenary. It "may be exercised `only on the basis of a constitutional violation.' " quoting See Once a constitutional violation is found, a federal court is required to *294 tailor "the scope of the remedy" to fit "the nature and extent of the constitutional violation." ; at In Milliken, there was no finding of unconstitutional action on the part of the suburban school officials and no demonstration that the violations committed in the operation of the Detroit school system had had any significant segregative effects in the suburbs. See 748. The desegregation order in Milliken requiring the consolidation of local school districts in the Detroit metropolitan area thus constituted direct federal judicial interference with local governmental entities without the necessary predicate of a constitutional violation by those entities or of the identification within them of any significant segregative effects resulting from the Detroit school officials' unconstitutional conduct. Under these circumstances, the Court held that the interdistrict decree was impermissible because it was not commensurate with the constitutional violation to be repaired. Since the Milliken decision was based on basic limitations on the exercise of the equity power of the federal courts and not on a balancing of particular considerations presented by school desegregation cases, it is apparent that the Court of Appeals erred in finding Milliken inapplicable on that ground to this public housing case.[11]*295 The school desegregation context of the Milliken case is nonetheless important to an understanding of its discussion of the limitations on the exercise of federal judicial power. As the Court noted, school district lines cannot be "casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience" because they separate independent governmental entities responsible for the operation of autonomous *296 public school systems. -743. The Court's holding that there had to be an interdistrict violation or effect before a federal court could order the crossing of district boundary lines reflected the substantive impact of a consolidation remedy on separate and independent school districts.[12] The District Court's desegregation order in Milliken was held to be an impermissible remedy not because it envisioned relief against a wrongdoer |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | impermissible remedy not because it envisioned relief against a wrongdoer extending beyond the city in which the violation occurred but because it contemplated a judicial decree restructuring the operation of local governmental entities that were not implicated in any constitutional violation. I The question presented in this case concerns only the authority of the District Court to order HUD to take remedial action outside the city limits of Chicago. HUD does not dispute the Court of Appeals' determination that it violated the Fifth Amendment and 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by knowingly funding CHA's racially discriminatory family public housing program, nor does it question the appropriateness of a remedial order designed to alleviate the effects of past segregative practices by requiring that public housing be developed in areas that will afford respondents an opportunity to reside in desegregated neighborhoods. But HUD contends that the Milliken decision bars a remedy affecting *297 its conduct beyond the boundaries of Chicago for two reasons. First, it asserts that such a remedial order would constitute the grant of relief incommensurate with the constitutional violation to be repaired. And, second, it claims that a decree regulating HUD's conduct beyond Chicago's boundaries would inevitably have the effect of "consolidat[ing] for remedial purposes" governmental units not implicated in HUD's and CHA's violations. We address each of these arguments in turn. A We reject the contention that, since HUD's constitutional and statutory violations were committed in Chicago, Milliken precludes an order against HUD that will affect its conduct in the greater metropolitan area. The critical distinction between HUD and the suburban school districts in Milliken is that HUD has been found to have violated the Constitution. That violation provided the necessary predicate for the entry of a remedial order against HUD and, indeed, imposed a duty on the District Court to grant appropriate relief. See Our prior decisions counsel that in the event of a constitutional violation "all reasonable methods be available to formulate an effective remedy," North Carolina State Board of Education v. and that every effort should be made by a federal court to employ those methods "to achieve the greatest possible degree of [relief], taking into account the practicalities of the situation." As the Court observed in : "Once a right and a violation have been shown, the scope of a district court's equitable powers to remedy past wrongs is broad, for breadth and flexibility are inherent in equitable remedies." *298 Nothing in the Milliken decision suggests a per se rule that federal courts lack authority to order parties found to have |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | federal courts lack authority to order parties found to have violated the Constitution to undertake remedial efforts beyond the municipal boundaries of the city where the violation occurred.[13] As we noted in Part the District Court's proposed remedy in Milliken was impermissible because of the limits on the federal judicial power to interfere with the operation of state political entities that were not implicated in unconstitutional conduct. Here, unlike the desegregation remedy found erroneous in Milliken, a judicial order directing relief beyond the boundary lines of Chicago will not necessarily entail coercion of uninvolved governmental units, because both CHA and HUD have the authority to operate outside the Chicago city limits.[14] *299 In this case, it is entirely appropriate and consistent with Milliken to order CHA and HUD to attempt to create housing alternatives for the respondents in the Chicago suburbs. Here the wrong committed by HUD confined the respondents to segregated public housing. The relevant geographic area for purposes of the respondents' housing options is the Chicago housing market, not the Chicago city limits. That HUD recognizes this reality is evident in its administration of federal housing assistance programs through "housing market areas" encompassing "the geographic area `within which all dwelling units' are in competition with one another as alternatives for the users of housing." Department of Housing and Urban Development, FHA Techniques of Housing Market 8 (Jan. 1970), quoting the Institute for Urban Land Use and Housing Studies, Housing Market : A Study of Theory and Methods, c. 2 (1953). The housing market area "usually extends beyond the city limits" and in the larger markets "may extend into several adjoining counties." FHA Techniques of Housing Market[15] An order against HUD and CHA regulating their conduct in the greater metropolitan area will *300 do no more than take into account HUD's expert determination of the area relevant to the respondents' housing opportunities and will thus be wholly commensurate with the "nature and extent of the constitutional violation." To foreclose such relief solely because HUD's constitutional violation took place within the city limits of Chicago would transform Milliken's principled limitation on the exercise of federal judicial authority into an arbitrary and mechanical shield for those found to have engaged in unconstitutional conduct. B The more substantial question under Milliken is whether an order against HUD affecting its conduct beyond Chicago's boundaries would impermissibly interfere with local governments and suburban housing authorities that have not been implicated in HUD's unconstitutional conduct. In examining this issue, it is important to note that the Court of Appeals' decision did not endorse or even |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | the Court of Appeals' decision did not endorse or even discuss "any specific metropolitan plan" but instead left the formulation of the remedial plan to the District Court on remand. On rehearing, the Court of Appeals characterized its remand order as one calling "for additional evidence and for further consideration of the issue of metropolitan area relief in light of this opinion and that of the Supreme Court in" In the current posture of the case, HUD's contention that any remand for consideration of a metropolitan area order would be impermissible as a matter of law must necessarily be based on its claim at oral argument "that court-ordered metropolitan relief in this case, no matter how gently it's gone about, no matter how it's framed, is bound to require HUD to ignore the safeguards of local autonomy and local political processes" and therefore to violate the limitations on federal judicial power *301 established in Milliken. In addressing this contention we are not called upon, in other words, to evaluate the validity of any specific order, since no such order has yet been formulated. HUD's position, we think, underestimates the ability of a federal court to formulate a decree that will grant the respondents the constitutional relief to which they may be entitled without overstepping the limits of judicial power established in the Milliken case. HUD's discretion regarding the selection of housing proposals to assist with funding as well as its authority under a recent statute to contract for low-income housing directly with private owners and developers can clearly be directed toward providing relief to the respondents in the greater Chicago metropolitan area without preempting the power of local governments by undercutting the role of those governments in the federal housing assistance scheme. An order directing HUD to use its discretion under the various federal housing programs to foster projects located in white areas of the Chicago housing market would be consistent with and supportive of well-established federal housing policy.[] Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits racial discrimination in federally assisted programs including, of course, public housing programs.[17] Based upon this statutory prohibition, HUD in 1967 issued site-approval rules for low-rent *302 housing designed to avoid racial segregation and expand the opportunities of minority group members "to locate outside areas of [minority] concentration." Department of Housing and Urban Development, Low-Rent Housing Manual, 205.1, ¶ 4g (Feb. 1967 rev.). Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 expressly directed the Secretary of HUD to "administer the programs and activities relating to housing and urban development in a |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | and activities relating to housing and urban development in a manner affirmatively to further" the Act's fair housing policy. 42 U.S. C. 3608 (d) (5). Among the steps taken by HUD to discharge its statutory duty to promote fair housing was the adoption of project-selection criteria for use in "eliminating clearly unacceptable proposals and assigning priorities in funding to assure that the best proposals are funded first." HUD Evaluation of Rent Supplement Projects and Low-Rent Housing Assistance Applications, Fed. Reg. 203 In structuring the minority housing opportunity component of the project-selection criteria, HUD attempted "to assure that building in minority areas goes forward only after there truly exist housing opportunities for minorities elsewhere" in the housing market and to avoid encouraging projects located in substantially racially mixed areas. See 24 CFR 200.710 (1975). See generally Maxwell, HUD's Project Selection CriteriaA Cure for "Impermissible Color Blindness"?,[18] More recently, in *303 the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, Congress emphasized the importance of locating housing so as to promote greater choice of housing opportunities and to avoid undue concentrations of lower income persons. See 42 U.S. C. 5301 (c) (6), 5304 (a) (4) (A), (C) (ii) (1970 ed., Supp. IV); H. R. Rep. No. 93-1114, p. 8 (1974). A remedial plan designed to insure that HUD will utilize its funding and administrative powers in a manner consistent with affording relief to the respondents need not abrogate the role of local governmental units in the federal housing-assistance programs. Under the major housing programs in existence at the time the District Court entered its remedial order pertaining to HUD, local housing authorities and municipal governments had to make application for funds or approve the use of funds in the locality before HUD could make housing-assistance money available. See 42 U.S. C. 1415 (7) 1421b (a) (2). An order directed solely to HUD would not force unwilling localities to apply for assistance under these programs but would merely reinforce the regulations guiding HUD's determination of which of the locally authorized projects to assist with federal funds. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, amending the United States Housing Act of 19, 42 U.S. C. 14 et seq. (1970 ed., Supp. IV), significantly enlarged HUD's role in the creation of housing opportunities. Under the 8 Lower-Income Housing Assistance program, which has largely replaced the older federal low-income housing programs,[19] HUD *304 may contract directly with private owners to make leased housing units available to eligible lower income persons.[20] As HUD has acknowledged in this case, "local governmental approval is no longer explicitly required as |
Justice Stewart | 1,976 | 18 | majority | Hills v. Gautreaux | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109428/hills-v-gautreaux/ | case, "local governmental approval is no longer explicitly required as a condition of the program's applicability to a locality." Brief for Petitioner 33-34. Regulations governing the 8 program permit HUD to select "the geographic area or areas in which the housing is to be constructed," 24 CFR 880.203 (1975), and direct that sites be chosen to "promote greater choice of housing opportunities and avoid undue concentration of assisted persons in areas containing a high proportion of low-income persons." 880.112 (d), 883.209 (a) (3). See 880.112 (c), 883.209 (a) (2), (2). In most cases the Act grants the unit of local government in which the assistance is to be provided the right to comment on the application and, in certain specified circumstances, to preclude the Secretary of HUD from approving the application. See 42 U.S. C. 1439 (a)-(c) (1970 ed., Supp. IV).[21]*305 Use of the 8 program to expand low-income housing opportunities outside areas of minority concentration would not have a coercive effect on suburban municipalities. For under the program, the local governmental units retain the right to comment on specific assistance proposals, to reject certain proposals that are inconsistent with their approved housing-assistance plans, and to require that zoning and other land-use restrictions be adhered to by builders. In sum, there is no basis for the petitioner's claim that court-ordered metropolitan area relief in this case would be impermissible as a matter of law under the Milliken decision. In contrast to the desegregation order in that case, a metropolitan area relief order directed to HUD would not consolidate or in any way restructure local *306 governmental units. The remedial decree would neither force suburban governments to submit public housing proposals to HUD nor displace the rights and powers accorded local government entities under federal or state housing statutes or existing land-use laws. The order would have the same effect on the suburban governments as a discretionary decision by HUD to use its statutory powers to provide the respondents with alternatives to the racially segregated Chicago public housing system created by CHA and HUD. Since we conclude that a metropolitan area remedy in this case is not impermissible as a matter of law, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals remanding the case to the District Court "for additional evidence and for further consideration of the issue of metropolitan area relief." 503 F.2d, Our determination that the District Court has the authority to direct HUD to engage in remedial efforts in the metropolitan area outside the city limits of Chicago should not be interpreted as requiring a metropolitan area |
Justice Stevens | 1,979 | 16 | concurring | Givhan v. Western Line Consol. School Dist. | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109967/givhan-v-western-line-consol-school-dist/ | Because this Court's opinion in Mt. Healthy City Bd. of had not been announced when the District Court decided this case, it did not expressly find that respondents would have rehired petitioner if she had not engaged in constitutionally protected conduct. The District Court did find, however, that petitioner's protected conduct was the "primary" reason for respondents' decision.[*] The *418 Court of Appeals regarded that finding as foreclosing respondents' Mt. Healthy claim. In essence, the Court of Appeals concluded that the District Court would have made an appropriate finding on the issue if it had access to our Mt. Healthy opinion. My understanding of the District Court's finding is the same as the Court of Appeals'. Nevertheless, I agree that the District Court should have the opportunity to decide whether there is any need for further proceedings on the issue. If that court regards the present record as adequate to enable it to supplement its original findings without taking additional evidence, it is free to do so. On that understanding, I join the Court's opinion. |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | Internal Revenue Code 104(a)(2), as it read in excluded from "gross income" the "amount of any damages received (whether by suit or agreement and whether as lump sums or as periodic payments) on account of personal injuries or sickness. " 26 U.S. C. 104(a)(2) (emphasis added). The issue before us is whether this provision applies to (and thereby makes nontaxable) punitive damages received by a plaintiff in a tort suit for personal injuries. We conclude that the punitive damages received here were not received "on account of " personal injuries; hence the provision does not apply, and the damages are taxable. I Petitioners in this litigation are the husband and two children of Betty O'Gilvie, who died in of toxic shock syndrome. Her husband, Kelly, brought a tort suit (on his own behalf and that of her estate) based on Kansas law against the maker of the product that caused Betty O'Gilvie's death. Eventually, he and the two children received the net proceeds of a jury award of $1,525,000 actual damages and $10 million punitive damages. Insofar as the proceeds represented punitive damages, petitioners paid income tax on the proceeds but immediately sought a refund. The litigation before us concerns petitioners' legal entitlement to that refund. Procedurally speaking, the litigation represents the consolidation of two cases brought in the same Federal District Court: Kelly's suit against the Government for a refund, and the Government's suit against the children to recover the refund that the Government had made to the children earlier. 26 U.S. C. 7405(b) (authorizing *82 suits by the United States to recover refunds erroneously made). The Federal District Court held on the merits that the statutory phrase "damages On account of personal injury or sickness" includes punitive damages, thereby excluding punitive damages from gross income and entitling Kelly to obtain, and the children to keep, their refund. The Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, however, reversed the District Court. Along with the Fourth, Ninth, and Federal Circuits, it held that the exclusionary provision does not cover punitive damages. Because the Sixth Circuit has held the contrary, the Circuits are divided ab the proper interpretation of the provision. We granted certiorari to resolve this conflict. II Petitioners received the punitive damages at issue here "by suit"indeed "by" an ordinary "suit" for "personal injuries." Contrast United ( 104(a)(2) exclusion not applicable to backpay awarded under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the claim was not based upon "`tort or tort type rights,' " ); (Age Discrimination in Employment Act of (ADEA) claim is similar to |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | Discrimination in Employment Act of (ADEA) claim is similar to Title VII claim in in this respect). These legal circumstances bring those damages within the gross-income-exclusion provision, however, only if petitioners also "received" those damages "on account of" the "personal injuries." And the phrase "on account of" does not unambiguously define itself. On one linguistic interpretation of those words, that of petitioners, they require no more than a "but-for" connection between "any" damages and a lawsuit for personal injuries. They would thereby bring virtually all personal injury lawsuit damages within the scope of the provision, since: "but for the personal injury, there would be no lawsuit, and but for the lawsuit, there would be no damages." *83 On the Government's alternative interpretation, however, those words impose a stronger causal connection, making the provision applicable only to those personal injury lawsuit damages that were awarded by reason of, or because of, the personal injuries. To put the matter more specifically, they would make the section inapplicable to punitive damages, where those damages "`are not compensation for injury [but] [i]nstead are private fines levied by civil juries to punish reprehensible conduct and to deter its future occurrence.' " Elec- trical quoting The Government says that such damages were not "received. on account of" the personal injuries, but rather were awarded "on account of" a defendant's reprehensible conduct and the jury's need to punish and to deter it. Hence, despite some historical uncertainty ab the matter, see Rev. Rul. 75-45, -1 Cum. Bull. 47, revoked by Rev. Rul. 84-108, 1984-2 Cum. Bull. 32, the Government now concludes that these punitive damages fall side the statute's coverage. We agree with the Government's interpretation of the statute. For one thing, its interpretation gives the phrase "on account of" a meaning consistent with the dictionary definition. See, e. g., Webster's Third New International Dictionary 13 ("for the sake of: by reason of: because of"). More important, in we came close to resolving the statute's ambiguity in the Government's favor. That case did not involve damages received in an ordinary tort suit; it involved liquidated damages and backpay received in a settlement of a lawsuit charging a violation of the ADEA. Nonetheless, in deciding one of the issues there presented (whether the provision now before us covered ADEA liquidated damages), we contrasted the elements of *84 an ordinary tort recovery with ADEA liquidated damages. We said that pain and suffering damages, medical expenses, and lost wages in an ordinary tort case are covered by the statute and hence excluded from income "not simply because the taxpayer received |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | hence excluded from income "not simply because the taxpayer received a tort settlement, but rather because each element satisfies the requirement that the damages were received `on account of personal injuries or sickness.' " In holding that ADEA liquidated damages are not covered, we said that they are not "designed to compensate ADEA victims," ; instead, they are "`punitive in nature,' " quoting Trans World Airlines, Applying the same reasoning here would lead to the conclusion that the punitive damages are not covered because they are an element of damages not "designed to compensate. victims," 515 U. S., ; rather they are "`punitive in nature,' " Although we gave other reasons for our holding in as well, we explicitly labeled this reason an "independent" ground in support of our decision, We cannot accept petitioners' claim that it was simply a dictum. We also find the Government's reading more faithful to the history of the statutory provision as well as the basic tax-related purpose that the history reveals. That history begins in approximately At that time, this Court had recently decided several cases based on the principle that a restoration of capital was not income; hence it fell side the definition of "income" upon which the law imposed a tax. E. g., ; Shern Pacific The Attorney General then advised the Secretary of the Treasury that proceeds of an accident insurance policy should be treated as nontaxable because they primarily *85 "substitute capital which is the source of future periodical income merely tak[ing] the place of capital in human ability which was destroyed by the accident. They are therefore [nontaxable] `capital' as distinguished from `income' receipts." 31 Op. Atty. Gen. 304, 308 The Treasury Department added that "upon similar principles an amount received by an individual as the result of a suit or compromise for personal injuries sustained by him through accident is not income [that is] taxable." T. D. 2747, Soon thereafter, Congress enacted the first predecessor of the provision before us. That provision excluded from income "[a]mounts received, through accident or health insurance or under workmen's compensation acts, as compensation for personal injuries or sickness, plus the amount of any damages received whether by suit or agreement on account of such injuries or sickness." Revenue Act of ch. 18, 213(b)(6), The provision is similar to the cited materials from the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury in language and structure, all of which suggests that Congress sought, in enacting the statute, to codify the Treasury's basic approach. A contemporaneous House Report, insofar as relevant, confirms this similarity |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | A contemporaneous House Report, insofar as relevant, confirms this similarity of approach, for it says: "Under the present law it is doubtful whether amounts received through accident or health insurance, or under workmen's compensation acts, as compensation for personal injury or sickness, and damages received on account of such injuries or sickness, are required to be included in gross income. The proposed bill provides *86 that such amounts shall not be included in gross income." H. R. Rep. No. 7, pp. 9-10 This history and the approach it reflects suggest there is no strong reason for trying to interpret the statute's language to reach beyond those damages that, making up for a loss, seek to make a victim whole, or, speaking very loosely, "return the victim's personal or financial capital." We concede that the original provision's language does go beyond what one might expect a purely tax-policy-related "human capital" rationale to justify. That is because the language excludes from taxation not only those damages that aim to substitute for a victim's physical or personal wellbeingpersonal assets that the Government does not tax and would not have taxed had the victim not lost them. It also excludes from taxation those damages that substitute, say, for lost wages, which would have been taxed had the victim earned them. To that extent, the provision can make the compensated taxpayer better off from a tax perspective than had the personal injury not taken place. But to say this is not to support cutting the statute totally free from its original moorings in victim loss. The statute's failure to separate those compensatory elements of damages (or accident insurance proceeds) one from the other does not change its original focus upon damages that restore a loss, that seek to make a victim whole, with a tax-equality objective providing an important part of, even if not the entirety of, the statute's rationale. All this is to say that the Government's interpretation of the current provision (the wording of which has not changed significantly from the original) is more consistent than is petitioners' with the statute's original focus. Finally, we have asked why Congress might have wanted the exclusion to have covered these punitive damages, and we have found no very good answer. Those damages are not a substitute for any normally untaxed personal (or financial) quality, good, or "asset." They do not compensate for *87 any kind of loss. The statute's language does not require, or strongly suggest, their exclusion from income. And we can find no evidence that congressional generosity or concern for administrative convenience stretched |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | evidence that congressional generosity or concern for administrative convenience stretched beyond the bounds of an interpretation that would distinguish compensatory from noncompensatory damages. Of course, as we have just said, from the perspective of tax policy one might argue that noncompensatory punitive damages and, for example, compensatory lost wages are much the same thing. That is, in both instances, exclusion from gross income provides the taxpayer with a windfall. This circumstance alone, however, does not argue strongly for an interpretation that covers punitive damages, for coverage of compensatory damages has both language and history in its favor to a degree that coverage of noncompensatory punitive damages does not. Moreover, this policy argument assumes that coverage of lost wages is something of an anomaly; if so, that circumstance would not justify the extension of the anomaly or the creation of another. See Wolfman, Current Issues of Federal Tax Policy, 16 U. Ark. Little Rock L. J. 543, 549-550 (1994) ("[T]o build upon" what is, from a tax policy perspective, the less easily explained portion "of the otherwise rational exemption for personal injury," simply "does not make sense"). Petitioners make three sorts of arguments to the contrary. First, they emphasize certain words or phrases in the original, or current, provision that work in their favor. For example, they stress the word "any" in the phrase "any damages." And they note that in both original and current versions Congress referred to certain amounts of money received (from workmen's compensation, for example) as "amounts received as compensation," while here they refer only to "damages received" with adding the limiting phrase "as compensation." 26 U.S. C. 104(a); Revenue Act of 213(b)(6), They add that in the original version, the words "on account of personal injuries" *88 might have referred to, and modified, the kind of lawsuit, not the kind of damages. And they find support for this view in the second sentence of the Treasury Regulation first adopted in 1958 which says: "The term `damages received (whether by suit or agreement)' means an amount received (other than workmen's compensation) through prosecution of a legal suit or action based upon tort or tort type rights, or through a settlement agreement entered into in lieu of such prosecution." 26 CFR 1.104-1(c) (1996). These arguments, however, show only that one can reasonably read the statute's language in different waysthe very assumption upon which our analysis rests. They do not overcome our interpretation of the provision in nor do they change the provision's history. The help that the Treasury Regulation's second sentence gives the petitioners is offset by its |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | Regulation's second sentence gives the petitioners is offset by its first sentence, which says that the exclusion applies to damages received "on account of personal injuries or sickness," and which we have held sets forth an independent requirement. See Appendix, infra, at 92. Second, petitioners argue that to some extent the purposes that might have led Congress to exclude, say, lost wages from income would also have led Congress to exclude punitive damages, for doing so is both generous to victims and avoids such administrative problems as separating punitive from compensatory portions of a global settlement or determining the extent to which a punitive damages award is itself intended to compensate. Our problem with these arguments is one of degree. Tax generosity presumably has its limits. The administrative problem of distinguishing punitive from compensatory elements is likely to be less serious than, say, distinguishing among the compensatory elements of a settlement (which difficulty might account for the statute's treatment of, say, lost *89 wages). And, of course, the problem of identifying the elements of an ostensibly punitive award does not exist where, as here, relevant state law makes clear that the damages at issue are not at all compensatory, but entirely punitive. ; accord, ; ; Third, petitioners rely upon a later enacted law. In Congress amended the law so that it now specifically says the personal injury exclusion from gross income "shall not apply to any punitive damages in connection with a case not involving physical injury or physical sickness." 26 U.S. C. 104(a). Why, petitioners ask, would Congress have enacted this amendment removing punitive damages (in nonphysical injury cases) unless Congress believed that, in the amendment's absence, punitive damages did fall within the provision's coverage? The short answer to this question is that Congress might simply have thought that the then-current law ab the provision's treatment of punitive damagesin cases of physical and nonphysical injurieswas unclear, that it wanted to clarify the matter in respect to nonphysical injuries, but it wanted to leave the law where it found it in respect to physical injuries. The fact that the law was indeed uncertain at the time supports this view. Compare Rev. Rul. 84-108, 1984-2 Cum. Bull. 32, with, e. g., ; rev'd The amendment's legislative history, insofar as relevant, offers further support. The amendment grew of the Senate's refusal to agree to a House bill that would have *90 made all damages in nonphysical personal injury cases taxable. The Senate was willing to specify only that the Government could tax punitive damages in such cases. Compare H. R. Rep. |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | tax punitive damages in such cases. Compare H. R. Rep. No. 101-247, p. 1355 with H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 101-386, pp. 622-623 Congress' primary focus, in other words, was upon what to do ab nonphysical personal injuries, not upon the provision's coverage of punitive damages under pre-existing law. We add that, in any event, the view of a later Congress cannot control the interpretation of an earlier enacted statute. United ; But cf. n. 6 (including a passing reference to the amendment, in dicta, as support for a view somewhat like that of petitioners). (Although neither party has argued that it is relevant, we note in passing that 1605 of the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996, Stat. 1838, explicitly excepts most punitive damages from the exclusion provided by 104(a)(2). Because it is of prospective application, the section does not apply here. The Conference Report on the new law says that "[n]o inference is intended" as to the proper interpretation of 104(a)(2) prior to amendment. H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 104-737, p. 301 (1996).) The upshot is that we do not find petitioners' arguments sufficiently persuasive. And, for the reasons set we agree with the Government's interpretation of the statute. III Petitioners have raised two further issues, specific to the procedural posture of this litigation. First, the O'Gilvie children point that the Government had initially accepted their claim for a refund and wrote those checks on July 6, The Government later changed its mind and, on July 9, 1992, two years plus three days later, filed suit against them seeking the return of a refund erroneously made. 26 U.S. C. 7405(b) (authorizing a "civil action brought in the *91 name of the United States" to recover any "portion of a tax. which has been erroneously refunded"). They add that the relevant statute of limitations specifies that recovery of the refund "shall be allowed only if such suit is begun within 2 years after the making of such refund." 6532(b). The children concede that they received the refund checks on July 9, and they agree that if the limitation period runs from the date of receiptif, as the Government argues, that is the date of the "making of" the refundthe Government's suit was timely. But the children say that the refund was made on, and the limitations period runs from, the date the Government mailed the checks (presumably July 6, 7, or 8), in which case the Government brought this suit one or two or three days too late. In our view, the Government is correct in its claim |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | In our view, the Government is correct in its claim that its lawsuit was timely. The language of the statute admits of both interpretations. But the law ordinarily provides that an action to recover mistaken payments of money "accrues upon the receipt of payment," New ; accord, unless, as in some States and in some cases, it accrues upon the still later date of the mistake's discovery, see Allen & Lamkin, When Statute of Limitations Begins to Run Against Action to Recover Money Paid By Mistake, 79 A. L. R. 3d 754, 766-769 (1977). We are not aware of any good reason why Congress would have intended a different result where the nature of the claim is so similar to a traditional action for money paid by mistakean action the roots of which can be found in the old common-law claim of "assumpsit" or "money had and received." New Bedford, -. The lower courts and commentators have reached a similar conclusion. United ; ; United *92 rev'd on other grounds, ; 14 J. Mertens Law of Federal Income Taxation 54A.69 ; Kafka & Cavanagh, Litigation of Federal Civil Tax Controversies 20.03, p. 20-15 That conclusion is consistent with dicta in an earlier case from this Court, United as well as with this Court's normal practice of construing ambiguous statutes of limitations in Government action in the Government's favor. E. g., 4 U.S. 386, We concede the children's argument that a "date of mailing" interpretation produces marginally greater certainty, for such a rule normally would refer the court to the postmark to establish the date. But there is no indication that a "date of receipt" rule has proved difficult to administer in ordinary state or common-law actions for money paid erroneously. The date the check clears, after all, sets an er bound. Second, Kelly O'Gilvie says that the Court of Appeals should not have considered the Government's original appeal from the District Court's judgment in his favor because, in his view, the Government filed its notice of appeal a few days too late. The Court of Appeals describes the circumstances underlying this case-specific issue in its opinion. We agree with its determination of the matter for the reasons it has there set forth. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is Affirmed. APPENDIX TO OPINION OF THE COURT Section 104(a), in read as follows: "Compensation for injuries or sickness "(a) In general.Except in the case of amounts attributable to (and not in excess of) deductions allowed under *93 section 213 (relating to medical, etc., expenses) for any prior taxable year, gross |
Justice Breyer | 1,996 | 2 | majority | O'Gilvie v. United States | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/118070/ogilvie-v-united-states/ | to medical, etc., expenses) for any prior taxable year, gross income does not include "(1) amounts received under workmen's compensation acts as compensation for personal injuries or sickness; "(2) the amount of any damages received (whether by suit or agreement and whether as lump sums or as periodic payments) on account of personal injuries or sickness; "(3) amounts received through accident or health insurance for personal injuries or sickness (other than amounts received by an employee, to the extent such amounts (A) are attributable to contributions by the employer which were not includible in the gross income of the employee, or (B) are paid by the employer); "(4) amounts received as a pension, annuity, or similar allowance for personal injuries or sickness resulting from active service in the armed forces of any country or in the Coast and Geodetic Survey or the Public Health Service, or as a disability annuity payable under the provisions of section 808 of the Foreign Service Act of ; and "(5) amounts received by an individual as disability income attributable to injuries incurred as a direct result of a violent attack which the Secretary of State determines to be a terrorist attack and which occurred while such individual was an employee of the United States engaged in the performance of his official duties side the United States." 26 U.S. C. 104 ( ed.). In 104(a) was amended, adding, among other things, the following language: "Paragraph (2) shall not apply to any punitive damages in connection with a case not involving physical injury or physical sickness." 26 U.S. C. 104(a). *94 Treasury Regulation 1.104-1(c) provides: "Section 104(a)(2) excludes from gross income the amount of any damages received (whether by suit or agreement) on account of personal injuries or sickness. The term `damages received (whether by suit or agreement)' means an amount received (other than workmen's compensation) through prosecution of a legal suit or action based upon tort or tort type rights, or through a settlement agreement entered into in lieu of such prosecution." 26 CFR 1.104-1(c) (1996). |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Greene v. Lindsey | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110705/greene-v-lindsey/ | A Kentucky statute provides that in forcible entry or detainer actions, service of process may be made under certain circumstances by posting a summons on the door of a tenant's apartment. The question presented is whether this statute, as applied to tenants in a public housing project, fails to afford those tenants the notice of proceedings initiated against them required by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. *446 I Appellees Linnie Lindsey, Barbara Hodgens, and Pamela Ray are tenants in a Louisville, Ky., housing project. Appellants are the Sheriff of Jefferson County, Ky., and certain unnamed Deputy Sheriffs charged with responsibility for serving process in forcible entry and detainer actions. In 1975, the Housing Authority of Louisville initiated detainer actions against each of appellees, seeking repossession of their apartments. Service of process was made pursuant to Ky. Rev. Stat. 454.030 (1975), which states: "If the officer directed to serve notice on the defendant in forcible entry or detainer proceedings cannot find the defendant on the premises mentioned in the writ, he may explain and leave a copy of the notice with any member of the defendant's family thereon over sixteen (16) years of age, and if no such person is found he may serve the notice by posting a copy thereof in a conspicuous place on the premises. The notice shall state the time and place of meeting of the court." In each instance, notice took the form of posting a copy of the writ of forcible entry and detainer on the door of the tenant's apartment.[1] Appellees claim never to have seen these posted summonses; they state that they did not learn of the *447 eviction proceedings until they were served with writs of possession, executed after default judgments had been entered against them, and after their opportunity for appeal had lapsed. Thus without recourse in the state courts, appellees filed this suit as a class action in the United States District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief under 42 U.S. C. 1983. They claimed that the notice procedure employed as a predicate to these eviction proceedings did not satisfy the minimum standards of constitutionally adequate notice described in and that the Commonwealth of Kentucky had thus failed to afford them the due process of law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Named as defendants were the Housing Authority of Louisville, several public officials charged with responsibility over particular Louisville public housing projects, Joseph Greene, the Jefferson County Sheriff, and certain known and unknown Deputy Sheriffs. On cross-motions for summary judgment, the |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Greene v. Lindsey | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110705/greene-v-lindsey/ | and unknown Deputy Sheriffs. On cross-motions for summary judgment, the District Court granted judgment for appellants. In an unreported opinion, the court noted that some 70 years earlier, in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had held that constructive notice by posting on the door of a building, pursuant to the predecessor statute to 454.030, provided an adequate constitutional basis upon which to commence an eviction action, on the ground that it was reasonable for the State to presume that a notice posted on the door of the building in dispute would give the tenant actual notice in time to contest the action. Although the District Court recognized that "conditions have changed since the decision in Weber and. that there is undisputed testimony in this case that notices posted on the apartment doors of tenants are often removed by other tenants," App. 41-42, the court nevertheless concluded that the procedures employed did not deny due *448 process in light of the fact "that posting only comes into play after the officer directed to serve notice cannot find the defendant on the premises," The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed the grant of summary judgment in favor of appellants and remanded the case for further proceedings. Acknowledging that its decision in Weber directed a contrary result, the Court of Appeals examined the doctrinal basis of that decision, and concluded that it rested in part on distinctions between actions in rem and actions in personam that had been drawn in cases such as ; ; ; ; and and that had been substantially undercut by intervening decisions of this Court. In overruling Weber, the Court of Appeals cited International Shoe and as cases calling for a more realistic appraisal of the adequacy of process provided by the State. Turning to the circumstances of this case and the procedures contemplated by 454.030, the Court of Appeals noted that while there may have been "a time when posting provided a surer means of giving notice than did mailing, [t]hat time has passed. The uncontradicted testimony by process servers themselves that posted summonses are not infrequently removed by persons other than those served constitutes effective confirmation of the conclusion that notice by posting `is not reasonably calculated to reach those who could easily be informed by other means at hand,' " 649 F.2d, 8, quoting[2] The court held, therefore, that the notice provided *449 pursuant to 454.030 was constitutionally deficient. We noted probable jurisdiction, and now affirm. II A "The fundamental requisite of due process of law is the opportunity to |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Greene v. Lindsey | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110705/greene-v-lindsey/ | requisite of due process of law is the opportunity to be heard." And the "right to be heard has little reality or worth unless one is informed that the matter is pending and can choose for himself whether to appear or default, acquiesce or contest," Personal service guarantees actual notice of the pendency of a legal action; it thus presents the ideal circumstance under which to commence legal proceedings against a person, and has traditionally been deemed necessary in actions styled in Nevertheless, certain less rigorous notice procedures have enjoyed substantial acceptance throughout our legal history; in light of this history and the practical obstacles to providing personal service in every instance, we have allowed judicial proceedings to be prosecuted in some situations on the basis of procedures that do not carry with them the same certainty of actual notice that inheres in personal service. But we have also clearly recognized that the Due Process Clause does prescribe a constitutional minimum: "An elementary and fundamental requirement of due process in any proceeding which is to be accorded finality is notice reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the *450 pendency of the action and afford them an opportunity to present their objections." 339 U. S., It is against this standard that we evaluate the procedures employed in this case. B Appellants argue that because a forcible entry and detainer action is an action in rem, notice by posting is ipso facto constitutionally adequate. Appellees concede that posting has traditionally been deemed appropriate for in rem proceedings, but argue that detainer actions can now encompass more than the simple issue of the tenant's continued right to possession, and that they therefore require the more exacting forms of notice customarily provided for proceedings in Appellants counter by conceding that if the particular detainer proceeding was one in which the landlord sought to recover past due rent, personal service would be required by Kentucky law, but argue that such claims are unusual in such proceedings, and that in the case before us the landlord claimed only a right to recover possession. Tr. of Oral Arg. 19-21. As in we decline to resolve the constitutional question based upon the determination whether the particular action is more properly characterized as one in rem or in See That is not to say that the nature of the action has no bearing on a constitutional assessment of the reasonableness of the procedures employed. The character of the action reflects the extent to which the court purports to extend its power, and thus may |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Greene v. Lindsey | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110705/greene-v-lindsey/ | the court purports to extend its power, and thus may roughly describe the scope of potential adverse consequences to the person claiming a right to more effective notice. But " `[a]ll proceedings, like all rights, are really against persons.' "[3] In this case, appellees *451 have been deprived of a significant interest in property: indeed, of the right to continued residence in their homes.[4] In light of this deprivation, it will not suffice to recite that because the action is in rem, it is only necessary to serve notice "upon the thing itself."[5] The sufficiency of notice must be tested with reference to its ability to inform people of the pendency of proceedings that affect their interests. In arriving at the constitutional assessment, we look to the realities of the case before us: In determining the constitutionality of a procedure established by the State to provide notice in a particular class of cases, "its effect must be judged in the light of its practical application to the affairs of men as they are ordinarily conducted." North Laramie Land (15). It is, of course, reasonable to assume that a property owner will maintain superintendence of his property, and to presume that actions physically disturbing his holdings will come to his attention. See[6] The *452 frequent restatement of this rule impresses upon the property owner the fact that a failure to maintain watch over his property may have significant legal consequences for him, providing a spur to his attentiveness, and a consequent reinforcement to the empirical foundation of the principle. Upon this understanding, a State may in turn conclude that in most cases, the secure posting of a notice on the property of a person is likely to offer that property owner sufficient warning of the pendency of proceedings possibly affecting his interests. The empirical basis of the presumption that notice posted upon property is adequate to alert the owner or occupant of property of the pendency of legal proceedings would appear to make the presumption particularly well founded where notice is posted at a residence. With respect to claims affecting the continued possession of that residence, the application of this presumption seems particularly apt: If the tenant has a continuing interest in maintaining possession of the property for his use and occupancy, he might reasonably be expected to frequent the premises; if he no longer occupies the premises, then the injury that might result from his not having received actual notice as a consequence of the posted notice is reduced. Short of providing personal service, then, posting notice on the door |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Greene v. Lindsey | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110705/greene-v-lindsey/ | of providing personal service, then, posting notice on the door of a person's home would, in many *453 or perhaps most instances, constitute not only a constitutionally acceptable means of service, but indeed a singularly appropriate and effective way of ensuring that a person who cannot conveniently be served personally is actually apprised of proceedings against him. But whatever the efficacy of posting in many cases, it is clear that, in the circumstances of this case, merely posting notice on an apartment door does not satisfy minimum standards of due process. In a significant number of instances, reliance on posting pursuant to the provisions of 454.030 results in a failure to provide actual notice to the tenant concerned. Indeed, appellees claim to have suffered precisely such a failure of actual notice. As the process servers were well aware, notices posted on apartment doors in the area where these tenants lived were "not infrequently" removed by children or other tenants before they could have their intended effect.[7] Under these conditions, notice by *454 posting on the apartment door cannot be considered a "reliable means of acquainting interested parties of the fact that their rights are before the courts." Of course, the reasonableness of the notice provided must be tested with reference to the existence of "feasible and customary" alternatives and supplements to the form of notice chosen. In this connection, we reject appellants' characterization of the procedure contemplated by 454.030 as one in which " `posting' is used as a method of service only as a last resort." Brief for Appellants 7. To be sure, the statute requires the officer serving notice to make a visit to the tenant's home and to attempt to serve the writ personally on the tenant or some member of his family. But if no one is at home at the time of that visit, as is apparently true in a "good percentage" of cases,[8] posting follows forthwith. Neither the statute, nor the practice of the process servers, makes provision for even a second attempt at personal service, perhaps at some time of day when the tenant is more likely to be at home. The failure to effect personal service on the first visit hardly suggests that the tenant has abandoned his interest in the apartment such that mere pro forma notice might be held constitutionally adequate. Cf. -318. *455 As noted by the Court of Appeals, and as we noted in the mails provide an "efficient and inexpensive means of communication," upon which prudent men will ordinarily rely in the conduct of important affairs, -320. |
Justice Brennan | 1,982 | 13 | majority | Greene v. Lindsey | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110705/greene-v-lindsey/ | will ordinarily rely in the conduct of important affairs, -320. Notice by mail in the circumstances of this case would surely go a long way toward providing the constitutionally required assurance that the State has not allowed its power to be invoked against a person who has had no opportunity to present a defense despite a continuing interest in the resolution of the controversy.[9] Particularly where the subject matter of the action also happens to be the mailing address of the defendant, and where personal service is ineffectual, notice by mail may reasonably be relied upon to provide interested persons with actual notice of judicial proceedings. We need not go so far as to insist that in order to "dispense with personal service the substitute that is most likely to reach the defendant is the least that ought to be required," 243 U. S., at in order to recognize that where an inexpensive and efficient mechanism such as mail service is available to enhance the reliability of an otherwise unreliable notice procedure, the State's continued exclusive reliance on an ineffective means of service is not notice "reasonably calculated to reach those who could *456 easily be informed by other means at hand."[10] III We conclude that in failing to afford appellees adequate notice of the proceedings against them before issuing final orders of eviction, the State has deprived them of property without the due process of law required by the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is therefore Affirmed. |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | Over the course of the last decade, the deliberate-bypass standard announced in has played a central role in efforts by the federal judiciary to accommodate the constitutional rights of the individual with the States' interests in the integrity of their judicial procedural regimes. The Court today decides that this standard should no longer apply with respect to procedural defaults occurring during the trial of a criminal defendant. In its place, the Court adopts the two-part "cause"-and-"prejudice" test originally developed in and As was true with these earlier cases,[1]*100 however, today's decision makes no effort to provide concrete guidance as to the content of those terms. More particularly, left unanswered is the thorny question that must be recognized to be central to a realistic rationalization of this area of law: How should the federal habeas court treat a procedural default in a state court that is attributable purely and simply to the error or negligence of a defendant's trial counsel? Because this key issue remains unresolved, I shall attempt in this opinion a re-examination of the policies[2] that should *101 informand in Fay did informthe selection of the standard governing the availability of federal habeas corpus jurisdiction in the face of an intervening procedural default in the state court. I I begin with the threshold question: What is the meaning and import of a procedural default? If it could be assumed that a procedural default more often than not is the product of a defendant's conscious refusal to abide by the duly constituted, legitimate processes of the state courts, then I might agree that a regime of collateral review weighted in favor of a State's procedural rules would be warranted.[3]Fay, however, recognized that such rarely is the case; and therein lies Fay's basic unwillingness to embrace a view of habeas jurisdiction that results in "an airtight system of [procedural] forfeitures." This, of course, is not to deny that there are times when the failure to heed a state procedural requirement stems from an intentional decision to avoid the presentation of constitutional claims to the state forum. Fay was not insensitive to this possibility. Indeed, the very purpose of its bypass test is to detect and enforce such intentional procedural *102 forfeitures of outstanding constitutionally based claims. Fay does so through application of the longstanding rule used to test whether action or inaction on the part of a criminal defendant should be construed as a decision to surrender the assertion of rights secured by the Constitution: To be an effective waiver, there must be "an intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | must be "an intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right or privilege." Incorporating this standard, Fay recognized that if one "understandingly and knowingly forewent the privilege of seeking to vindicate his federal claims in the state courts, whether for strategic, tactical or any other reasons that can fairly be described as the deliberate by-passing of state procedures, then it is open to the federal court on habeas to deny him all" For this reason, the Court's assertion that it "think[s]" that the Fay rule encourages intentional "sandbagging" on the part of the defense lawyers is without basis, ante, at 89; certainly the Court points to no cases or commentary arising during the past 15 years of actual use of the Fay test to support this criticism. Rather, a consistent reading of case law demonstrates that the bypass formula has provided a workable vehicle for protecting the integrity of state rules in those instances when such protection would be both meaningful and just.[] *103 But having created the bypass exception to the availability of collateral review, Fay recognized that intentional, tactical forfeitures are not the norm upon which to build a rational system of federal habeas jurisdiction. In the ordinary case, litigants simply have no incentive to slight the state tribunal, since constitutional adjudication on the state and federal levels are not mutually exclusive. ; ; Under the regime of collateral review recognized since the days of and enforced by the Fay bypass test, no rational lawyer would risk the "sandbagging" feared by the Court.[5] If a constitutional challenge is not properly raised *10 on the state level, the explanation generally will be found elsewhere than in an intentional tactical decision. In brief then, any realistic system of federal habeas corpus jurisdiction must be premised on the reality that the ordinary procedural default is born of the inadvertence, negligence, inexperience, or incompetence of trial counsel. See, e. g., Hill, The Inadequate State Ground, The case under consideration today is typical. The Court makes no effort to identify a tactical motive for the failure of Sykes' attorney to challenge the admissibility or reliability of a highly inculpatory statement. While my Brother STEVENS finds a possible tactical advantage, I agree with the Court of Appeals that this reading is most implausible: "We can find no possible advantage which the defense might have gained, or thought they might gain, from the failure to conform with Florida Criminal Procedure Rule 3.190 (i)." Indeed, there is no basis for inferring that Sykes or his state trial lawyer was even aware of the existence of his |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | trial lawyer was even aware of the existence of his claim under the Fifth Amendment; for this is not a case where the trial judge expressly drew the attention of the defense to a possible constitutional contention or procedural requirement, e. g., ; cf. or where the defense signals its knowledge of a constitutional claim by abandoning a challenge previously raised, e. g., Rather, any realistic reading of the record demonstrates that we are faced here with a lawyer's simple error.[6] Fay's answer thus is plain: the bypass test simply refuses to credit what is essentially a lawyer's mistake as a forfeiture of constitutional rights. I persist in the belief that the interests of Sykes and the State of Florida are best rationalized by adherence to this test, and by declining to react to inadvertent defaults through the creation of an "airtight system of forfeitures." II What are the interests that Sykes can assert in preserving the availability of federal collateral relief in the face of his inadvertent state procedural default? Two are paramount. As is true with any federal habeas applicant, Sykes seeks access to the federal court for the determination of the validity of his federal constitutional claim. Since at least it has been recognized that the "fair effect [of] the habeas corpus jurisdiction as enacted by Congress" entitles a state prisoner to such federal While some of my Brethren may feel uncomfortable with this congressional choice of policy, see, e. g., the Legislative Branch nonetheless remains entirely free to determine that the constitutional rights of an individual subject to state custody, like those of the civil rights *106 plaintiff suing under 2 U.S. C. 1983, are best preserved by "interpos[ing] the federal courts between the States and the people, as guardians of the people's federal rights" With respect to federal habeas corpus jurisdiction, Congress explicitly chose to effectuate the federal court's primary responsibility for preserving federal rights and privileges by authorizing the litigation of constitutional claims and defenses in a district court after the State vindicates its own interest through trial of the substantive criminal offense in the state courts.[7] This, of course, was not the only course that Congress might have followed: As an alternative, it might well have decided entirely to circumvent all state procedure through the expansion of existing federal removal statutes such as 28 U.S. C. 12 (a) (1) and 13, thereby authorizing the pretrial transfer of all state criminal cases to the federal courts whenever federal defenses or claims are in issue.[8] But liberal post-trial federal review is the redress *107 that |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | But liberal post-trial federal review is the redress *107 that Congress ultimately chose to allow and the consequences of a state procedural default should be evaluated in conformance with this policy choice. Certainly, we can all agree that once a state court has assumed jurisdiction of a criminal case, the integrity of its own process is a matter of legitimate concern. The Fay bypass test, by seeking to discover intentional abuses of the rules of the state forum, is, I believe, compatible with this state institutional interest. See Part III, infra. But whether Fay was correct in penalizing a litigant solely for his intentional forfeitures properly must be read in light of Congress' desired norm of widened post-trial access to the federal courts. If the standard adopted today is later construed to require that the simple mistakes of attorneys are to be treated as binding forfeitures, it would serve to subordinate the fundamental rights contained in our constitutional charter to inadvertent defaults of rules promulgated by state agencies, and would essentially leave it to the States, through the enactment of procedure and the certification of the competence of local attorneys, to determine whether a habeas applicant will be permitted the access to the federal forum that is guaranteed him by Congress.[9] *108 Thus, I remain concerned that undue deference to local procedure can only serve to undermine the ready access to a federal court to which a state defendant otherwise is entitled. But federal review is not the full measure of Sykes' interest, for there is another of even greater immediacy: assuring that his constitutional claims can be addressed to some court. For the obvious consequence of barring Sykes from the federal courthouse is to insulate Florida's alleged constitutional violation from any and all judicial review because of a lawyer's mistake. From the standpoint of the habeas petitioner, it is a harsh rule indeed that denies him "any review at all where the state has granted none," particularly when he would have enjoyed both state and federal consideration had his attorney not erred. Fay's answer to Sykes' predicament, measuring the existence and extent of his procedural waiver by the Zerbst standard is, I submit, a realistic one. The Fifth Amendment assures that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" A defendant like Sykes can forgo this protection in two ways: He may decide to waive his substantive self-incrimination right at the point that he gives an inculpatory statement to the police authorities, or he and his attorney may choose not to challenge |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | or he and his attorney may choose not to challenge the admissibility of an incriminating statement when such a challenge would be effective under state trial procedure. See With few exceptions in the past 0 years, e. g., this Court has required that the substantive waiver, to be valid, must be a knowing and intelligent one. *109 See, e. g., ; ; Escobedo v. 378 U.S. 90 n. 1 (196); 355 U.S. 18, ; 19-150 (199); (192). It has long been established that such is the case for the waiver of the protections of the Miranda rule. See 38 U.S., at 75; at 20. Fay simply evaluates the procedural waiver of Sykes' Fifth Amendment rights by the same standard. From the standpoint of the habeas petitioner this symmetry is readily understandable. To him, the inevitable consequence of either type of forfeiturebe it substantive or proceduralis that the protection of the Fifth Amendment is lost and his own words are introduced at trial to the prejudice of his defense. The defendant's vital interest in preserving his Fifth Amendment privilege entitles him to informed and intelligent consideration of any decision leading to its forfeiture. It may be, of course, that the State's countervailing institutional interests are more compelling in the case of eliciting a procedural default, thereby justifying a relaxation of the Zerbst standard. I discuss this possibility in greater detail in Part III, infra. It is sufficient for present purposes, however, that there is no reason for believing that this necessarily is true. That the State legitimately desires to preserve an orderly and efficient judicial process is undeniable. But similar interests of efficiency and the like also can be identified with respect to other state institutions, such as its law enforcement agencies. Yet, as was only recently reconfirmed, we would not permit and have not permitted the state police to enhance the orderliness and efficiency of their law enforcement activities by embarking on a campaign of acquiring inadvertent waivers of important constitutional rights. at 01-06; see generally 25 U. S., at 58-59, n. 2 *110 A procedural default should be treated accordingly. Indeed, a recent development in the law of habeas corpus suggests that adherence to the deliberate-bypass test may be more easily justified today than it was when Fay was decided. It also suggests that the "prejudice" prong of the Court's new test may prove to be a redundancy. Last Term the Court ruled that alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment in most circumstances no longer will be cognizable in habeas corpus. While, for me, the principle that generated this |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | habeas corpus. While, for me, the principle that generated this conclusion was not readily apparent, I expressed my concern that the Stone decision contains the seeds for the exclusion from collateral review of a variety of constitutional rights that my Brethren somehow deem to be unimportantperhaps those that they are able to conclude are not "guilt-related." See If this trail is to be followed, it would be quite unthinkable that an unintentional procedural default should be allowed to stand in the way of vindication of constitutional rights bearing upon the guilt or innocence of a defendant. Indeed, if as has been argued, a key to decision in this area turns upon a comparison of the importance of the constitutional right at stake with the state procedural rule, Sandalow, and the Adequate State Ground: Proposals for a Revised Doctrine, then the Court's threshold effort to identify those rights of sufficient importance to be litigated collaterally should largely predetermine the outcome of this balance. In sum, I believe that Fay's commitment to enforcing intentional but not inadvertent procedural defaults offers a realistic measure of protection for the habeas corpus petitioner seeking federal review of federal claims that were not litigated before the State. The threatened creation of a more "airtight system of forfeitures" would effectively deprive habeas petitioners of the opportunity for litigating *111 their constitutional claims before any forum and would disparage the paramount importance of constitutional rights in our system of government. Such a restriction of habeas corpus jurisdiction should be countenanced, I submit, only if it fairly can be concluded that Fay's focus on knowing and voluntary forfeitures unduly interferes with the legitimate interests of state courts or institutions. The majority offers no suggestion that actual experience has shown that Fay's bypass test can be criticized on this score. And, as I now hope to demonstrate, any such criticism would be unfounded. III A regime of federal habeas corpus jurisdiction that permits the reopening of state procedural defaults does not invalidate any state procedural rule as such;[10] Florida's courts remain entirely free to enforce their own rules as they choose, and to deny any and all state rights and remedies to a defendant who fails to comply with applicable state procedure. The relevant inquiry is whether more is requiredspecifically, whether the fulfillment of important interests of the State necessitates that federal courts be called upon to impose additional sanctions for inadvertent noncompliance with state procedural requirements such as the contemporaneous-objection rule involved here. *112 Florida, of course, can point to a variety of legitimate interests in seeking allegiance to |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | to a variety of legitimate interests in seeking allegiance to its reasonable procedural requirements, the contemporaneous-objection rule included. See 379 U. S., at 8. As Fay recognized, a trial, like any organized activity, must conform to coherent process, and "there must be sanctions for the flouting of such procedure." 372 U.S., at 31. The strict enforcement of procedural defaults, therefore, may be seen as a means of deterring any tendency on the part of the defense to slight the state forum, to deny state judges their due opportunity for playing a meaningful role in the evolving task of constitutional adjudication, or to mock the needed finality of criminal trials. All of these interests are referred to by the Court in various forms.[11] The question remains, however, whether any of these policies or interests are efficiently and fairly served by enforcing both intentional and inadvertent defaults pursuant to the identical stringent standard. I remain convinced that when one pierces the surface justifications for a harsher rule posited by the Court, no standard stricter than Fay's deliberate-bypass test is realistically defensible. *113 Punishing a lawyer's unintentional errors by closing the federal courthouse door to his client is both a senseless and misdirected method of deterring the slighting of state rules. It is senseless because unplanned and unintentional action of any kind generally is not subject to deterrence; and, to the extent that it is hoped that a threatened sanction addressed to the defense will induce greater care and caution on the part of trial lawyers, thereby forestalling negligent conduct or error, the potential loss of all valuable state remedies would be sufficient to this end.[12] And it is a misdirected sanction because even if the penalization of incompetence or carelessness will encourage more thorough legal training and trial preparation, the habeas applicant, as opposed to his lawyer, hardly is the proper recipient of such a penalty. Especially with fundamental constitutional rights *11 at stake, no fictional relationship of principal-agent or the like can justify holding the criminal defendant accountable for the naked errors of his attorney.[13] This is especially true when so many indigent defendants are without any realistic choice in selecting who ultimately represents them at trial.[1] Indeed, if responsibility for error must be apportioned between the parties, it is the State, through its attorney's admissions and certification policies, that is more fairly held to blame for the fact that practicing lawyers too often are ill-prepared or ill-equipped to act carefully and knowledgeably when faced with decisions governed by state procedural requirements. *115 Hence, while I can well agree that the |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | requirements. *115 Hence, while I can well agree that the proper functioning of our system of criminal justice, both federal and state, necessarily places heavy reliance on the professionalism and judgment of trial attorneys, I cannot accept a system that ascribes the absolute forfeiture of an individual's constitutional claims to situations where his lawyer manifestly exercises no professional judgment at allwhere carelessness, mistake, or ignorance is the explanation for a procedural default. Of course, it is regrettable that certain errors that might have been cured earlier had trial counsel acted expeditiously must be corrected collaterally and belatedly. I can understand the Court's wistfully wishing for the day when the trial was the sole, binding and final "event" of the adversarial processalthough I hesitate to agree that in the eyes of the criminal defendant it has ever ceased being the "main" one, ante, at 90. But it should be plain that in the real world, the interest in finality is repeatedly compromised in numerous ways that arise with far greater frequency than do procedural defaults. The federal criminal system, to take one example, expressly disapproves of interlocutory review in the generality of cases even though such a policy would foster finality by permitting the authoritative resolution of all legal and constitutional issues prior to the convening of the "main event." See generally 31 U.S. 651 Instead, it relies on the belated correction of error, through appeal and collateral review, to ensure the fairness and legitimacy of the criminal sanction. Indeed, the very existence of the well-established right collaterally to reopen issues previously litigated before the state courts, represents a congressional policy choice that is inconsistent with notions of strict finalityand probably more so than authorizing the litigation of issues that, due to inadvertence, were never addressed to any court. Ultimately, all of these limitations on the finality of criminal convictions emerge from the tension between justice *116 and efficiency in a judicial system that hopes to remain true to its principles and ideals. Reasonable people may disagree on how best to resolve these tensions. But the solution that today's decision risks embracing seems to me the most unfair of all: the denial of any judicial consideration of the constitutional claims of a criminal defendant because of errors made by his attorney which lie outside the power of the habeas petitioner to prevent or deter and for which, under no view of morality or ethics, can he be held responsible. In short, I believe that the demands of our criminal justice system warrant visiting the mistakes of a trial attorney on the |
Justice Brennan | 1,977 | 13 | dissenting | Wainwright v. Sykes | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/109717/wainwright-v-sykes/ | warrant visiting the mistakes of a trial attorney on the head of a habeas corpus applicant only when we are convinced that the lawyer actually exercised his expertise and judgment in his client's service, and with his client's knowing and intelligent participation where possible. This, of course, is the precise system of habeas review established by IV Perhaps the primary virtue of Fay is that the bypass test at least yields a coherent yardstick for federal district courts in rationalizing their power of collateral See n. In contrast, although some four years have passed since its introduction in the only thing clear about the Court's "cause"-and-"prejudice" standard is that it exhibits the notable tendency of keeping prisoners in jail without addressing their constitutional complaints. Hence, as of today, all we know of the "cause" standard[15] is its requirement that habeas applicants bear an undefined burden of explanation for the failure to obey the state rule, ante, at 91. Left unresolved is whether a habeas petitioner like Sykes can adequately discharge this burden by *117 offering the commonplace and truthful explanation for his default: attorney ignorance or error beyond the client's control. The "prejudice" inquiry, meanwhile, appears to bear a strong resemblance to harmless-error doctrine. Compare ante, at 91, with 2 I disagree with the Court's appraisal of the harmlessness of the admission of respondent's confession, but if this is what is meant by prejudice, respondent's constitutional contentions could be as quickly and easily disposed of in this regard by permitting federal courts to reach the merits of his complaint. In the absence of a persuasive alternative formulation to the bypass test, I would simply affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals and allow Sykes his day in court on the ground that the failure of timely objection in this instance was not a tactical or deliberate decision but stemmed from a lawyer's error that should not be permitted to bind his client. One final consideration deserves mention. Although the standards recently have been relaxed in various jurisdictions,[16] it is accurate to assert that most courts, this one included,[17] traditionally have resisted any realistic inquiry into the competency of trial counsel. There is nothing unreasonable, *118 however, in adhering to the proposition that it is the responsibility of a trial lawyer who takes on the defense of another to be aware of his client's basic legal rights and of the legitimate rules of the forum in which he practices his profession.[18] If he should unreasonably permit such rules to bar the assertion of the colorable constitutional claims of his client, |
Justice Stevens | 1,989 | 16 | majority | Hardin v. Straub | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112265/hardin-v-straub/ | This case presents the question whether a federal court applying a state statute of limitations to an inmate's federal civil rights action should give effect to the State's provision tolling the limitations period for prisoners. Petitioner is incarcerated in a Michigan state prison. In 1986 he filed a pro se complaint pursuant to 42 U.S. C. 1983, alleging that for approximately 180 days in 1980 and he had been held in solitary confinement in violation of his federal constitutional rights.[1] The District Court sua sponte dismissed the complaint because it had been filed after the expiration of Michigan's 3-year statutory limitations period for personal injury actions. The Court of Appeals affirmed. Following its 3-day-old decision in the court refused to apply a Michigan statute that suspends limitations periods for persons under a legal disability until one year after the disability has been removed. Because the holding appeared to conflict with our decision in Board of Regents, University of New we granted certiorari.[2] We now reverse. *538 In enacting 42 U.S. C. 1988 Congress determined that gaps in federal civil rights acts should be filled by state law, as long as that law is not inconsistent with federal law.[3] See Because no federal statute of limitations governs, federal courts routinely measure the timeliness of federal civil rights suits by state law. ; ; This tradition of borrowing analogous limitations statutes, cf. is based on a congressional decision to defer to "the State's judgment on the proper balance between the policies of repose and the substantive policies of enforcement embodied in the state cause of action."[4] "In virtually all statutes of limitations the chronological length of the limitation period is interrelated with provisions regarding tolling, revival, and questions of application." at Courts thus should not unravel state limitations rules unless their full application would defeat the goals of the federal statute at issue. See, e. g., ; These principles were invoked in Board of Regents, University of New to review a contention that a 1983 action was barred by New York's 3-year limitations statute. The District Court and the Court of Appeals had rejected the defense by relying on a "federal tolling rule" not contained among the tolling provisions the state legislature had codified with its limitations periods. This Court reversed. Limitations periods in 1983 suits are to be determined by reference to the appropriate "state statute of limitations and the coordinate tolling rules"; New York's legislative choices in this regard were therefore "binding rules of law." Since the State's rules did not defeat either 1983's chief goals of compensation and deterrence[5] |
Justice Stevens | 1,989 | 16 | majority | Hardin v. Straub | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112265/hardin-v-straub/ | not defeat either 1983's chief goals of compensation and deterrence[5] or its subsidiary goals of uniformity and federalism, *540 the Court held that 's suit was time barred. It is undisputed that the limitations period applicable to this case is three years, as established in Michigan's statute governing personal injury actions.[6] See ; v. Since 1846, however, the Michigan Legislature has enacted provisions tolling the onset of limitations periods for prisoners and others suffering from legal disabilities.[7] The contemporary counterpart provides: "[I]f the person first entitled to make an entry or bring an action is under 18 years of age, insane, or imprisoned at the time the claim accrues, the person or those claiming under the person shall have 1 year after the disability is removed through death or otherwise, to make the entry or bring the action although the period of limitations has run." Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. 600.5851(1)[8] *541 Having passed this statute in 1961,[9] the Michigan Legislature revised it in 1972 without altering its effect on prisoners' lawsuits. A legislative committee recognized: " `[E]ven prisoners can bring civil actions, though they may not be allowed to be personally present, so it is not as necessary to provide long periods after the removal of the disability in which to sue as it was in the past when these disabilities were considerably more real. Nevertheless, it was considered better to allow a short period after the termination of the disability in which the person under the disability could bring an action.' " quoting committee comment following Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. 600.5851, p. 914 (1968). Likewise, 1986 amendments to the provision did not affect its applicability to prison inmates. See historical note following Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. 600.5851, p. 540 In the Michigan Court of Appeals employed 600.5851 to toll a state-law libel action by a plaintiff who was incarcerated in a state correctional institution. "[T]he purpose of the statute is to provide prisoners with additional time to assert their legal rights," the state court concluded, "and this purpose could reasonably be based upon the fact that prisoners have restricted access to the judicial system due to their confinement." at -749, 311 N.W.2d, at *542 The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit nonetheless refused to apply the tolling provision to inmates' 1983 suits in this case and in Although it recognized in Higley that it was "obligated to apply state tolling statutes to 1983 actions, as long as the result is not inconsistent with federal law or policy," the court held that "application of a lengthy tolling period is |
Justice Stevens | 1,989 | 16 | majority | Hardin v. Straub | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112265/hardin-v-straub/ | court held that "application of a lengthy tolling period is clearly counterproductive to sound federal policy in attempting to deal with 1983 claims as promptly as practicable,"[10] Tolling is neither inconsistent with nor required by 1983's goal of compensating persons whose constitutional rights have been violated, the court stated. Its result thus turned on two other interests, which it discussed in tandem: the settled 1983 policy of deterring officials' unconstitutional behavior and a novel "rehabilitative function [of] providing a `safety valve' for prisoner grievances."[11] at 626. Concluding that quick disposition *543 of 1983 suits advances these latter policies, the court held that Michigan's tolling law is inconsistent with federal law and declined to apply it. We do not agree with the Court of Appeals. A State's decision to toll the statute of limitations during the inmate's disability does not frustrate 1983's compensation goal. Rather, it enhances the inmate's ability to bring suit and recover damages for injuries.[12] Nor does the State's decision to toll its statute of limitations hinder 1983's deterrence interest. In the event an official's misconduct is ongoing, the plaintiff will have an interest in enjoining it; thus, the time during which the official will unknowingly violate the Constitution may well be short. The State also may have decided that if the official knows an act is unconstitutional, the risk that he or she might be haled into court indefinitely is more likely to check misbehavior than the knowledge that he or she might escape a challenge to that conduct within a brief period of time. The Court of Appeals may have overlooked this point in Higley because of its unfortunate intermeshing of 1983's deterrence function with a dubious "rehabilitative function."[13] *544 As the Sixth Circuit pointed out, ib many prisoners are willing and able to file 1983 suits while in custody. Thus, a State reasonably could decide that there is no need to enact a tolling statute applicable to such suits. Alternatively, a State reasonably might conclude that some inmates may be loathe to bring suit against adversaries to whose daily supervision and control they remain subject, or that inmates who do file may not have a fair opportunity to establish the validity of their allegations while they are confined. The Michigan tolling statute reflects a legislative decision to lessen any such difficulties by extending the time in which prisoners may seek recovery for constitutional injuries. Such a statute is consistent with 1983's remedial purpose.[14] The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. It |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | These cases present several issues arising out of petitioners' action against respondents for alleged racial discrimination in employment and provision of services by the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service (Extension Service). The District Court declined to certify various proposed classes and, after a lengthy trial, entered judgment for respondents in all respects, finding that petitioners had not carried their burden of demonstrating that respondents had engaged in a pattern or practice of racial discrimination. The District Court also ruled against each of the individual plaintiffs' discrimination claims. The Court of Appeals affirmed. We hold, for the reasons stated in the concurring opinion of JUSTICE BRENNAN, that the Court of Appeals erred in holding that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, 42 U.S. C. 2000e et seq., the Extension Service had no duty to eradicate *387 salary disparities between white and black workers that had their origin prior to the date Title VII was made applicable to public employers;[1] that the Court of Appeals erred in disregarding petitioners' statistical analysis because it reflected pre-Title VII salary disparities, and in holding that petitioners' regressions were unacceptable as evidence of discrimination; that the Court of Appeals erred in ignoring evidence presented by petitioners in addition to their multiple regression analyses; that, on remand, the Court of Appeals should examine all of the evidence in the record relating to salary disparities under the clearly-erroneous standard; that the reasons given by the Court of Appeals for refusing to certify a class of black employees of the Extension Service do not support a decision not to certify such a class; and that the Court of Appeals was correct in refusing to certify a class of defendant counties.[2] We further hold, for the reasons stated in the opinion of JUSTICE WHITE, that neither the Constitution nor the applicable Department of Agriculture regulations require more than what the District Court and *388 the Court of Appeals found the Extension Service has done in this case to disestablish segregation in its 4-H and Extension Homemaker Clubs. Accordingly, the judgment of the Court of Appeals is affirmed in part and vacated in part, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.[3] It is so ordered. JUSTICE BRENNAN, joined by all other Members of the Court, concurring in part. I A The purpose of North Carolina's agricultural extension program, administered through the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service (Extension Service), is to aid in the dissemination of "useful and practical information on subjects *389 relating to agriculture and home economics." App. to |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | subjects *389 relating to agriculture and home economics." App. to Pet. for Cert. in No. 85-93, p. 7a (hereinafter Pet. App.). The Extension Service is a division of the School of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University (NCSU). It is headed by a Director who exercises authority over District Extension Chairmen responsible for administering all Extension Service programs within the State's six Extension Service districts. The District Extension Chairmen, in turn, supervise the 100 County Extension Chairmen who are responsible for developing and coordinating all Extension Service activities within their respective counties. The County Extension Chairmen also report to their respective Board of County Commissioners (Board), a unit of local government, on extension programs and on matters relating to budgeting and personnel. The Extension Service operates in four major areas: home economics, agriculture, 4-H and youth, and community resource development. In both the home economics and 4-H areas, one of the Extension Service's methods entails the establishment of clubs to educate the club members in home economics and other useful and practical skills. The agricultural program educates and encourages farmers to adopt scientific methods and to adjust to changing economic circumstances. The community resource development program emphasizes group action through citizen groups and organizations. Each of these programs is implemented by local agents who are selected for employment jointly by the Extension Service and the county Boards. Agents are divided into three ranks: full agent, associate agent, and assistant agent. "While the three ranks of agents perform essentially the same types of tasks, when an agent is promoted his responsibilities increase and a higher level of performance is expected of him." at 17a. The salaries of all workers are determined jointly by the Extension Service and the Boards. at 33a; CA App. *390 223; DX 78, CA App. 1684.[1] The federal, state, and county governments all contribute to these salaries. The Boards and the Extension Service determine jointly the proportionate share of salaries to be paid by the State and by the county. Moreover, all county extension hirings and firings are decided " `jointly between the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service and the Board of County Commissioners.' " Pet. App. 24a (quoting Memorandum of Understanding, DX 78). The Extension Service has overall responsibility for establishing qualifications for employment in the Service and for screening applicants before recommending qualified applicants to the county commissioners for appointment to vacant or new positions. The Extension Service also prepares and submits an annual budget request to the Board for the county's share of funds for salaries. Each Board reviews the budget |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | share of funds for salaries. Each Board reviews the budget requests from the Extension Service each year and confers with and advises the District and County Extension Chairman concerning Extension Service programs. The Board furnishes the county's share of salaries for extension personnel. In addition, it provides office space and equipment, utilities, telephone, demonstration materials, etc. Prior to August 1, 1965, the Extension Service was divided into two branches: a white branch and a "Negro branch." Only the "Negro branch" had a formal racial designation. The "Negro branch" was composed entirely of black personnel and served only black farmers, homemakers, and youth. The white branch employed no blacks, but did on occasion serve blacks. On August 1, 1965, in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the State merged the two branches of the *391 Extension Service into a single organization. However, as the District Court subsequently found, "[the] unification and integration of the Extension Service did not result immediately in the elimination of some disparities which had existed between the salaries of white personnel and black personnel." at 31a. B The private petitioners include employees of the Extension Service, recipients of its services, members of Extension Homemaker Clubs, and parents of 4-H Club youths. Complaint 12. They brought this action in 1971 alleging racial discrimination in employment and in the provision of services on the part of the Extension Service in violation of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, 42 U.S. C. 1981, 1983 and 2000d, and 7 U.S. C. 341 et seq. The defendants, respondents here, were William C. Friday, President of NCSU, and various officials associated with the University and its School of Agriculture. In addition, County Commissioners from Alamance, Edgecomb, and Mecklenburg Counties were also named as defendants. On April 7, 1972, the United intervened under 902 of Title IX and 601 and 602 of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S. C. 2000h-2, 2000d, and 2000d-1. The United subsequently amended its complaint in intervention to include allegations that defendants had also violated 703 and 706 of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, 42 U.S. C. 2000e-2 and 2000e-5. The United ' complaint essentially tracked the claims made by the private petitioners. The private petitioners were permitted on the eve of trial to amend their complaint to add a claim under Title VII as well. On two occasions prior to trial the District Court was asked, but declined, to certify the action as a class action. *392 Near the close of trial the |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | a class action. *392 Near the close of trial the plaintiffs again requested the court to certify four classes of plaintiffs and one class of defendants.[2] However, the District Court once again declined to do so, and this decision was subsequently upheld by the Court of Appeals. On the merits, the trial court explored allegations of racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of the Extension Service's employment practices and provision of services.[3] The District Court ruled in favor of respondents in all respects. On most issues it concluded that petitioners *393 had failed to carry their burden of proof. As a general proposition, the District Court was of the view that the Extension Service had conducted itself in a nondiscriminatory manner since it became subject to Title VII and since the merger of the black and white branches in 1965. Both the private petitioners and the United limited their appeals to the claims that the District Court erred in considering the evidence before it regarding salaries and promotions to County Chairmen, and in concluding that the Extension Service had not discriminated against blacks with respect to salaries and promotions to County Chairmen. The United also claimed that the system used to determine merit pay increases violated Title VII. The private petitioners also appealed the rejection of their claim that respondents were unlawfully providing services and materials to segregated 4-H and Extension Homemaker Clubs, and the District Court's refusal to certify the case as a class action. The Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court in all respects. We granted certiorari,[4] *394 II The first issue we must decide is whether the Court of Appeals erred in upholding the District Court's finding that petitioners had not proved by a preponderance of the evidence that respondents had discriminated against black Extension Service employees in violation of Title VII by paying them less than whites employed in the same positions. The Court of Appeals reasoned that the Extension Service was under no obligation to eliminate any salary disparity between blacks and whites that had its origin prior to 1972 when Title VII became applicable to public employers such as the Extension Service.[5] It also reasoned that factors, other than those included in petitioners' multiple regression analyses, affected salary, and that therefore those regression analyses were incapable of sustaining a finding in favor of petitioners. A Both the Court of Appeals and the District Court found that before the black and white Extension Service branches were merged in 1965, the Extension Service maintained two separate, racially segregated branches and paid black employees less than |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | separate, racially segregated branches and paid black employees less than white employees. Pet. App. 120a; The Court of Appeals also acknowledged that after the merger of the Extension Service, "[s]ome preexisting salary disparities continued to linger on," and that these disparities continued after Title VII became applicable to the Extension Service in March 1972 and after this suit was filed. Indeed, the Court of Appeals noted that "the Extension Service admits that, while it had made some adjustments to try to get rid of the salary disparity resulting *395 on account of pre-Act discrimination, it has not made all the adjustments necessary to get rid of all such disparity." See also Brief for Respondents 32 ("[E]fforts were made to reduce the average differences but due to the county by county salary differences and finding [sic] structure 1971 [sic], the averages were not eliminated"). The court interpreted petitioners' claim on appeal to be that "the pre-Act discriminatory difference in salaries should have been affirmatively eliminated but has not." Relying on our cases in Hazelwood School and United Air Lines, it concluded, "[w]e do not think this is the law." The error of the Court of Appeals with respect to salary disparities created prior to 1972 and perpetuated thereafter is too obvious to warrant extended discussion: that the Extension Service discriminated with respect to salaries prior to the time it was covered by Title VII does not excuse perpetuating that discrimination after the Extension Service became covered by Title VII. To hold otherwise would have the effect of exempting from liability those employers who were historically the greatest offenders of the rights of blacks. A pattern or practice that would have constituted a violation of Title VII, but for the fact that the statute had not yet become effective, became a violation upon Title VII's effective date, and to the extent an employer continued to engage in that act or practice, it is liable under that statute. While recovery may not be permitted for pre-1972 acts of discrimination, to the extent that this discrimination was perpetuated after 1972, liability may be imposed. Each week's paycheck that delivers less to a black than to a similarly situated white is a wrong actionable under Title VII, regardless of the fact that this pattern was begun prior *396 to the effective date of Title VII. The Court of Appeals plainly erred in holding that the pre-Act discriminatory difference in salaries did not have to be eliminated.[6] *397 The Court of Appeals' conclusion that pre-Act salary discrimination did not have to be eliminated undermines the rest |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | discrimination did not have to be eliminated undermines the rest of its analysis of the District Court opinion. Having rejected the effect of pre-Act discrimination, the court considered solely whether the Extension Service discriminated with respect to the application of quartile rankings which, according to the Court of Appeals, were "the only aspect of salary computation in which the Extension Service exercised any discretion."[7] Because, as we have explained, the Extension Service was under an obligation to eradicate salary disparities based on race that began prior to the effective date of Title VII,[8] the Court of Appeals erred in concentrating its analysis solely on the issue whether there was racial discrimination in the ranking system. B We now turn to the issue whether the Court of Appeals erred in upholding the District Court's refusal to accept the petitioners' expert statistical evidence as proof of discrimination *398 by a preponderance of the evidence. In a case alleging that a defendant has engaged in a pattern and practice of discrimination under 707(a) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S. C. 2000e-6(a), plaintiffs must "establish by a preponderance of the evidence that racial discrimination was the company's standard operating procedure the regular rather than the unusual practice." Further, our decision in United Postal Service Board of although not decided in the context of a pattern-and-practice case, makes clear that if the defendants have not succeeded in having a case dismissed on the ground that plaintiffs have failed to establish a prima facie case, and have responded to the plaintiffs' proof by offering evidence of their own, the factfinder then must decide whether the plaintiffs have demonstrated a pattern or practice of discrimination by a preponderance of the evidence. This is because the only issue to be decided at that point is whether the plaintiffs have actually proved discrimination. This determination is subject to the clearly-erroneous standard on appellate review. See ; At trial, petitioners relied heavily on multiple regression analyses designed to demonstrate that blacks were paid less than similarly situated whites. The United ' expert prepared multiple regression analyses relating to salaries for the years 1974, 1975, and 1981. Certain of these regressions used four independent variables race, education, tenure, and job title. Petitioners selected these variables based on discovery testimony by an Extension Service official that four factors were determinative of salary: education, tenure, job title, and job performance. GX 159, pp. 90,96. In addition, regressions done by the Extension Service itself for 1971 included the variables race, sex, education, and experience; and another in 1974 used |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | race, sex, education, and experience; and another in 1974 used the variables race, education, *399 and tenure to check for disparities between the salaries of blacks and whites. GX 214; Tr. 3915-3918; CA App. 1681; Tr. 3920. The regressions purported to demonstrate that in 1974 the average black employee earned $331 less per year than a white employee with the same job title, education, and tenure, GX 123; CA App. 1601; Tr. 364-365, and that in 1975 the disparity was $395, GX 123; CA App. 1589; Tr.377.[9] The regression for 1981 showed a smaller disparity which lacked statistical significance. The Court of Appeals stated: "[The] district court refused to accept plaintiffs' expert testimony as proof of discrimination by a preponderance of the evidence because the plaintiffs' expert had not included a number of variable factors the court considered relevant, among them being the across the board and percentage pay increases which varied from county to county. The district court was, of course, correct in this analysis." 751 F.2d, The Court of Appeals thought the District Court correct for essentially two reasons: First, the Court of Appeals rejected petitioners' regression analysis because it "contained salary figures which reflect the effect of pre-Act discrimination, a consideration not actionable under Title VII" Second, the court believed that "[a]n appropriate regression analysis of salary should include all measurable variables thought to have an effect on salary level." In particular, the court found that the failure to consider county-to-county differences in salary increases was significant. It concluded, noting: "[B]oth experts omitted from their respective analysis variables which ought to be reasonably viewed as determinants of salary. As a result, the regression analysis presented here must be *400 considered unacceptable as evidence of discrimination." The Court of Appeals' treatment of the statistical evidence in this case was erroneous in important respects. 1 The Court of Appeals erred in stating that petitioners' regression analyses were "unacceptable as evidence of discrimination," because they did not include "all measurable variables thought to have an effect on salary level." The court's view of the evidentiary value of the regression analyses was plainly incorrect. While the omission of variables from a regression analysis may render the analysis less probative than it otherwise might be, it can hardly be said, absent some other infirmity, that an analysis which accounts for the major factors "must be considered unacceptable as evidence of discrimination." Normally, failure to include variables will affect the analysis' probativeness, not its admissibility.[10] Importantly, it is clear that a regression analysis that includes less than "all measurable variables" may serve to |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | that includes less than "all measurable variables" may serve to prove a plaintiff's case. A plaintiff in a Title VII suit need not prove discrimination with scientific certainty; rather, his or her burden is to prove discrimination by a preponderance of the evidence. Texas Dept. of Community Whether, in fact, such a regression analysis does carry the plaintiffs' ultimate burden will depend in a given case on the factual context of each case in light of all the evidence presented by both the plaintiff and the defendant. However, as long as the court may fairly conclude, in light of all the evidence, that it is more likely *401 than not that impermissible discrimination exists, the plaintiff is entitled to prevail. 2 In this case the Court of Appeals failed utterly to examine the regression analyses in light of all the evidence in the record. Looked at in its entirety, petitioners offered an impressive array of evidence to support their contention that the Extension Service engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination with respect to salaries. In addition to their own regression analyses described above, petitioners offered regressions done by the Extension Service for 1971 and 1974 that showed results similar to those revealed by petitioners' regressions. Tr. 3917; CA App. 1681. Petitioners also claim support from multiple regressions presented by respondents at trial for the year 1975. Using the same model that petitioners had used, and similar variables, respondents' expert obtained substantially the same result for 1975, a statistically significant racial effect of $384. CA App. 1716. Indeed, respondents also included in their analysis, "quartile rank" as an independent variable, and this increased the racial effect to $475.[11] Petitioners also presented evidence of pre-Act salary discrimination, and of respondents' ineffectual attempts to eradicate it. For example, petitioners submitted evidence, and the District Court found, that blacks were paid less than whites in comparable positions prior to the merger of the black and white services in 1965. Pet. App. 120a. Moreover, in 1971, respondents acknowledged that substantial salary *402 differences between blacks and whites existed.[12] In addition, evidence was offered to show that the efforts by the Extension Service to equalize those salaries in 1971 were insufficient to accomplish the goal. Tr. 242-246; GX 98. As we made clear in Hazelwood School -310, n. 15 "[p]roof that an employer engaged in racial discrimination prior to the effective date of Title VII might in some circumstances support the inference that such discrimination continued, particularly where relevant aspects of the decisionmaking process had undergone little change."[13] Further, petitioners presented evidence to rebut |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | had undergone little change."[13] Further, petitioners presented evidence to rebut respondents' contention that county-to-county variations in contributions to salary explain the established disparity between black and white salaries. The United presented evidence, which it claims respondents did not rebut, establishing that black employees were not located disproportionately in the counties that contributed only a small amount to Extension Service salaries. GX 216; see also CA App. 189. Absent a disproportionate concentration of blacks in such counties, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how the fact that some counties contribute less to salaries than others could explain disparities between black and white salaries. *403 In addition, the United presented an exhibit based on 1973 data for 23 counties showing 29 black employees who were earning less than whites in the same county who had comparable or lower positions and tenure. GX 102. Finally, and there was some overlap here with evidence used to discredit the county-to-county variation theory, petitioners presented evidence consisting of individual comparisons between salaries of blacks and whites similarly situated. GX 102, DX 48. Witness testimony, claimed by petitioners to be unrebutted, also confirmed the continued existence of such disparities. CA App. 190; Tr. 2010-2012, 2685, 2825-2826. Setting out the range of persuasive evidence offered by petitioners demonstrates the error of the Court of Appeals in focusing solely on the characteristics of the regression analysis. Although we think that consideration of the evidence makes a strong case for finding the District Court's conclusion clearly erroneous,[14] we leave that task to the Court of *404 Appeals on remand which must make such a determination based on the "entire evidence" in the record. United v. United Gypsum Co.,[15] III The private petitioners complain that the District Court and Court of Appeals erred in failing to certify this case as a class action. They seek the certification of three distinct classes: (1) all black employees of the Extension Service on or after November 18, 1971; (2) all current black members and potential black members of the 4-H and Extension Homemaker *405 Clubs on or after November 18, 1971;[16] and as a defendant (3) all County Commissioners in North Carolina who held that position on or after November 18, 1971. The Court of Appeals upheld the District Court's denial of class certification. A With respect to the class of black employees, the Court of Appeals held that due to the fact that salaries are made up of money from several distinct sources, the Federal Government, the State, and the counties, the "claim of a potential plaintiff against one county will |
per_curiam | 1,986 | 200 | per_curiam | Bazemore v. Friday | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/111746/bazemore-v-friday/ | the "claim of a potential plaintiff against one county will not be typical of the claim of another potential plaintiff against a different county."[17] It applied the same reasoning to the employees' charge of discrimination in the hiring of County Chairmen. Yet the claims here were not asserted solely against the counties; they were asserted also against the Extension Service. And, as against the Extension Service, at least, it is clear that the claims of the named plaintiffs were "typical" *406 of other black employees who may have been paid less or denied promotion to chairman. Although it seems likely that the other requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 were met by this class, neither court below expressly considered the issue and we therefore leave that determination to the Court of Appeals on remand.[18] B The Court of Appeals also upheld the District Court's decision not to certify a class of County Commissioner defendants because there "was simply no evidence of any standardized practice among the one hundred separate counties in the state to deprive anyone of any rights solely because of race." Pet. App. 47a-48a. The Court of Appeals was of the view that "to have a proper class of defendants in a case such as this there must be either a statewide rule or practice so that relief is available if the rule or practice is invalid, or the adjudication with respect to a member of a defendant class must as a practical matter be dispositive of the interests of the other members of the class as provided in FRCP 23(b)(1)(B)." We agree with the Court of Appeals that certification of a defendant class under Rule 23(b)(1)(B) in this case would have been improper. Whether an individual county acted intentionally with the Extension Service in setting salaries or in selecting County Chairmen in a discriminatory manner, is an issue that once decided with respect to a *407 particular county could not "be dispositive of the interests of the other members of the class." The private petitioners have suggested no theory to support any different result. |
Justice Powell | 1,982 | 17 | concurring | Ralston v. Robinson | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110585/ralston-v-robinson/ | The only question presented in this case is whether an offender, the respondent, serving a sentence under the Federal Youth Corrections Act (YCA), 18 U.S. C. 5005 et seq., and thereafter sentenced to a consecutive term of imprisonment as an adult, must nevertheless be separated from other adult offenders for the remainder of his sentence under that Act. I agree with the Court that the answer to this question must be in the negative. I write separately because it seems to me that the Court's opinion, in addressing broadly the authority of the Director of the Bureau of Prisons (the Director), may be read as unnecessarily curtailing his authority and discretion to act in other cases. It was a District Court that imposed the consecutive adult term on respondent, but it was the Director who made the decision to treat respondent as an adult prisoner no longer entitled to be segregated from adult offenders. I agree with the Court as to the authority of the District Court to impose the consecutive adult term of imprisonment. I confine this concurrence to the issue of authority of the Director. Respondent pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1974. The court sentenced him to 10 years of custody under the YCA. In 1975 respondent was convicted of assaulting a *222 federal guard with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to a consecutive 10-year term. The District Court found "that the [respondent] will not benefit any further under the provisions of the Youth Offenders Act and decline[d] to sentence under said act." After it received a report from the Bureau of Prisons, however, the court took two additional actions. It reduced respondent's sentence to five and one-half years, and it recommended but did not order that respondent "be transferred from [the] Federal Youth Center. to a facility providing greater security." In 1977 respondent again was convicted of assaulting a federal guard. He again was given consecutive adult sentencing. Two courts thus certified that respondent had shown an incorrigibility and capacity for violence that warrants adult treatment. In my view, certainly under these circumstances, the Director had the authority to treat the respondent as an adult offender. The YCA directs that youth offenders are to "undergo treatment in institutions of maximum security, medium security, or minimum security types" 18 U.S. C. 5011. " `[T]reatment' means corrective and preventive guidance and training designed to protect the public by correcting the antisocial tendencies of youth offenders." 5006(f). The Director, inter alia, may "order the committed youth offender confined and afforded treatment under such conditions as he |
Justice Powell | 1,982 | 17 | concurring | Ralston v. Robinson | https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/110585/ralston-v-robinson/ | offender confined and afforded treatment under such conditions as he believes best designed for the protection of the public." 5015(a)(3) (emphasis added). "The Director may transfer at any time a committed youth offender from one agency or institution to any other agency or institution." 5015(b) (emphasis added). "Insofar as practical, youth offenders shall be segregated from other offenders" 5011 (emphasis added). Thus, the express language of YCA vests broad discretion in the Director. It contains no mandatory directions that youth segregation must continue indefinitely no matter how clearly appropriate adult treatment may be. The statutory emphasis instead is on flexibility and individualized treatment. *223 See 18 U.S. C. 5005, 5014, 5016, 5017, 5018, and 5020. The YCA does require youth offenders to be separated from adult offenders, but this command is qualified by the phrase "[i]nsofar as practical." We need not in this case consider the limits on the discretion thus conferred. This is an easy case in view of respondent's convictions as an adult offender and the findings of the federal courts. In these circumstances the Director plainly had the authority indeed the duty to transfer respondent from the Federal Youth Center to a "facility providing greater security." We properly defer to the Director's judgment that continued segregation from adult offenders is no longer "practical" under such circumstances. Even in the absence of subsequent felony convictions, there could be occasions when, because of a youth offender's incorrigibility and threat to the safety of others, it would be highly impractical to continue his segregation in a youth center. As we are not confronted with such a situation in this case, I would limit our decision to the record before us and defer to another day a general discussion of the Director's authority. |
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