Criminal Law Update January 20, 2009
Recent Supreme Court Decisions Affecting Criminal Law
In Hedgbeth v. Pulido, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the issue of which standard of review to apply when a defendant is convicted after the jury is instructed on two alternative theories of guilt-and one of those theories is invalid. The Ninth Circuit held that such an error was "structural," and that the conviction should be set aside regardless of whether the defendant was prejudiced by the error. In reversing the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court held that the proper standard of review for such an error is the harmless error standard. The dissent agreed that the standard was "harmless error," but felt that the Ninth Circuit had implicitly agreed with the District Court's ruling applying that standard and that remanding the case back to the Ninth Circuit was a waste of resources.
At issue in Jiminez v. Quarterman was the timeframe in which a state prisoner may seek federal habeas corpus relief under 28 U.S.C. 2244(d)(1)(A). Mr. Jiminez, through a comedy of errors involving him being at the state department of corrections after a felony conviction, rather than the local county jail, missed his original timeframe to file an appeal in state court. At a much later time, he was allowed to file an untimely appeal in state court. He was ultimately unsuccessful and attempted to file a petition for habeas corpus in federal court, which the District Court dismissed as untimely-holding him to the 1 year timeframe starting from the date that his original window of time to file a state appeal was closed, as opposed to the conclusion of his ultimately unsuccessful untimely state appeals. A unanimous Supreme Court agreed with him that the plain language of the federal statute granted him one year from the conclusion of his belated state appeal granted during the state collateral review process since he had not yet sought federal habeas corpus relief.
In Chambers v. United States, less surprising was that the Supreme Court held "failing to report" is not a violent crime for sentencing enhancement under the federal guidelines-more surprising was another opinion of the Court was without dissent. What complicated the analysis was that under Illinois law, failing to report was lumped in with other conduct, such as escape from custody, which could be considered violent. The Court held that in situations such as that, categorizing the different subsections is appropriate, and found, of course, that failing to report is non-violent.
Florida Statute 921.16 does not require a criminal court to engage in any fact finding missions before imposing a consecutive sentence rather than a concurrent one. However, in Oregon, there is a statutory scheme which does require a judge to make determinations before doing so. In Oregon v. Ice, a divided court held that allowing a judge to make those determinations and to then sentence a defendant to consecutive sentences does not violate Apprendi/Blakely principles. The four dissenting defenders of the right to have a jury find these facts beyond a reasonable doubt: Justices Scalia, Thomas, Souter, and Chief Justice Roberts.
The Supreme Court divided more predictably in Herring v. United States. The swing vote of Justice Kennedy joined Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito to hold that isolated negligence (such as the negligent maintenance of records as to whom has an outstanding warrant), as opposed to deliberate misconduct, or reckless, grossly negligent conduct, by the police does not warrant the application of the exclusionary rule. They maintained that the focus of the exclusionary rule should be on the deterrence of police misconduct.
