Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9003300774
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM LASSER COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Defendant Horace Butler was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of a Charleston, S.C., convenience-store clerk. A jury found that the slaying was committed during the commission of a rape, and handed down the death sentence. Butler's conviction was affirmed by the South Carolina Supreme Court.
After exhausting all other appeals, Butler asked the federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that his conviction was unconstitutional. The problem, Butler contended, was that the conviction was based at least in part on a confession obtained after Butler had retained an attorney for an unrelated charge. Such police questioning, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1988 case of Arizona v. Roberson, violates the Fourth Amendment.
Why, then, wasn't the Supreme Court's rule applied in Butler's case? Because, unfortunately for Butler, the Roberson case was not handed down until after Butler's conviction. When Butler was interrogated, in other words, his questioning was legal under existing federal law. A 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court - including the three Reagan appointees - therefore refused to overturn Butler's conviction.
However technical the reasoning, the result is clear: Horace Butler will go to the electric chair despite the fact that his conviction was based on an interrogation that, the court now says, violated his Fifth Amendment rights. For habeas corpus purposes, the court held last week, it is sufficient if law enforcement officials abide by yesterday's Supreme Court decision without worrying about tomorrow's.
Under such a system, as Justice William J. Brennan Jr. pointed out in dissent, state courts and law-enforcement officers will be free to construe Supreme Court precedents as narrowly as possible and will incur no obligation to seek out and obey - as Justice Brennan put it - "the plain purport of our decisions."
Last month's decision reveals a troubling side of the court's new conservative majority. Their determination to expound the technical aspects of federal habeas law - however plausible their arguments might be in a classroom or law review - seems to have overpowered their ability to see what they have done. It hardly requires sympathy for Butler or his heinous crime to object to the court's refusal to correct judicial or law-enforcement errors even when matters of life and death are at stake.
Nor does the current majority seem to care that, with this latest in a series of decisions, they have effectively gutted Congress's attempt - beginning in 1867 - to extend meaningful habeas corpus relief to state prisoners. And this from justices who "pride themselves," as Justice Brennan observed, "on their reluctance to play an `activist' judicial role by infringing upon legislative prerogatives."
It took the arcane confines of federal habeas corpus law to reveal, in its clearest form, the new conservative majority's deep cynicism and lack of respect for the principles of American law and justice. To the Reagan appointees, constitutional decisions are not lasting, permanent interpretations of the fundamental law; they are mere "guidelines" for the law-enforcement profession. The interrogation of Butler, the court concedes, was "unquestionably" contrary to present guidelines, and the law-enforcement agencies are hardly to be blamed if the federal Supreme Court changes the guidelines from time to time.
It is ironic that justices who are so quick to condemn decisions such as Roe v. Wade as "judicial legislation" are so willing to characterize their own decisions in legislative terms.
The current court has no patience for traditionalists who see constitutional interpretation as an evolving process in which the court reaches continually toward a deeper and more profound understanding of the constitutional text.
by CNB