The U.S. Supreme Court has several highly contentious matters under consideration, or soon to be argued, including whether various presidential executive orders can survive separation-of-powers analysis.
Yesterday, however, the Court began the flow of this term’s decisions with two per curiam opinions (that is, unsigned rulings of a unanimous Court) that reached easily predictable conclusions.
That is not to say that these decisions are unimportant. Indeed, for those of us who, if only occasionally, defend criminal cases, the two decisions provide useful procedural advice. Given the tenor of recent arguments, though, this term’s early harmony is unlikely to last. So, let’s revel in the peace of the day.
Clark v. Sweeney was a case in which a man convicted of second-degree murder in Maryland had his conviction reversed upon a request for habeas corpus relief by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, but on grounds that Sweeney himself had never asserted and, accordingly, the prosecution had had no opportunity to address. This transgressed the “party-presentation principle,” a use-it-or-lose-it rule that preserves the adversarial nature of criminal justice.
In seeking reversal of his conviction, Sweeney had alleged ineffective assistance of counsel. However, describing certain impermissible investigative activity by members of the sitting jury, the Court of Appeals, sua sponte, held instead that the case had been prejudiced by a “‘combination of extraordinary failures from juror to judge to attorney’ that deprived Sweeney of his right to be confronted with the witnesses against him and his right to trial by an impartial jury.”
The Supreme Court firmly held that “[i]n our adversarial system of adjudication, we follow the principle of party presentation. . . . The parties ‘frame the issues for decision,’ while the court serves as ‘neutral arbiter of matters the parties present,’” quoting Greenlaw v. United States, 554 U. S. 237, 243 (2008) (citations omitted).
While the Supreme Court’s decision reversed Sweeney’s conviction, the matter is not at an end. The Court simply remanded the case for the trial court to consider what should have been decided in the first place: the claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.
The second case decided yesterday also involved confrontation, this time about a human rather than a technical pleading issue. The per curiam opinion in Pitts v. Mississippi begins with the generally applicable statement that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment guarantees a defendant the opportunity to face a witness before the trier of fact. However, that rule might not literally apply in a case of child abuse, where the trauma of a trial might impair a child-witness’s ability to give testimony.
The case involved Pitts’s alleged sexual abuse of his daughter. Consistent with Mississippi law, the state sought permission to place a screen between the child and her father when she took the witness stand. Pitts objected. While he didn’t question the statute’s mandatory terms governing screening, he did allege that they violated the Sixth Amendment. The trial judge simply granted the state’s request for the screen, holding that the Mississippi law governed on its face. However, referencing prior decisions, the Supreme Court held that the trial court should have applied a case-specific analysis to determine whether or not face-to-face confrontation should be required.
However, as in the Sweeney decision, the reversal of the defendant’s conviction does not end things. Instead, the Supreme Court noted that even constitutional errors can be subjected to the “harmless error” rule. Thus, the case was remanded to allow the prosecutor at least to try to show that a conviction could have been obtained irrespective of the failure to allow face-to-face confrontation. This result, which many present and former prosecutors might find problematic, likely doesn’t write finis to the Pitts story. One suspects that, absent a plea, there will be future appellate issues requiring judicial attention.
For now, though, a peaceful day at the Court has ended. But are those rumblings that one can hear in the heavens?
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