Over the dissent of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who warned that the decision undermined “our role under the Constitution as the final arbiter of federal law,” the court ruled in favor of a Minnesota man convicted of sexually abusing a child in 1996. Years after his conviction had become final on appeal, the man, Stephen Danforth, went back to state court seeking the benefit of a 2004 Supreme Court decision that enhanced the right of defendants to confront their accusers in open court. The six-year-old victim had not appeared at the trial, instead giving a videotaped interview.
Under Supreme Court precedent, state criminal defendants whose convictions are final may generally not avail themselves of “new rules” by petitioning for habeas corpus in federal court on the basis of a favorable new Supreme Court decision.
The question for the court in this case was whether state courts, in considering postconviction appeals from criminal defendants, are bound by the same rule of nonretroactivity.
The Supreme Court ruled last year that the 2004 decision on the right of confrontation, Crawford v. Washington, was not retroactive. But that ruling did not answer the question posed by this case, Danforth v. Minnesota, No. 06-8273. Clearly, the Minnesota courts did not have to apply the Crawford decision retroactively, but the question was whether they could apply it if they chose to. The Minnesota Supreme Court answered that question in the negative.
In an opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court held that in administering their own criminal justice systems, states are free to be as protective of federal constitutional rights as they care to be. “States are independent sovereigns with plenary authority to make and enforce their own laws as long as they do not infringe on federal constitutional guarantees,” Justice Stevens said.
He added: “While we have ample authority to control the administration of justice in the federal courts — particularly in their enforcement of federal legislation — we have no comparable supervisory authority over the work of state judges.”
The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the chief justice’s strongly worded dissenting opinion. Referring to the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the Constitution, which makes federal law “the supreme law of the land,” Chief Justice Roberts said “the court’s opinion invites just the sort of disuniformity in federal law that the Supremacy Clause was meant to prevent.” Once the Supreme Court decided that the Crawford decision was not retroactive, “that should be the end of the matter,” he said.
In response, Justice Stevens offered this retort: “Nonuniformity is a necessary consequence of a federalist system of government.”
The decision offered a window on the court’s rapidly evolving stance toward federalism, a subject that split the justices into sharply defined ideological camps in the last years of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s leadership. In those days, the five most conservative justices voted in case after case on the states’ rights side, while the four more liberal justices voted to uphold national authority.
The Rehnquist federalism revolution more recently has been running out of steam, in part because Chief Justice Roberts, as indicated by his dissenting opinion, appears to have little interest in pursuing it. He also dissented in the court’s last term from a decision that permitted Massachusetts to pursue a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for its failure to address global climate change. The state did not have legal standing to bring the case, the chief justice argued in dissent.
The case that barred state inmates from receiving the advantage of new
Supreme Court decisions in their federal habeas corpus cases was a heatedly
disputed 5-to-4 decision, Teague v. Lane, from 1989. It acted as a brake on
the spread of the occasional liberal Supreme Court decision. Now that
liberal initiatives are more likely to come from state criminal justice
systems than from the court, the alignment of justices may well be
different.