December 29, 2006
Carey v. Musladin, a quick analysis ::
legal — tagged crime, due process, habeas corpus, legal and SCOTUS
3:00 pm
I must be feeling better because I find I have a reinvigorated interest in the activities of the Supreme Court. I note particularly the Court’s opinion in Carey v. Musladin, which presented the question of whether the California courts improperly upheld the conviction of a criminal defendant after the victim’s family members were allowed to wear buttons displaying photographs of the victim during the trial. The question was couched within the defendant’s subsequent federal habeas petition, and the Court’s majority opinion stuck to the narrow, technical question of whether upholding the conviction in spite of the buttons was “contrary to” or “an unreasonable application of” clearly established federal law. In a brief opinion by Justice Thomas, the Court quickly answered the question in the negative. But Justice Souter, concurring in the judgment, took a different approach in which he dealt with the question in a more substantive manner:
[O]ne could not seriously deny that allowing spectators at a criminal trial to wear visible buttons with the victim’s photo can raise a risk of improper considerations. The display is no part of the evidence going to guilt or innocence, and the buttons are at once an appeal for sympathy for the victim (and perhaps for those who wear the buttons) and a call for some response from those who see them. On the jurors’ part, that expected response could well seem to be a verdict of guilty, and a sympathetic urge to assuage the grief or rage of survivors with a conviction would be the paradigm of improper consideration.
It’s interesting to compare the majority opinion with Souter’s concurrence. In an effort to build consensus and answer only a narrow, technical question, the majority seems to foreclose the possibility that private actors in a court room could ever do something that would prejudice a criminal defendant during trial. By contrast, Souter’s concurrence does a good job of being just as narrow of an opinion, but leaving open the possibility of prejudice against the defendant based on a different set of facts.
Update: Tony Mauro has an interesting article about Chief Justice Roberts that shades the oddly narrow and technical nature of the Court’s Carey opinion. I noted particularly this paragraph:
Nearly everywhere he goes, Roberts speaks of his desire to preside over a more cohesive and unanimous Court. But with resignation in his voice, he notes that he cannot achieve that goal without active help from his colleagues.
Given Roberts’ intelligence and his overwhelmingly technical mind, as well as this priority he seems to be sticking to, it could be that this opinion simply a product of the type of influence he has over the Court.
