The U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases today, one of which, Lackey v. Stinnie, involved an action brought pursuant to 42 U. S. C. §1983 and should be of particular interest to the many readers of this blog who practice in the civil rights space.
The second case, Glossip v. Oklahoma, is a homicide case in which the state knowingly adduced false testimony. But does the Supreme Court have jurisdiction to reverse the conviction? The answer is that it does, though an interesting mix of Justices take more than 70 pages to explain their competing views.
Lackey v. Stinnie involved a group of drivers whose licenses were suspended under a Virginia law sanctioning drivers who had failed to pay court fines. They challenged the statute as unconstitutional, and the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles from enforcing it. Before the case could come to trial, the state legislature repealed the law and, by agreement of the parties, the case was dismissed as moot. 42 U. S. C. §1988(b) allows the award of attorneys’ fees to “prevailing parties” under §1983, and the plaintiffs sought them. Writing for himself and six other Justices (only Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor dissented), the Chief Justice applied a strict view of the “American Rule” and held that “the plaintiff drivers, who had gained no more than preliminary injunctive relief before the action became moot—do not qualify as ‘prevailing part[ies]’ eligible for attorney’s fees under §1988(b) because no court conclusively resolved their claims by granting enduring judicial relief.” The Court began with text, recognizing that “prevailing party” is a legal term of art. At the time when §1988(b) became law, “contemporary dictionaries defined a prevailing party as one who successfully maintains its claim when the matter is finally resolved.” A preliminary injunction doesn’t do that, because it does not conclusively decide the case on the merits. Indeed, the preliminary injunction does no more than signal likely success on the merits, “along with factors such as irreparable harm, the balance of equities, and the public interest.” The preliminary injunction’s purpose is to preserve the status quo until a trial resolves the case, and “external events that render a dispute moot do not convert that temporary order into a conclusive adjudication on the merits that materially altered the legal relationship between the parties.”
An important caveat is found in a footnote pointing out that the question of who is a “prevailing party” is different for defendants and plaintiffs. Thus, the Court’s decision today “should not be read to affect our previous holding that a defendant need not obtain a favorable judgment on the merits to prevail, nor to address the question we left open of whether a defendant must obtain a preclusive judgment in order to prevail. See CRST Van Expedited, Inc. v. EEOC, 578 U. S. 419, 431−434 (2016). “As we have explained, ‘[p]laintiffs and defendants come to court with different objectives.’” Here, the Court rejects the claim accepted by the dissenters that the drivers “prevailed” because they ultimately succeeded in having the law repealed. However, they didn’t succeed in prosecuting an actual claim in a legal action. And taking that road “made all the difference.” Frost, R., “The Road Not Taken.”
Glossip v. Oklahoma is one of those cases that, if nothing else, defies common notions about how the Justices will align. Here is a case in which Justice Sotomayor delivered the majority opinion of the Court, having been joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. Justice Barrett concurred in part and dissented in part, and Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Alito, dissented. Justice Gorsuch recused because he had sat on an earlier version of the case while on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. As noted, the Justices spared no ink in dealing with this murder case. Years after Glossip was convicted of murdering his boss and sentenced to death, and after he’d filed several habeas petitions, substantial doubt about his guilt emerged through an independent law firm investigation and the state discovering documents suggesting that the main witness against Glossip had testified falsely. Indeed, “[t]he attorney general determined that Smothermon [the prosecutor] had knowingly elicited false testimony from [the witness] Sneed and failed to correct it, violating Napue v. Illinois, 360 U. S. 264, which held that prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to correct false testimony.” However, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied an unopposed petition for a new trial, holding that the petition was barred by Oklahoma law and that the concession was “[n]ot based on law or fact” and did not constitute a Napue error because the defense likely knew that Sneed had testified falsely about his mental condition, and this condition somehow could be tolerated because Sneed was in denial about it. The Court’s majority was plainly unimpressed with this argument because, instead of remanding the case to state court to decide whether a new trial should be granted, the Court held that “[b]ecause ample evidence supports the attorney general’s confession of error in this Court, there also is no need to remand for further evidentiary proceedings.”
Two main aspects of the Court’s ruling should be noted. First, while the independent and adequate state ground doctrine precludes the Court from considering a federal question if the state court’s decision rests on an independent and adequate state law ground, the state court’s application of its procedural rule was not such a ground because it was premised on the rejection of the attorney general’s confession of error under Napue, which was based solely on federal law. However, Oklahoma precedent confirms that rejection of an attorney general’s confession generally has been made only after finding that it was unsupported by law and the record. “By making the application of the [the state’s procedural law] contingent on its determination that the attorney general’s confession of federal constitutional error was baseless, the [state court] made the procedural bar dependent on an antecedent ruling on federal law.”
Second, and more succinctly, the Court simply reversed the conviction and held that “[u]nder Napue, a conviction obtained through the knowing use of false evidence violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”
Justice Barrett, who agreed generally with the majority, would have remanded the case for a determination as to whether a new trial was warranted. Justice Thomas, in dissent, wrote that the state court’s denial of a new trial “should have marked the end of the road for Glossip. Instead, the Court stretches the law at every turn to rule in his favor.”
Two decisions and two bright-line tests. The Court is busy—stay tuned next week.
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