United States v. Johnson

Justice White,

with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Rehnquist, and Justice O’Connor join, dissenting.

In my view, this case is controlled by United States v. Peltier, 422 U. S. 531 (1975). Peltier established two propositions. First, retroactive application of a new constitutional doctrine is appropriate when that doctrine’s major purpose is “‘to overcome an aspect of the criminal trial that substantially impairs its truth-finding function and so raises serious questions about the accuracy of guilty verdicts in past trials.’” Id., at 535 , quoting Williams v. United States, 401 U. S. 646, 653 (1971). Second, new extensions of the exclusionary rule do not serve this purpose and, therefore, will not generally be applied retroactively. There was surely nothing extraordinary about our ruling in Payton v. New York, 445 U. S. 573 (1980), that would justify an exception to this general rule.

Peltier was only the latest of a number of cases involving the question of whether rulings extending the reach of the exclusionary rule should be given retroactive effect. We noted there that “in every case in which the Court has addressed the retroactivity problem in the context of the exclusionary rule . . . the Court has concluded that any such new constitutional principle would be accorded only prospective application.” 422 U. S., at 535 . We suggested that there were two reasons for this consistent pattern of decisions ánd that these two reasons were directly related to the justifications for the exclusionary rule.

That rule has traditionally been understood to serve two purposes: first, it preserves “judicial integrity”; second, it acts as a deterrent to unconstitutional police conduct. Neither of these purposes, however, is furthered by retroactive application of new extensions of the rule. First, “if the law enforcement officers reasonably believed in good faith that evidence they had seized was admissible at trial, the ‘impera *565 tive of judicial integrity’ is not offended by the introduction into evidence of that material.” Id., at 537 . Second, a deterrence purpose can only be served when the evidence to be suppressed is derived from a search which the law enforcement officers knew or should have known was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Id., at 542 .

In focusing on the purpose of the exclusionary rule in order to decide the question of retroactivity, the Court was following settled principles. In Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U. S. 618 (1965), which the majority agrees is the first of the modern retroactivity cases, the Court set forth a three-pronged model for analysis of the retroactivity question presented there:

“[W]e must look to the purpose of the Mapp rule; the reliance placed upon the Wolf doctrine; and the effect on the administration of justice of a retrospective application of Mapp.” Id., at 636 .

This three-prong analysis was consistently applied in the cases which followed, Tehan v. United States ex rel. Shott, 382 U. S. 406, 419 (1966); Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U. S. 719, 727 (1966); Stovall v. Denno, 388 U. S. 293, 297 (1967). Indeed, in Stovall , the Court specifically announced that these three considerations — purpose of the new rule, reliance on the old rule, and effect on the administration of justice— were generally to guide resolution of all retroactivity problems relating to constitutional rules of criminal procedure. In each of these cases, the purpose of the new rule was the first consideration. That this was not accidental was made absolutely clear in Desist v. United States, 394 U. S. 244, 249 (1969): “Foremost among these factors is the purpose to be served by the new constitutional rule.” * And as we went on *566 to say there, “[t]his criterion strongly supports prospectivity for a decision amplifying the evidentiary exclusionary rule.” Ibid.

Moreover, up until today’s decision it was clear that these same principles governed the question of whether a new decision should retroactively apply to cases pending on appeal at the time of its announcement. Peltier itself was just this sort of a case: Peltier’s case was on appeal at the time of the announcement of the decision in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U. S. 266 (1973). Indeed, we reversed the Court of Appeals’ holding in that case that the “rule announced . . . in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States. . . should be applied to similar cases pending on appeal on the date the Supreme Court’s decision was announced.” United States v. Peltier, 500 F. 2d 985, 986 (CA9 1974) (footnote omitted). I had thought that we long ago resolved the problem of the appearance of inequity that arises whenever we limit the retroactive reach of a new principle of law. As Justice Brennan stated for the Court in Stovall, supra, at 301:

“Inequity arguably results from according the benefit of a new rule to the parties in the case in which it is announced but not to other litigants similarly situated in the trial or appellate process who have raised the same issue. But we regard the fact that the parties involved are chance beneficiaries as an insignificant cost for adherence to sound principles of decision-making.”

All of these principles are well settled and require reversal of the judgment of the Court of Appeals. The majority, in an intricate and confusing opinion disagrees. Two reasons for its disagreement seem to be presented.

First, the majority discerns no consistent reading of our precedents that would control this case. Ante, at 554 (“Having determined that the retroactivity question here is not clearly controlled by our prior precedents . . .”). Given the clarity with which we have previously set out the applicable *567 principles and the consistent application of those principles in cases involving extensions of the exclusionary rule, this is surely a strange conclusion. Eschewing the straightforward reading of the cases set forth above, which looks primarily to the substantive purpose of the relevant rule of law, the majority replaces it with an exceedingly formal set of three categories. Ante, at 549-551. Because these categories turn out to be dicta only, they merit little comment. Suffice it to say that their inadequacy is obvious from even a moment’s reflection: That category to which the majority agrees “the Court has regularly given complete retroactive effect” is nowhere included in this formal scheme — cases announcing new constitutional rules whose major purpose “ ‘is to overcome an aspect of the criminal trial that substantially impairs its truth-finding function and so raises serious questions about the accuracy of guilty verdicts in past trials.’” Ante, at 544, quoting Williams v. United States, 401 U. S., at 653 (plurality opinion). It is little wonder that the majority finds this case difficult, when it has failed to learn the most obvious lessons of the previous cases.

Second, the majority seems to think that the problems of principle that Justice Harlan struggled with in his dissent in Desist v. United States, supra, are unanswerable under any rule that fails to give the benefits of a new constitutional ruling to all criminal defendants whose cases are pending on appeal at the time of the announcement. These problems are not new and were, I believe, adequately answered by Justice Brennan in Stovall . The majority’s approach, however, does not resolve these theoretical problems; it simply draws what is necessarily an arbitrary line in a somewhat different place than the Court had previously settled upon. Anything less than full retroactivity will necessarily appear unjust in some instances; it will provide different treatment to similarly situated individuals. The majority recognizes that the vagaries of the appellate process will cause this same problem to reappear under its proposed rule: “Even under *568 our approach, it may be unavoidable that some similarly situated defendants will be treated differently.” Ante, at 556-557, n. 17. We had previously held that the best way to deal with this problem of inherent arbitrariness was to abide by the substantive principles outlined in Stovall . The majority makes no better suggestion today and is fooling itself if it believes that its proposal is a reasoned response to this problem of arbitrariness, rather than an exercise in line-drawing.

The insubstantiality of the majority’s analysis and proposal is well illustrated by its conclusion. Despite the appearance of having resolved the difficult problem of the apparent injustice of any rule of partial retroactivity, the Court announces at the end that its decision today applies only to decisions “construing the Fourth Amendment” and asserts that it is not disturbing any of our retroactivity precedents. Ante, at 562. That is, it returns from its abstract procedural approach to the substantive rule of law at issue. There are two problems with this, however. First, there is no connection between the analysis and the conclusion. Second, and more important, we already had a perfectly good rule for resolving retroactivity problems involving the Fourth Amendment.

Accordingly, I dissent.

See also 394 U. S., at 251 : “It is to be noted also that we have relied heavily on the factors of the extent of reliance and consequent burden on the administration of justice only when the purpose of the rule in question did not clearly favor either retroactivity or prospectivity.”