Vasquez v. Hillery

Vasquez v. Hillery
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 15, 1985 Decided January 14, 1986
Full case name	Daniel Vasquez, Warden, v. Booker T. Hillery, Jr.
Citations	474 U.S. 254 (more) 106 S.Ct. 617, 88 L.Ed.2d 598
Holding
A defendant's conviction must be reversed if members of his own race were systematically excluded from the grand jury that indicted him, even if he was convicted following an otherwise fair trial.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan, Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell, Jr. · William Rehnquist John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor
Case opinions
Majority	Marshall, joined by Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens; White (all but the sixth paragraph of Part III)
Concurrence	O'Connor
Dissent	Powell, joined by Burger, Rehnquist
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV;

Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U.S. 254^[1] (1986) is a United States Supreme Court case. An African-American man named Booker T. Hillery was convicted for murder by a California grand jury in 1962. Hillery was accused of stabbing fifteen-year-old girl named Marlene Miller with scissors in the small town of Hanford.^[2] Miller was said to be sewing a dress alone in the house and did not notice an intruder sneaking into the household. The perpetrator fought with the young woman and hogtied her and stabbed her chest. Deputies came on to the crime scene; with evidence and a witness, all fingers pointed to Booker T. Hillery, who was on parole for rape at the time. Hillery pleaded he was innocent, but he was indicted by a California grand jury and subsequently convicted. However, members of his own race were systematically excluded from the indicting grand jury, suggesting that the defendant was singled out for murder due to his criminal past and race. This caused Booker T. Hillery to seek petitions for a retrial.

Hillery went through many courts for over 24 years to have his writ accepted. In 1986, he was able to file for a writ of habeas corpus,^[3] which is a court order to summon a prisoner to hear from a prison official the reason why he or her was imprisoned for the prisoner's "belief of unlawful detention" with evidence against it. The Supreme Court accepted the petitioner's appeal due to suspicion of unlawful detention from Hillery's previous petitions in court, and subsequently vacated his conviction. The Court held that a grand jury which systematically excluded blacks is different from a conviction voided by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that discrimination by a grand jury is harmless to the conviction. The Court also held that there should be no time limit on how long habeas relief to a prisoner should take depending on the state's ability to obtain a second conviction as complained by the prosecutors in the case, and finally that the decision made was "supported, but not compelled by the stare decisis doctrine" and would change the law in a perceivable manner.

Background

Historical context

The original conviction of Booker T. Hillery occurred in the early 1960s in California.^[4] At that time, America was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. The movement was met up with discrimination, racism, and segregation. Many places, including restaurants, beaches and bathrooms, were segregated and even though schools were desegregated, only three percent of African-American attended schools with white children in 1964.^[5] Many African-Americans could not succeed because white people would not allow a colored person to work for them in high ranking positions; if they did hire African-Americans it reflected negativity among other white workers. A common police practice at that time for police was to suspect a black person as the main culprit at a crime scene. Prior to the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, if an African-American was to be sent to court, there was no guarantee they would receive a fair and just trial.^[6] As African-Americans fought to obtain civil rights, it caused the white community to sympathize with their ideals, at the same time there were some Americans that disliked the movement and still continued unrighteous acts throughout all of the United States. Rifts between the White population and the Black population were growing at the time throughout America. The emergence of the Black Panther Party was a major contribution to the animosity and only fueled more hatred with their violence.^[7] The Black Panthers expanded to all parts of the United States as well as to other countries such as Algeria and Cuba. The Panthers would fight against aggression of Anglo-Caucasians towards African-Americans and use self-protection using firearms. The Black Panthers were connected to slayings of policemen and other innocent people which earned them the label of being a hate group.^[8] California, being racially diversified, became a war zone between African-Americans and Anglo-Americans.

At the time, the Black Panther Party was considered and labeled a racist organization early in its evolutionary period 1966-1968. The Panther's gained mainstream acceptance by most US periodicals by 1969 and continued to do so till the mid-1970s when the Party's ideology changed. The Black Panther Party worked with many Anglo organizations early in its existence. Organizations like The White Panther Party, Rising Up Angry, Young Patriots, Students for a Democratic Society, John Brown Revolutionary League were all White groups that created coalitions with the Panthers in as early as 1968. Latino, Asian and Native American groups like American Indian Movement, Brown Berets and the Young Lords were also influenced and worked alongside the Panthers early in 1968 till mid-1970s.

The Conflict

When Booker T. Hillery was first indicted by the Californian jury in 1962, he felt that he was wrongly convicted based on race. He claimed that the fact that the jury excluded blacks was the cause for his conviction. It was unjust to purposefully exclude blacks from the jury and breached Hillery's Fourteenth Amendment rights. To a further extent, it was proven with evidence that no black served as a juror and there were equally qualified black to serve if the court needed it. Unfortunately Hillery's case in California ended poorly partly due to the events in the United States and the state itself. With the birth of the Black Panthers in Oakland, California and the Civil Rights Movement affecting all over America, it could have had potential to make some of the white population even more agitated could have caused this conviction based on race alone. When Hillery decided he wanted to petition for habeas corpus, he tried for 16 years in California before trying to petition in the East coast and finally obtaining his grant.

Opinion of the Court

Majority

Justice Marshall delivered the opinion of the Court, stating that "When constitutional error calls into question the objectivity of those charged with bringing a defendant to judgment, a reviewing court can neither indulge a presumption of regularity nor evaluate the resulting harm. Accordingly, when the trial judge is discovered to have had some basis for rendering a biased judgment, his actual motivations are hidden from review, and we must presume that the process was impaired. Similarly, when a petite jury has been selected upon improper criteria or has been exposed to prejudicial publicity, we have required reversal of the conviction because the effect of the violation cannot be ascertained. Like these fundamental flaws, which never have been thought harmless, discrimination in the grand jury undermines the structural integrity of the criminal tribunal itself, and is not amenable to harmless-error review". Marshall then went on to say "The opinion of the Court in Mitchell ably presented other justifications, based on the necessity for vindicating Fourteenth Amendment rights, supporting a policy of automatic reversal in cases of grand jury discrimination...The six years since Mitchell have given us no reason to doubt the continuing truth of that observation." The opinion also was against adopting a time limit for habeas corpus and regarding the stare decisis doctrine, Marshall said that "its lesson is that every successful proponent of overruling precedent has borne the heavy burden of persuading the Court that changes in society or in the law dictate that the values served by stare decisis yield in favor of a greater objective. In the case of grand jury discrimination, we have been offered no reason to believe that any such metamorphosis has rendered the Court's long commitment to a rule of reversal outdated, ill-founded, unworkable, or otherwise legitimately vulnerable to serious reconsideration."

Concurrence

Justice O'Connor concurred in the judgment. O'Connor expressed that she "share[s] the view expressed by Justice Powell in Rose: a petitioner who has been afforded by the state courts a full and fair opportunity to litigate the claim that blacks were discriminatorily excluded from the grand jury which issued the indictment should be foreclosed from relitigating that claim on federal habeas. The incremental value that continued challenges may have in rooting out and deterring such discrimination is outweighed by the unique considerations that apply when the habeas writ is invoked. The history and purposes of the writ, as well as weighty finality interests and considerations of federalism, counsel against permitting a petitioner to renew on habeas a challenge which does not undermine the justness of his trial, conviction, or incarceration". She did agree that, "In this case, the District Court held that respondent was not given a full and fair hearing on his discriminatory exclusion claim in state court". Finally, O'Connor agreed with the decision to re-convict the petitioner with insufficient evidence to reverse the conviction.

Dissent

Justice Powell, joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justice Rehnquist, dissented, arguing that "the Court misapplies stare decisis because it relies only on decisions concerning grand jury discrimination. There is other precedent, including important cases of more recent vintage than those cited by the Court, that should control this case. Those cases hold, or clearly imply, that a conviction should not be reversed for constitutional error where the error did not affect the outcome of the prosecution". Powell continues disagreeing by mentioning that "the Court held that a trial judge's improper comment on the defendant's failure to testify—a clear violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—was not a proper basis for reversal if harmless". With more disparagement, Justice Powell doesn't comprehend why major amendments that are deprived of right have harmless error, but "grand jury discrimination affects the integrity of the judicial process". Powell made a different opinion regarding that "The question is whether reversal of respondent's conviction either is compelled by the Constitution or is an appropriate, but not constitutionally required, remedy for racial discrimination in the selection of grand jurors." Powell goes on to say that the Court "should focus directly on the aspect of delay that increases the costliness of its remedy by allowing the State to show that it would be substantially prejudiced in its ability to retry respondent. If this showing were made, respondent's petition for relief should be denied. Such an approach would also identify those cases in which granting habeas relief could be expected to have the least deterrent value: the State will likely suffer the greatest prejudice in cases of long delay, and those are the cases in which the automatic reversal rule is least likely to alter the behavior of discriminatory officials. This approach would leave the rule that the Court defends intact in precisely those cases where it does the most good and the least harm: cases in which the responsible officials are likely to be accountable for forcing the State to again prove its case, and in which retrial and reconviction are plausible possibilities". Finally, Powell believes that the Court's decision should be reversed based on the "procedures used to convict him or on the sufficiency of the evidence of his guilt".

References

1. "Vasquez v. Hillery". Court Case. Cornell Law. Retrieved 2 November 2011.
2. Warren, Jenifer (29 July 1993). "Time Dulls Rage Over '62 Murder : A Central Valley town rallied against previous bids to parole a man convicted of killing a teen-ager with her sewing shears. But Hanford isn't so tiny now--and violence is no longer a stranger.". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2 November 2011.
3. "Headliners; A Second Trial". NY Times. November 30, 1986. Retrieved 2 November 2011.
4. "People v. Hillery". Retrieved 2 November 2011.
5. "Little Rock High School". History Learning Site. Retrieved 2 November 2011.
6. "The History of Jim Crow". PBS. Retrieved 3 November 2011.
7. David, Farber. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960's. p. 207.
8. Van Derbeken, Jaxon (24 June 2011). "Ex-militants charged in S.F. police officer's '71 slaying at station". San Francisco Gate. Retrieved 2 November 2011.

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