LAVALLEE, CORRECTIONAL SUPERINTENDENT v. DELLE ROSE
No. 72-905
Supreme Court of the United States
Decided March 19, 1973
410 U.S. 690
The State of New York petitions for certiorari to review the adverse determination of the Court of Appeals in this federal habeas corpus proceeding directing the release* of respondent Pasquale Delle Rose. Delle Rose was serving a life sentence for the premeditated murder of his wife in 1963. At his trial, occurring before Jacksonv. Denno, 378 U. S. 368 (1964), respondent was convicted by a jury which chose to credit his two confessions over his protestation of accidental involvement, and which presumably found them to be voluntary. On appeal, the New York appellate court directed the trial court to hold a special hearing to determine the voluntariness of his confessions in accordance with People v. Huntley, 15 N. Y. 2d 72, 204 N. E. 2d 179 (1965), the State‘s procedural response to this Court‘s decision in Jackson v. Denno, supra.
On remand to the trial court, the State rested on the trial record, and the respondent, in addition to relying on the record, testified in his own behalf. After extensively summarizing the trial evidence and respondent‘s explanations of certain of his confession statements, the court concluded:
“On all evidence, both at the trial and at the hearing, and after considering the totality of the circumstances, including the omission to warn defendant of his right to counsel and his right against self-incrimination, I find and decide that the respective confessions to the police and district attorney were, in all respects, voluntary and legally admissible in evidence at the trial....”
On this basis, respondent‘s conviction was affirmed by the New York appellate courts, 33 App. Div. 2d 657, 27 N. Y. 2d 882, 265 N. E. 2d 770 (1970), and this Court denied certiorari, 402 U. S. 913 (1971).
Respondent then petitioned the United States District Court for a writ of habeas corpus alleging his confessions were involuntary. That court held that since the state trial judge had “neglected to say how far he credited—and to what extent, if any, he discounted or rejected” respondent‘s testimony and the evidence before him, there was no “adequate” determination within the mean
The Court of Appeals held that the state court‘s opinion did not meet the requisites of
“[A] determination after a hearing on the merits of a factual issue, made by a State court of competent jurisdiction ... evidenced by a written finding, written opinion, or other reliable and adequate written indicia, shall be presumed to be correct, unless the applicant shall establish or it shall otherwise appear —”
“(1) that the merits of the factual dispute were not resolved in the State court hearing....”
Although it is true that the state trial court did not specifically articulate its credibility findings, it can scarcely be doubted from its written opinion that respondent‘s factual contentions were resolved against him. Respondent‘s wife was killed by a blast from a sawed-off shotgun device which had been set to shoot through the back of their front car seat. His confessions indicated that because of extreme jealousy, he rigged the device to go off when his wife pulled the car seat forward. For some reason it failed initially; so when he was seated with her in the car, he operated it by hand. At trial, he claimed his confessions were false and testified that he was seated in the car with his wife and he noticed a lump on the floor behind the front seat. When he reached down to investigate, it shot her.
“he had had a back injury, and therefore was in pain; that he was taken to the garage and asked to put his hand in the back seat where the blood of his wife was; that the police threatened to beat him up if he did not admit he killed her; that he was compelled to say by the police that he had killed his wife but that what he meant was that he had done so inadvertently, by placing his hand over the lump; and that, after telling the officer he wanted to see his wife, he did not remember what happened thereafter until 9:00 o‘clock in the morning.”
In addition, at his “Huntley” hearing, he testified that the officers told him they would beat him up if he did not talk to them; that one of the detectives told him to put his hands in the front seat hole where his wife‘s blood was and when he did not, the detective took his hands and put them there himself; and that he did not remember anything past the time when he asked to see his wife at the morgue, including the giving of the second statement. He also attempted to explain the reasons for his giving such detailed and factually accurate confession statements.
The trial court‘s summary of the State‘s evidence tended to show that although respondent had been taken to the station house about 5 p. m. on the day of the murder, he was not even a suspect as late as 9 p. m., and he was only giving information. He was taken to the morgue at his own request, a factor which triggered the first confession. Further, he had been allowed to sit with his family, was given coffee by his mother-in-law and police, and he admitted that his treatment by the police was good during the time of the questioning.
The Court of Appeals stated that it could not tell whether the state courts “credited Delle Rose‘s story of the circumstances surrounding his confessions but still held these to have been voluntary, a conclusion to which we could not agree, or based their holding of voluntariness on a partial or complete rejection of his testimony, in which event the district judge would have been bound to deny the petition.” 468 F. 2d 1288, 1290. In Townsend v. Sain, 372 U. S. 293, 314-315 (1963), the precursor of
“[T]he possibility of legal error may be eliminated in many situations if the fact finder has articulated the constitutional standards which he has applied. Furthermore, the coequal responsibilities of state and federal judges in the administration of federal constitutional law are such that we think the district judge may, in the ordinary case in which there has been no articulation, properly assume that the state trier of fact applied correct standards of federal law to the facts, in the absence of evidence ... that there is reason to suspect that an incorrect standard was in fact applied. Thus, if third-degree methods of obtaining a confession are alleged and the state court refused to exclude the confession from evidence, the district judge may assume that the state trier found the facts against the petitioner, the law being, of course, that third-degree methods necessarily produce a coerced confession.”
We, therefore, hold that the opinion of the state trial court met the requirements of
MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL, with whom MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, and MR. JUSTICE STEWART concur, dissenting.
Although I am in complete disagreement with this Court‘s per curiam decision herein, I see no reason to set
I cannot accept the Court‘s holding that both the District Court and the Court of Appeals improperly concluded that the voluntariness of respondent‘s confessions was not adequately resolved by the state trial court, thereby relieving respondent of the obligation to establish “by convincing evidence that the factual determination by the State court was erroneous,”
Foremost, the Court‘s certainty as to the basis for the state court‘s action rests upon the fact that it is clear the state court “applied” the correct legal standard in evaluating the voluntariness of respondent‘s confession. Without question, the state court in this case ritualistically recited the standard of “totality of the circumstances” which governs the determination of voluntariness with respect to these 1963 confessions. See, e. g., Clewis v. Texas, 386 U. S. 707, 708 (1967). But this recitation in itself provided the courts below with no guarantee that the state court had not erroneously applied this standard to the facts of this case, perhaps accepting respondent‘s version of the circumstances sur
The Court, however, places heavy reliance upon our prior statement in Townsend v. Sain, 372 U. S. 293, 314-315 (1963), the source of the test set forth in
“[E]ven if it is clear that the state trier of fact utilized the proper standard, a hearing is sometimes required if his decision presents a situation in which the ‘so-called facts and their constitutional significance [are] ... so blended that they cannot be severed in consideration.’ ... Unless the district judge can be reasonably certain that the state trier would have granted relief if he had believed petitioner‘s allegations, he cannot be sure that the state trier in denying relief disbelieved these allegations. If any combination of the facts alleged would prove a violation of constitutional rights and the issue of law on those facts presents a difficult or novel problem for decision, any hypothesis as to the relevant factual determinations of the state trier involves the purest speculation. The federal court cannot exclude the possibility that the trial judge believed facts which showed a deprivation of constitutional rights and yet (erroneously) concluded that relief should be denied. Under these circumstances it is impossible for the federal court to reconstruct the facts, and a hearing must be held.” Townsend v. Sain, supra, at 315-316 (emphasis added).
The precise problem encountered by the courts below in evaluating the state court‘s conclusion—a problem which the Court now effectively ignores—is that the issue of voluntariness in this case presents just the sort of “difficult” mixed question of law and fact which Townsend recognized would make federal court speculation concerning the basis for unreasoned state court action wholly inappropriate. To be sure, where, for instance, a defendant alleges simply that a confession was extracted from him by means of a physical beating administered by the police,
Respondent claimed that he was held and interrogated, apparently without rest, from 5 p. m. on the day of the murder until sometime early the next morning. Throughout this time, respondent purportedly was suffering pain due to a serious back ailment and was undoubtedly handicapped by his lack of facility with the English language. Meanwhile, without any warnings as to his constitutional rights, he was questioned repeatedly by police officers, questioning which allegedly included physical threats if he refused to confess. During this process, respondent was compelled by the police to reenact the alleged murder of his wife complete with his hand being forced by a police officer into the torn seat
It is possible, of course, that the state court rejected all of respondent‘s testimony as incredible and therefore properly held the confessions voluntary. On the other hand, if the state court had believed all of respondent‘s contentions, it would undoubtedly have found the confessions involuntary. There remains, however, the third possibility that the state court believed some of respondent‘s contentions and rejected others. It is this last possibility that makes for substantial uncertainty in a factually complex case such as this as to whether the state court correctly applied the abstract legal standard and did not, instead, commit constitutional error. Due to the unrevealing nature of the state court‘s decision, it is impossible to say that that court may not have credited a sufficient portion of respondent‘s story to establish, under the controlling standard, the involuntariness of his confessions and nevertheless have reached an erroneous conclusion of voluntariness because the question may have been a close one on the facts that it accepted. It is this inherent uncertainty as to what the state court may have believed or disbelieved that justified the action of the District Court and the Court of Appeals in this case. To conclude otherwise, I believe, ignores the full import of this Court‘s reasoning in Townsend v. Sain, supra, concerning those limited situations in
Consequently, in my view, the courts below properly held the State not entitled in this case to the presumption of correctness and the special burden of proof set forth in