Lead Opinion
delivered the opinion of the Court.
In Payton v. New York,
I
Special Agents Hemenway and Pickering of the United States Secret Service suspected respondent Raymond Eugene Johnson and his codefendant, Oscar Joseph Dodd, of attempting to negotiate a misdelivered United States Tréasury check.
The agents drew their weapons, approached the doorway and knocked, identifying themselves by fictitious names. When respondent opened the door, he saw the two agents with their guns drawn and their badges raised. Respondent permitted the agents to enter the house. While one agent stood with respondent in the living room, the other searched the premises. The agents then advised respondent of his constitutional rights and interrogated him. When respondent revealed his involvement in the taking of the misdeliv-ered check, the agents formally arrested him. Respondent later signed a written statement admitting his involvement with the check.
Before trial, respondent sought to suppress his oral and written statements as fruits of an unlawful arrest not sup
By an unreported opinion filed December 19, 1978, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment of conviction. Acknowledging that “[i]t certainly would have been preferable had the agents obtained a warrant” for respondent’s arrest before entering his residence, the court nonetheless ruled that “if probable cause exists for the arrest, [respondent’s] constitutional rights were not violated by the warrantless arrest, even though there may have been time [for the agents] to have obtained a warrant for his arrest.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 26a-27a.
On April 15, 1980, while respondent’s petition for rehearing was still pending before the Ninth Circuit, this Court decided Payton v. New York, supra.
The Government sought review in this Court. We granted certiorari to consider the retrospective effect, if any, of the Fourth Amendment rule announced in Payton.
“[T]he federal constitution has no voice upon the subject” of retrospectivity. Great Northern R. Co. v. Sunburst Oil & Refining Co.,
In Linkletter, however, the Court concluded “that the Constitution neither prohibits nor requires [that] retrospective effect” be given to any “new” constitutional rule.
Linkletter itself addressed the question whether the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule of Mapp v. Ohio,
To determine whether a particular ruling should also extend to cases that were already final, Linkletter directed courts to “weigh the merits and demerits in each case by looking to the prior history of the rule in question, its purpose and effect, and whether retrospective operation will further or retard its operation.”
The following Term, in Tehan v. United States ex rel. Shott,
In Johnson v. New Jersey,
Because the balance of the three Stovall factors inevitably has shifted from case to case, it is hardly surprising that, for some, “the subsequent course of Linkletter became almost as difficult to follow as the tracks made by a beast of prey in search of its intended victim.” Mackey v. United States,
At the other extreme, the Court has applied some standards only to future cases, denying the benefit of the new rule even to the parties before the Court. See, e. g., Morrissey v. Brewer,
In a consistent stream of separate opinions since Link-letter, Members of this Court have argued against selective awards of retroactivity. Those opinions uniformly have asserted that, at a minimum, all defendants whose cases were still pending on direct appeal at the time of the law-changing decision should be entitled to invoke the new rule.
First, Justice Harlan argued, the Court’s “ambulatory ret-roactivity doctrine,” id., at 681, conflicts with the norm of principled decisionmaking. “Some members of the Court, and I have come to regret that I was among them, initially grasped this doctrine as a way of limiting the reach of decisions that seemed to them fundamentally unsound. Others rationalized this resort to prospectivity as a ‘technique’ that provided an ‘impetus ... for the implementation of long overdue reforms, which otherwise could not be practicably effected.’” Id., at 676, citing Jenkins v. Delaware,
Second, Justice Harlan found it difficult to accept the notion that the Court, as a judicial body, could apply a “ ‘new* constitutional rule entirely prospectively, while making an exception only for the particular litigant whose case was chosen as the vehicle for establishing that rule.” Desist v.
“announcefs] new constitutional rules . . . only as a correlative of our dual duty to decide those cases over which we have jurisdiction and to apply the Federal Constitution as one source of the matrix of governing legal rules. . . . Simply fishing one case from the stream of appellate review, using it as a vehicle for pronouncing new constitutional standards, and then permitting a stream of similar cases subsequently to flow by unaffected by that new rule constitute an indefensible departure from this model of judicial review.” Id., at 678-679.
Third, Justice Harlan asserted that the Court’s selective application of new constitutional rules departed from the principle of treating similarly situated defendants similarly:
“[W]hen another similarly situated defendant comes before us, we must grant the same relief or give a principled reason for acting differently. We depart from this basic judicial tradition when we simply pick and choose from among similarly situated defendants those whoalone will receive the benefit of a ‘new’ rule of constitutional law.” Desist v. United States, 394 U. S., at 258-259 (dissenting opinion).
Justice Harlan suggested one simple rule to satisfy all three of his concerns. “I have concluded that Linkletter was right in insisting that all ‘new’ rules of constitutional law must, at a minimum, be applied to all those cases which are still subject to direct review by this Court at the time the ‘new’ decision is handed down.” Id., at 258. “[A] proper perception of our duties as a court of law, charged with applying the Constitution to resolve every legal dispute within our jurisdiction on direct review, mandates that we apply the law as it is at the time, not as it once was.” Mackey v. United States,
We now agree with Justice Harlan that “‘[rjetroactivity’ must be rethought,” Desist v. United States,
III
A
At the outset, we must first ask whether respondent’s case presents a retrospectivity problem clearly controlled by existing precedent. Re-examination of the post -Linkletter decisions convinces us that in three narrow categories of cases, the answer to the retroactivity question has been effectively determined, not by application of the Stovall factors, but rather, through application of a threshold test.
Conversely, where the Court has expressly declared a rule of criminal procedure to be “a clear break with the past,” Desist v. United States,
Third, the Court has recognized full retroactivity as a necessary adjunct to a ruling that a trial court lacked authority to convict or punish a criminal defendant in the first place. The Court has invalidated inconsistent prior judgments where its reading of a particular constitutional guarantee immunizes a defendant’s conduct from punishment, see, e. g., United States v. United States Coin & Currency,
Respondent’s case neatly fits none of these three categories. First, Payton v. New York did not simply apply settled precedent to a new set of facts. In Payton, the Court acknowledged that the “important constitutional question presented” there had been “expressly left open in a number of our prior opinions.”
By the same token, however, Payton also did not announce an entirely new and unanticipated principle of law. In general, the Court has not subsequently read a decision to work a “sharp break in the web of the law,” Milton v. Wainwright,
Payton did none of these. Payton expressly overruled no clear past precedent of this Court on which litigants may have relied. Nor did Payton disapprove an established practice that the Court had previously sanctioned. To the extent that the Court earlier had spoken to the conduct engaged in by the police officers in Payton, it had deemed it of doubtful constitutionality.
It is equally plain that Payton does not fall into the third category of cases that do not pose difficult retroactivity questions. Payton did not hold that the trial court lacked authority to convict or sentence Theodore Payton, nor did Payton’s reading of the Fourth Amendment immunize Payton’s conduct from punishment. The holding in Payton did not prevent the defendant’s trial from taking place; rather, it reversed the New York Court of Appeals’ judgment and remanded for a new trial to be conducted without unconstitutionally obtained evidence.
B
Having determined that the retroactivity question here is not clearly controlled by our prior precedents, we next must ask whether that question would be fairly resolved by applying the rule in Payton to all cases still pending on direct appeal at the time when Payton was decided. Answering that question affirmatively would satisfy each of the three concerns stated in Justice Harlan’s opinions in Desist and Mackey.
First, retroactive application of Payton to all previously nonfinal convictions would provide a principle of decisionmak-ing consonant with our original understanding of retroactivity in Linkletter and Shott. Moreover, such a principle would be one capable of general applicability, satisfying Justice Harlan’s central concern: “Refusal to apply new constitutional rules to all cases arising on direct review . . . tends to cut this Court loose from the force of precedent, allowing us
Second, application of Payton to cases pending on direct review would comport with our judicial responsibilities “to do justice to each litigant on the merits of his own case,” Desist v. United States,
Third, application of the Harlan approach to respondent’s case would further the goal of treating similarly situated defendants similarly. The Government contends that respondent may not invoke Payton because he was arrested before Payton was decided. Yet it goes without saying that Theodore Payton also was arrested before Payton was decided, and he received the benefit of the rule in his case. Furthermore, at least one other defendant whose conviction was not final when Payton issued benefited from Payton’s rule, although he, too, was arrested before Payton was decided.
Against adoption of this approach, the Government raises four arguments based on United States v. Peltier,
The Government first cites Peltier’s, holding: that the Fourth Amendment rule announced in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States,
Upon examination, however, the retroactivity question posed here differs from that presented in Peltier. As the Government concedes, Payton overturned neither a statute nor any consistent judicial history approving noneonsensual, warrantless home entries. See Brief for United States 30, n. 18. Thus, its nonretroactivity is not preordained under the “clear break” principles stated above. In Peltier, in contrast, the Court noted that Almeida-Sanchez had invalidated a form of search previously sanctioned by “a validly enacted statute, supported by longstanding administrative regulations and continuous judicial approval.”
Because Almeida-Sanchez had overturned a longstanding practice to which this Court had not spoken, but which a near-unanimous body of lower court authority had approved, it represented a “clear break” with the past. For that reason alone, under controlling retroactivity precedents, the nonretroactive application of Almeida-Sanchez would have been appropriate even if the case had involved no Fourth Amendment question. In that respect, Peltier resembles several earlier decisions that held “new” Fourth Amendment
The Government bases its second argument on Peltier’s, broad language: “If the purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter unlawful police conduct then evidence obtained from a search should be suppressed only if it can be said that the law enforcement officer had knowledge, or may properly be charged with knowledge, that the search was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment” (emphasis added).
The Government does not seriously suggest that the retro-activity of a given Fourth Amendment ruling should turn solely on the subjective state of a particular arresting officer’s mind. Instead, it offers an “objective” test: that law enforcement officers “may properly be charged with knowledge” of all “settled” Fourth Amendment law. Under the Government’s theory, because the state of Fourth Amendment law regarding warrantless home arrests was “unsettled” before Payton, that ruling should not apply retroactively even to cases pending on direct appeal when Payton was decided. See Brief for United States 14-19, 34-38.
The Government’s third claim is that Peltier’s logic suggests that retroactive application of Fourth Amendment decisions like Payton — even to cases pending on direct review— would not serve the policies underlying the exclusionary rule. Cf.
This logic does not apply to a ruling like Payton, that resolved a previously unsettled point of Fourth Amendment law. Because this Court cannot rule on every unsettled Fourth Amendment question, years may pass before the Court finally invalidates a police practice of dubious constitutionality. See, e. g., Desist v. United States,
If, as the Government argues, all rulings resolving unsettled Fourth Amendment questions should be nonretroactive, then, in close cases, law enforcement officials would have little incentive to err on the side of constitutional behavior.
The Government finally argues that retroactive application of Payton, even to a case pending on direct appeal, would accomplish nothing but the discharge of a wrongdoer. Justice Harlan gave the answer to this assertion. “We do not release a criminal from jail because we like to do so, or because we think it wise to do so, but only because the government has offended constitutional principle in the conduct of his case. And when another similarly situated defendant comes
V
To the extent necessary to decide today’s case, we embrace Justice Harlan’s views in Desist and Mackey. We therefore hold that, subject to the exceptions stated below, a decision of this Court construing the Fourth Amendment is to be applied retroactively to all convictions that were not yet final at the time the decision was rendered.
By so holding, however, we leave undisturbed our precedents in other areas. First, our decision today does not affect those cases that would be clearly controlled by our existing retroactivity precedents. Second, because respondent’s case arises on direct review, we need not address the retroactive reach of our Fourth Amendment decisions to those cases that still may raise Fourth Amendment issues on collateral attack.
Respondent’s case was pending on direct appeal when Payton v. New York was decided. Because the Court of Appeals correctly held that the rule in Payton should apply to respondent’s case, its judgment is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
Notes
The Fourth Amendment reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
On March 30, 1977, the United States Postal Service mistakenly delivered to Lena Kearney a Treasury check for $4,681.41, payable to Elihu Peterson. Kearney and her sister-in-law sought Dodd’s assistance in cashing the check. Accompanied by respondent Johnson and another man, Dodd went to Kearney’s residence to discuss methods of cashing the check. The three men eventually departed, taking the check with them.
After Kearney and her sister-in-law related the foregoing events to Special Agent Hemenway, he obtained a warrant for Dodd’s arrest. He, however, did not obtain a warrant to arrest respondent. See
The jury acquitted respondent on a separate count of aiding and abetting the receipt of stolen Government property. See 18 U. S. C. §§ 2, 641. Respondent’s codefendant Dodd was convicted on both counts. In an unreported decision, Dodd’s conviction was affirmed summarily on appeal, and is not before us. See United States v. Dodd, No. 79-1030 (CA9 Feb. 4, 1980), rehearing denied, Mar. 5, 1980.
The Court noted probable jurisdiction in Payton on December 11, 1978.
On August 20, 1979, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed respondent’s conviction, in the process amending its initial opinion and denying respondent’s petition for rehearing. App. to Pet. for Cert. 14a. Respondent timely .filed a second petition for rehearing and suggestion for rehearing en banc, which was still pending in the Court of Appeals when Payton was decided.
In a decision issued three months before its initial ruling here, a different panel of the Ninth Circuit had anticipated Payton, holding that “absent exigent circumstances, police who have probable cause to arrest a felony suspect must obtain a warrant before entering a dwelling to carry out the arrest.” United States v. Prescott,
For the purposes of this case, the Government assumes the correctness of the Court of Appeals’ ruling that, if applied to these facts, Payton would require exclusion of respondent’s statements. Brief for United States 12-13, n. 6. We therefore need not examine the Court of Appeals’ conclusion on that issue.
The pre-1965 requirement that all constitutional rules receive full retroactive application derived from the Blackstonian notion “that the duty of the court was not to ‘pronounce a new law, but to maintain and expound the old one.’” Linkletter v. Walker,
“By final we mean where the judgment of conviction was rendered, the availability of appeal exhausted, and the time for petition for certiorari had elapsed [or a petition for certiorari finally denied, all] before our decision in Mapp v. Ohio.” Linkletter v. Walker,
See, e. g., Brown v. Louisiana,
Evenhanded justice for similarly situated litigants was the principal theme sounded by the dissenting opinions of Justices Black and Douglas. See cases cited in n. 9, supra. The views of these Justices diverged from those of Justice Harlan, however, on the question whether equal treatment also requires retroactive application of newly announced constitutional rules to all cases arising on collateral attack. Compare Desist v. United States,
These eases therefore have not proved “readily susceptible of analysis under the Linkletter line of cases.” Robinson v. Neil,
In the civil context, in contrast, the “clear break” principle has usually been stated as the threshold test for determining whether or not a decision should be applied nonretroactively. See, e. g., Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson,
At least since Boyd v. United States,
The Payton Court relied on the “ ‘basic principle of Fourth Amendment law’ that searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable.”
While the practice invalidated in Payton had found support in some state courts, those decisions evinced “by no means the kind of virtual unanimity,” id., at 600, required to make Payton a clear break with the past. In Payton, the Court noted that at the time of its decision, “‘[o]nly 24 of the 50 States currently sanction, warrantless entries into the home to arrest, . . . and there is an obvious declining trend.” Ibid. In California, where the present respondent’s ease arose, the State Supreme Court had held more than a year before respondent’s arrest that, under the Fourth Amendment and its state constitutional counterpart, warrantless arrests within the home were per se unreasonable in the absence of exigent circumstances. See People v. Ramey,
Of the seven United States Courts of Appeals that had considered the question before Payton, five had expressed the view that warrantless home arrests were unconstitutional.
In the Ninth Circuit, where respondent was arrested, it has been said that “law enforcement officials knew that th[e] circuit’s law was unsettled but that there was some drift toward a warrant requirement.” United States v. Blake,
The New York Court of Appeals affirmed Payton’s conviction along with that of Obie Riddick. See Payton v. New York, 445 U. S., at
In theory, the Court could have held Riddick’s jurisdictional statement pending the disposition in Payton’s case, then vacated and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of Payton. Such a course was taken in seven other nonfinal cases. See Gonzalez v. New York,
Potential for unequal treatment is inherent in this process. As Justice Douglas “recalled,” when the Court decided Miranda v. Arizona,
“[S]ome 80 cases were presented raising the same question. We took four of them and held the rest and then disposed of each of the four, applying the new procedural rule retroactively. But as respects the rest of the pending cases we denied any relief. ... Yet it was sheer coincidence that those precise four were chosen. Any other single case in the group or any other four would have been sufficient for our purposes.” Desist v. United States,394 U. S., at 255 (dissenting opinion).
The dissent argues 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.” Post, at 566. But the dissent mischaracterizes both the problem and this Court’s treatment of it. The problem is not merely the appearance of inequity, but the actual inequity that results when, the Court chooses which of many similarly situated defendants should be the chance beneficiary of a retroactively applied rule. As the persistently voiced dissatisfaction with the Court’s “ambulatory retroactivity doctrine” has revealed, see n. 9, supra, until now this Court has not “resolved” this problem so much as it has chosen to tolerate it. The time for toleration has come to an end.
We are aware, of course, that many considerations affect a defendant’s progress through the judicial system, and that the speed of appellate review will differ from State to State, Circuit to Circuit, and case to case. Even under our approach, it may be unavoidable that some similarly
The Government suggests an approach, however, that virtually ensures that such anomalies will occur. The Government concedes that the Payton rule should apply to any pre-Payton case arising in a Circuit where the United States Court of Appeals already had held authoritatively that Payton-type searches were unlawful. Brief for United States 22-26. When respondent was arrested, two Courts of Appeals had invalidated warrantless home arrests conducted in the absence of exigent circumstances. See Dorman v. United States, 140 U. S. App. D. C. 313,
The dissent takes a different tack. Arguing that “inherent arbitrariness” arises whenever lines are drawn in this area, the dissent suggests that the “best way to deal with this problem” is to continue to make retro-activity decisions by picking and choosing from among similarly situated defendants. See post, at 568. By clinging to this view, the dissent, and not the Court, “is fooling itself.” Ibid. This Court has no power to speed up or slow down the appellate process in the many tribunals throughout the country to ensure similar treatment of similarly situated defendants. The Court does, however, have the power to eliminate the obvious unfairness that results when it gives only the most conveniently situated defendant the retrospective benefit of a newly declared rule.
The dissent shares this mistaken impression. In support of its claim, the dissent cites Peltier's suggestion that every decision by this Court involving the exclusionary rule has been “accorded only prospective application.” Post, at 564, citing
The record in this case, for example, does not explain why respondent’s arresting officers failed to obtain a warrant for his arrest, when they did obtain a warrant to arrest his eodefendant. See n. 2, supra.
After Stone v. Powell,
The logic of our ruling, however, is not inconsistent with our precedents giving complete retroactive effect to constitutional rules whose purpose is to overcome an aspect of the criminal trial that substantially impairs its truth-finding function. See, e. g., Hankerson v. North Carolina,
Curiously, the dissent faults us not only for limiting our ruling to the only context properly presented by this case — the Fourth Amendment— but also for preserving, rather than overruling, clearly controlling retro-activity precedents. See post, at 568. The dissent then recasts those precedents in its own simplistic way, arguing that rules related to truth-finding automatically receive full retroactive effect, while implying that all other rules — including Fourth Amendment rules — should receive none.
There are, however, two problems with this. First, the Court’s decisions regularly giving complete retroactive effect to truth-finding rules have in no way required that newly declared Fourth Amendment rulings be denied all retroactive effect. For the reasons already stated, retroactive application of Fourth Amendment rules at least to cases pending on direct review furthers the policies underlying the exclusionary rule. Second, and more important, the Fourth Amendment “rule” urged by the dissent is far from a “perfectly good” one. Ibid. As we already have shown, that “rule” condones obviously inequitable treatment of similarly situated litigants and judicial injustice to individual litigants.
The question on which we granted certiorari encompassed one other issue: whether the Court of Appeals correctly concluded that its own decision in United States v. Prescott,
Concurrence Opinion
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion on my understanding that the decision leaves undisturbed our retroactivity precedents as ap
Dissenting Opinion
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,
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.”
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
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,
“[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,
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,
“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
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
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