Miller v. Hall

• Decision Date: 23 June 1976
• Docket Number: No. 76-8043,76-8043
• Citation: 536 F.2d 967
• Parties: John D. MILLER, Petitioner, v. Frank HALL et al., Respondents. Misc.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 967

536 F.2d 967

John D. MILLER, Petitioner, v. Frank HALL et al., Respondents.

Misc. No. 76-8043.

United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.

Submitted April 29, 1976.

Decided June 23, 1976.

ON REQUEST FOR A CERTIFICATE OF PROBABLE CAUSE

Before COFFIN, Chief Judge, McENTEE and CAMPBELL, Circuit Judges.

COFFIN, Chief Judge.

Petitioner was arrested in Amherst, Massachusetts in October, 1971, and charged with drug offenses. In March, 1972, the Superior Court suppressed various controlled substances which had been seized during a search of the van in which petitioner had been riding when arrested. Upon the Commonwealth's interlocutory appeal from this ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court reversed, holding that there was probable cause for the search and that there was justification for the failure to obtain a search warrant. Commonwealth v. Miller, 1974 Mass. Adv. Sh. 2139, 318 N.E.2d 909. ¹ Miller was thereupon tried and convicted he began serving his sentence in February, 1975. His petition for bail pending appeal was denied.

In August, 1975, petitioner brought his habeas corpus action in the district court, raising the same two claims lack of probable cause and lack of justification for the failure to obtain a warrant which had been directly presented to the Supreme Judicial Court. The parties appear to agree that these two specific claims have been properly exhausted, although the Commonwealth maintained below that the district court should nevertheless refuse to consider them until petitioner's state court appeal, raising only trial issues, was concluded.

In March, 1976, petitioner for the first time advanced a third claim in connection with the habeas proceeding. He argued that the Superior Court findings contradictory to the arresting officer's testimony at the suppression hearing amounted to a finding of perjury on the officer's part. ² This, he claimed, made suppression appropriate under the principles of United States v. Belculfine, 508 F.2d 58 (1st Cir.1974). Belculfine concerned government misstatements in search warrant affidavits, but petitioner argued that it applies a fortiori to testimony in support of warrantless searches, lest a disincentive to seeking warrants result.

The district court correctly found that this issue had not been properly exhausted. A careful review of the briefs in the state courts makes clear that this argument that suppression was required by the alleged perjury of the searching officer was not raised in the interlocutory appeal proceeding. Petitioner protests that he presented all the facts necessary to support the claim, but this gains him nothing. Picard v. Connor, 404 U.S. 270, 277, 92 S.Ct. 509, 513, 30 L.Ed.2d 438 (1971), directly rejected an identical effort: "To be sure, respondent presented all the facts. Yet the constitutional claim (alleged to be) inherent in those facts was never brought to the attention of the state courts. The Supreme Judicial Court dealt with the arguments respondent offered; we cannot fault that court for failing also to consider sua sponte (the present constitutional ground)." There is no indication that petitioner will not be able to raise this issue in state court, either by injecting it into his pending appeal, or through state postconviction procedures.

Confronted with a petitioner raising two exhausted claims and one claim which was not exhausted, the district court dismissed the entire petition, without prejudice. We think this was error. Although the propriety of dismissal under the circumstances was not briefed by the parties below, we see an issue of first impression in this circuit. Resolution of the issue involves some scrutiny of the values served by a broad dismissal, in the light of values served by continued litigation of an exhausted federal claim.

The Supreme Court has stated that the "exhaustion doctrine is a judicially crafted instrument which reflects a careful balance between important interests of federalism and the need to preserve the writ of habeas corpus as a 'swift and imperative remedy in all cases of illegal restraint or confinement.' " Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court, 410 U.S. 484, 490, 93 S.Ct. 1123, 1127, 35 L.Ed.2d 443 (1973), quoting Secretary of State for Home Affairs v. O'Brien, (1923) A.C. 603, 609 (H.L.). The interests it protects include the preservation of a significant role for the state courts in the application and enforcement of federal law, and the preservation of "orderly administration of state judicial business, preventing the interruption of state adjudication by federal habeas proceedings." Braden, 410 U.S. at 490, 93 S.Ct. at 1127, quoting Developments in the Law Federal Habeas Corpus, 93 Harv.L.Rev. 1038, 1094 (1970). For a federal court to hear an exhausted claim even though other unrelated claims may be outstanding clearly does not undercut the first of these interests. The very fact of exhaustion means that the state courts have ruled, or have had the chance to rule on the federal claim in the first instance. On the other hand, granting the writ on an exhausted claim undeniably would moot any pending state adjudication. But the disruption of state judicial business in this situation is considerably less abrasive than where a federal habeas writ aborts state consideration of the identical claim. Thus, while interests of federalism are undoubtedly implicated here,they are less weighty than in the garden variety exhaustion case.

The Commonwealth argues that comity dictates giving state courts first full crack at a habeas petitioner's entire case. This argument proves too much, for it ignores decisions such as Braden, supra, which hold habeas consideration can be appropriate in advance of trial. Moreover, we do not read the codification of the exhaustion doctrine to require as much even after judgment of conviction. Title 28, section 2254(c) provides: "An applicant shall not be deemed to have exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State, within the meaning of this section, if he has the right under the law of the State to raise, by any available procedure, the question presented." As the Supreme Court has said in another context: "It follows, of course, that once the federal claim has been fairly presented to the state courts, the exhaustion requirement is satisfied." Picard v. Connor, 404 U.S. 270, 275, 92 S.Ct. 509, 512 (1971). If the petition is denied on the merits, no state process will be interrupted. If the petition is meritorious, the "need to preserve the writ of habeas corpus as a 'swift and imperative remedy in all cases of illegal restraint or confinement' " comes into full play, and in the normal case will outweigh the interests of federalism opposing it.

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