Unraveling Retroactivity

Is a Supreme Court criminal-law decision binding on all states? Yes--but only to the extent that any new constitutional rule sets a minimum standard for state courts. Even lawyers often forget that the nation's highest tribunal does not write every one of the country's rules of criminal law. States remain free to give citizens greater liberty than even the Supreme Court requires.

In Miranda v. Arizona, for example, the court last June extended a defendant's privilege against self-incrimination all the way back to police interrogation. A week later, in Johnson v. New Jersey, the court stated that Miranda's strict standards were not retroactive, even for prisoners who were still appealing their cases. Did this prevent all convicts who had confessed under the old rules from seeking freedom under the new?

Not at all. While it made the new rules binding in the future, the Johnson decision simply refused to force retroactivity on the states. Which left the states free to apply Miranda to past cases. Even if they did not, the court ruled in another case, any prisoner may still claim that his pre-Miranda confession was unconstitutionally coerced.

Tawdry Test. Last week the New York Court of Appeals faced all those possibilities in a significant decision rejecting retroactivity. Appellant Charlie Mae McQueen, 50, a domestic with an estimated IQ of 84, was arrested after a laborer was found stabbed to death in Hempstead, N.Y. Given a 20-year-to.-life sentence in 1964, Miss McQueen appealed on three grounds: >The police violated her right to counsel at the station house when they barred her daughter--her only "counsel." > The police coerced her confession by not telling her that her victim was dead --and falsely claiming that he would identify her. >The police failed to state her constitutional rights, thus voiding her confession under Miranda--if New York chose retroactivity.

By a vote of 5 to 2, the high state court rejected all her claims. Chief Judge Charles Desmond, no Miranda admirer, nonetheless hotly dissented on the ground that every other direct appeal (excluding certain property-rights cases) in the history of New York's top court, had always been "decided according to the law as we found it on the day of decision." "New York," he said, "should make Miranda retroactive in accordance with its own traditions."

Desmond lost the argument because the New York majority feared retro-activity's potential result. Said concurring Judge Kenneth A. Keating: "Defendants convicted of heinous crimes would be set free to walk the streets."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.