Alito’s first opinion; Court rules on estate dispute
In the first opinion by new Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., the Supreme Court on Monday unanimously struck down an evidence rule barring a criminal defendant from introducing evidence that someone else committed the crime. That ruling came in the case of Holmes v. South Carolina (04-1327).
The state had a rule that evidence alleging another person’s guilt is not allowed, if the prosecution had offered “strong” physical evidence of guilt. The state Supreme Court decided that, when the prosecution has put on a case with strong forensic evidence, providing a strong indication of guilt, evidence about a third party’s alleged culpability cannot be admitted because it does not raise a reasonable inference of innocence. Writing for the Court, Alito’s opinion said that this focuses on the strength of only one party’s evidence, and that kind of analysis cannot support a conclusioon about the strength of contrary evidence.
In a second ruling, with no dissent, the Court decided that federal courts have some authority to decide questions about rights that are tied to disputes over estates, but did make clear that probate law remains the domain of the states.That ruling came in a case involving a well-known topless dancer and model, Anna Nicole Smith. As a result of the decision, a federal court has authority to consider her claim in a bitter dispute in Texas and federal courts over the estate of her late husband, Texas tycoon J. Howard Marshall II.
Announcing the opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the “probate exception” to federal court jurisdiction “reserves to state courts the probate or annulment of a will and the administration of a decedent’s estate. It also, and most importantly, precludes federal courts from disposing of property that is in the custody of a state court. But that is the sum and substance of it. The probate exception does not bar federal courts from adjudicating matters outside those confines and otherwise within federal jurisdiction.”
Ms. Smith, whose name is Vickie Lynn Marshall, went to federal bankruptcy court to allege fraud by her former husband’s son, and ultimately won damages of $88.6 million. The son took the case to the Ninth Circuit Court, which ruled that federal courts had no jurisdiction over the case because the estate had been probated in Texas courts. The Circuit Court ordered Mrs.Marshall’s claim dismissed, in a total victory for Marshall’s son Pierce.
The case, Marshall v. Marshall (04-1544), now goes back to the Circuit Court to settle some issues that the Court said remain open. The damages verdict thus may be far from final. All members of the Court joined in the result, but Justice John Paul Stevens did not join in full in Ginsburg’s opinion. He said in a separate opinion that there should be no probate exception “that ousts a federal court of jurisdiction it otherwise possesses.”
The Court said that Mrs. Marshall’s claim in bankruptcy court “alleges the widely recognized tort of interference with a gift or inheritance.” She thus is seeking a judgment against the son, not the probate or annulment of a will, Ginsburg noted. “Under our federal system, Texas cannot render its probate courts exclusively competent to entertain a claim of that genre, the Court concluded.
(See the end of this post for more on the issues on remand of the Marshall case to the Ninth Circuit.)
In the last of three cases decided Monday, the Court limited the power of states to place a lien on Medicaid benefit payments that an individual is entitled to receive. The decision, written by Justice Stevens, came in the case of Arkansas Department of Human Services v. Ahlborn (04-1506). The case involved a woman who had received $550,000 in a settlement for her injuries in a car accident. The state had claimed that it had a right to recover the full amount of Medicaid benefits it had paid to the woman — $215,645. But the Court ruled that it could collect only $35,581.47. That amount represents the portion of the settlement award that related to medical expenses — the only part the Court said Arkansas could reclaim. The remainder of the claim, the Court said, would violate the anti-lien provisions of federal law.
The Court, in the only case granted review Monday, agreed to try again to clarify the constitutionality of a California jury instruction, a “catch-all” instruction on consideration of evidence favorable to an accused in a death penalty case. The case, one that the Court examined nine times since January before deciding to hear it, is Ornaski v. Belmontes (05-493). The Court had ruled twice before on the so-called “factor k” instruction.
Among the cases the Court refused to hear was a new appeal in the celebrated “Nuremberg Files” cases, involving anti-abortion groups’ aggressive publicity campaign against doctors who perform abortions. The denial Monday was the second in the case by the Court in the past three years. As a result, two groups, the American Coalition for Life Activists and Advocates for Life Ministries, plus 11 individuals will have to pay $4.7 million in punitive damages, plus $11 million in treble damages under the RICO law, and $526,000 in compensatory damages to two abortion clinics in Oregon and two doctors who perform abortions. The case was American Coalition, et al., v Planned Parenthood, et al. (05-1083).
Again on Monday, the Court took no action on a major affirmative action issue — whether its rulings allowing limited use of race in college admissions will apply to student assignment plans in the public elementary and secondary schools. The new cases are from Seattle, Wash. (docket 05-908), and Louisville, Ky. (05-915).
In the Marshall estate case, Justice Ginsburg’s opinion noted that two issues remain open when the case goes back to the Ninth Circuit. IThe resolution of those issues either could mean an even higher damage award for Mrs. Marshall, or the total loss of what she had won in federal court.
Ginsburg cited two unresolved issues. The one that is critical to Mrs. Marshall is a question of whether the District Court should have undertaken its own, independent review of her claim that Pierce Marshall had wrongly interfered with her gift from her late husband. If the District Court was wrong in finding that he claim was not a “core proceeding” under bankruptcy law, that could go at least some of the way to restoring the bankruptcy court verdict awarding her $474 million (compared with $88.6 million awarded by the District Court after its independent review(.
The second issue noted by Ginsburg is a claim by Pierce Marshall that Mrs. Marshall could not raise her interference claim in federal court because her claim essentially was disposed of in the Texas state court probate case. If it should turn out that her claim was precluded, that could restore Pierce’s victory in the Texas court, presumably nullifying any award to her.
The Ninth Circuit did not decide either of those issues, because it found the federal courts lacked jurisdiction to hear Mrs. Marshall’s claim. The Circuit Court also noted other issues that it was not deciding — and those issues conceivably could remain open on remand. Those include a claim of a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Seventh Amendment, the Constitution’s full faith and credit clause, and the “Rooker-Feldman doctrine” against relitigating issues already tested in state court. It is unclear whether any or all of those issues survive the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday that the federal courts were open to hear Mrs. Marshall’s claim.
the Supreme Court unanimously struck down an evidence rule barring a criminal defendant from introducing evidence that someone else committed the crime
On what planet did someone think this was an acceptable rule of evidence?
Comment by Captain Ebo — May 1, 2006 @ 10:50 am
After Samuel Alito was nominated, but before he was confirmed, his opponents claimed that he was routinely hostile to the rights of criminal defendants. I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that in the first opinion assigned to him, he voted *in favor* of a criminal defendant.
Of course, there’s a long tradition that a new Justice’s first case is usually an uncontroversial unanimous decision. Although this case happens to favor a criminal defendant, the 9-0 vote suggests it wasn’t a close call.
To Captain Ebo: You should read the decision. There are indeed rules that limit a defendant’s ability to introduce evidence of third-party guilt. The problem in this case is that South Carolina had taken the idea too far.
Comment by Marc Shepherd — May 1, 2006 @ 11:41 am
As Marc notes, this type of rule is actually *just fine* in the form it usually takes — which is a rule saying you can’t present evidence of a third party’s guilt where the argument about that guilt is “speculative or remote.” The problem in the South Carolina case was that there was no language in the standard that weighed the “remoteness” of the argument being made. It just slapped a blanket prohibition on the use of evidence of third-party guilt once the prosecution had made some kind of case against the defendant.
Comment by Alex — May 1, 2006 @ 1:13 pm
Justice Alito leads off with a tightly written opinion that resolves the issue before the Court but avoids sweeping pronouncements. It is the kind of opinion Justice White would have written in this case. A solid beginning.
Comment by Kent Scheidegger — May 1, 2006 @ 2:37 pm
Alito’s opinion uses the familiar concept that all relevant evidence is presumptively admissible unless its relevance is substantially outweighed by the factors listed in FRE 403. The state court did no weighing; it just applied a blanket rule of exclusion. Note that when a criminal defendant offers evidence, there may be a special, 6th amendment-based, reason to admit the evidence. This is the theme of Chambers v. Mississippi, although the Chambers opinion is unclear on whether this concept is rooted in due process or compulsory process. prof. Peter Westen famously argued the latter view in his great Mich. L. Rev. article entitled “Compulsory Process.” (He argued Chambers.)
Comment by Michael E. Tigar — May 1, 2006 @ 3:52 pm
The Marshall case is good news for article 3 fans. Justice Ginsburg takes a swipe at discretionary judicially-created doctrines by which federal courts refuse to decide cases that are within their statutory and article 3 subject matter jurisdiction. Now if we could only get equivalent clarity on, e.g., the political question doctrine. . . .
Comment by Michael E. Tigar — May 1, 2006 @ 3:54 pm
Actually, the form of the opinion is more out of Alito’s mold than the substance.
Clearly, forbidding a criminal defendant from introducing evidence of someone else’s alleged confession to the crime is a problem. Clearly, Alito is right in stating the the problem with the rule is that it doesn’t allow the credibility of the prosecution’s evidence, which itself triggers the rule forbidding evidence of a third party offender, to be tested. The substance reminds me of a recent 5th Circuit case in which judges decided that failing to seek to strike for cause (or via pre-emptorary challenge) two jurors who stated on the record in voire dire that they were incapable of being impartial jurors and were biased against the defendant was ineffective assistance of counsel. Sometimes a case is so clearly out of whack with what the adversary system is supposed to be about that it is clear that something is wrong, no matter what your political come from may be.
For a U.S. Supreme Court decision, however, it is remarkably heavy on analysis and remarkably light on authority. It is basically a decision based on policy and logic, which is not intimately tied with a prior line of precedent. Indeed, the opinion doesn’t even clearly state precisely which provision of the constitution makes the South Carolina ruling unconstitutional. Is this a 14th Amendment Due Process case, a 6th Amendment confrontation case, or a 6th Amendment compulory process case? It also leaves somewhat fuzzy where the line between Rule 403 evidentiary challenges and other rules that exclude relevant evidence, which are left in place, end, and where the constitutional limitation begins.
Likewise, how does one draw the line between this case and ordinary appellate harmless error analysis? The prosecution had a palm print, DNA evidence from semen, DNA evidence from blood, and fiber matches in addition to a witness placing the defendant in the neighborhood at the pertinent time, and there was no plausible theory offered by the defendant that would explain how this could have arrived on the scene. The opinion does not indicate that the defendant was not permitted to impeach the government’s forensic evidence, only that the alternate theory was excluded, and the jury’s verdict speaks to the fact that the jury did not buy the tainted evidence theory (although one can argue that they might have been more willing to entertain it if there were an alternative worldview with an alternate defendant presented). One could easily have looked at the facts and determined that this was a case to deny cert or DIG because while the rule applied by the SC Supreme Court was clearly incorrect, the error was harmless in this instance.
For example, could the state have excluded the third party confession evidence if this were a bench trial and the judge ultimately resolved in a written ruling the claim that the prosecution evidence was tainted against the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt?
This is hardly the umpire like, servant to the positive law approach Alito set as a model for himself in confirmation hearings.
It would have been possible to more clearly link the opinion to a specific constitutional provision (why not the right to a trial by jury, which is usurped by a ruling in which a judge in a trial effectively pre-empts its power to make a credibility determination?) and to draw a brighter line in a shorter, umpire like opinion, but, surprisingly, Alito didn’t opt to do so.
One is also a little disappointed, if not surprised (on this we did have a prior record), to discover that Alito’s first opinion is so lacking in poetry or wit. Admittedly, this is not a job qualification of a Supreme Court Justice and many honorable jurists lack that touch, but many of the best jurists have it. If Alito had been inclined to do so, the raw moral quandry this case presents could have provided an easy opportunity to insert a Cardozo-like quotable statement about not foreclosing a defendant’s theory of the case procedurally. I fear that Alito’s jurisprudence in the next couple of decades won’t be on anyone’s must read list.
Comment by ohwilleke — May 1, 2006 @ 4:04 pm
The opinion is “intimately tied” with the Chambers-Crane-Rock line of precedent. While it does not resolve the ambiguity of the latter two decisions on whether this is a Fourteenth Amendment due process issue or a Sixth Amendment compulsory process issue, I do not regard that as a significant defect.
The lack of a sweeping statement about “not foreclosing a defendant’s theory of the case procedurally” is exactly why this is a solid opinion. Such a statement would undoubtedly be applied in other cases where the argument for exclusion of evidence is much stronger than it was in this case.
Pronouncements going beyond what is needed for the case have caused enormous damage in the past. Chief Justice Burger’s reckless announcement of an overreaching rule in Lockett v. Ohio in 1978, for example, has been a source of confusion ever since. It is at the root of the problem in the Belmontes case, granted certiorari today, in which the Court must once again clean up a mess that is ultimately of its own making. I will gladly give up poetry in opinions in return for no more Locketts.
Comment by Kent Scheidegger — May 1, 2006 @ 5:19 pm
If I’m not mistaken, in most states the widow is entitled to a portion of her husband’s estate whether or not she is mentioned in the will. Is this not the case in Texas? Or did she give up this right via a prenuptial agreement? It isn’t clear to me how this dispute arose in the first place.
Comment by billposer — May 1, 2006 @ 5:20 pm
In response to ohwilleke, I can think of three reasons why the defense should be permitted to introduce evidence of another person’s guilt in the face of apparently strong evidence for his guilt. One is that physical evidence of a conclusive sort could be the result of a frame by police or others, laboratory error, or mishandling. This kind of defect can be extremely difficult to detect even if the defendant is truly innocent. In such a situation, the only hope the defendant may have is evidence that someone else is the guilty party.
Second, what at one time appears to be convincing evidence may not be. We now know that fingerprint identifications have too often been made using partial prints and that eyewitness identification can be quite unreliable. Some courts have admitted putatively scientific evidence that should not have been admitted, such as “voiceprint” identifications. The defense may not at the time have been able to identify these problems and impeach the evidence, but evidence of another person’s guilt provides at least the possibility of overcoming such flawed evidence.
Third, one way in which wrongful convictions arise is when the police focus too early on a suspect and pursue evidence against him to the exclusion of considering other suspects. The introduction of evidence of another person’s guilt at trial may stimulate an investigator to look at the case again.
It may be reasonable to exclude a defense based on pure speculation about another party, but there are good reasons for allowing evidence of another person’s guilt to be introduced in the face of apparently convincing prosecution evidence.
Comment by billposer — May 1, 2006 @ 5:35 pm
billposer, Texas has community and separate property. Widows do not get to elect against a sperate property living trust. The dispute arose because jurisdictional conflicts are often incident in situations like this.
Comment by Robert — May 1, 2006 @ 5:40 pm
A proper response to Billposer, is somewhat complicated. In Texas, property held by a married person may either be community property or separate property.
A married person’s separate property consists of (1)property acquired before marriage, (2)property obtained by gift under a will or through inheritance, and (3)property obtained with directly traceable separate property funds. Except for property that is the family “homestead”, separate property may be sold and conveyed without the permission of the other spouse.
Under Texas’s version of community property law (about 9 states are under a community property regime), if a married person dies and is survived by his or her spouse and children and dies intestate (without a will), the surviving spouse receives a life estate (meaning that the survivor may continue to use the property until his or her death) in one-third of the decedent’s separate property estate, and the remainder of the separate property passes to the decedent’s children. A person may change this default distribution scheme through a will.
A married person’s community property is property owned by either spouse other than separate property. There is a presumption in Texas that all property acquired during marriage is community property.
Should a married person die intestate and is survived by a spouse and children, the surviving spouse will inherit all community property if all the decedent’s children are also the children of the surviving spouse; otherwise, one-half of the decedent’s interest in the community estate of the marriage passes to his or her children, with the surviving spouse keeping only his or her one-half interest. A person may only change by will the distribution of the one-half interest in the community estate that would not automatically be distributed to the spouse (i.e. you can’t give away all of the community propery–only your one-half interest).
In this case, most likely most of Marshall’s estate consisted of separate property. To the extent that the couple acquired new property during their two year marriage or received earnings on old man Marshall’s separate property, then it would be property of the community. In short, except through gift or devise, Vicky was not likely entitled to much of the old man’s estate; hence, the importance of her claim against Pierce Marshall.
Comment by Boojum — May 1, 2006 @ 6:02 pm
I wouldn’t worry about the lack of “poetry” in Alito’s first opinion. A rookie Justices is normally assigned a very straightforward case for his first outing. It’s not the place for a unique voice to emerge. Anyone care to look up Scalia’s first opinion? Or, for that matter, the first opinion of any Justice?
I also wouldn’t worry that the opinion doesn’t go back to first principles. Evidently the Justices agreed that this case was easily resolvable under current precedent, and there was no need to decide precisely which Constitutional right had been violated. The Court decides plenty of cases without going all the way back to Constitutional bedrock.
Comment by Marc Shepherd — May 2, 2006 @ 9:13 am
Can someone please post links or point me to the amici briefs in this case.
Comment by Plevy — May 2, 2006 @ 4:53 pm
Marc:
“It’s not the place for a unique voice to emerge. Anyone care to look up Scalia’s first opinion?”
At the risk of shamelessly promoting a product still under devlopment – for such questions, turn always to Ninoville. ;) Scalia’s first opinion on the court was O’Connor v. United States, 479 U.S. 27 (1986) (construing the Panama Canal Treaty to include only Panamanian taxes for purposes of tax refunds) and his first dissent was Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut, 479 U.S. 208 (1986) (arguing – aptly enough for today, given that around the country, defeated primary candidates are likely weighing legal challenges – that freedom of association is not violated by a law requiring voters in political party primary to be registered members of that party).
Comment by Simon — May 3, 2006 @ 8:57 am
Marc: “Or, for that matter, the first opinion of any Justice?”
I think your point is generally true, but Alito’s predecessor’s first opinion was Miss. Univ. for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. 718 (1982) (invalidating gender-based affirmative action in Mississippi’s nursing schools). It was a 5-4 decision that precipitated 3 separate dissents.
Comment by pitchnduel — May 3, 2006 @ 3:01 pm
Justice O’Connor’s first opinion was not Mississippi Univ. for Women v. Hogan, which was issued at the end of the 1981-82 term on July 1, 1982. In a quick scan of the 1982 Congressional Quarterly Almanac’s listing of cases for the term, it appears that her first opinion was Watt v. Energy Action Educational Foundation, 454 U.S. 151 (Dec. 1, 1981), a unanimous decision upholding the interior secretary’s discretion to experiment with non-cash-bonus bidding systems for offshore leasing.
Comment by Ken Jost — May 8, 2006 @ 10:02 am