Further filing on Teague and retroactivity
on Apr 27, 2007 at 1:02 pm
The public defender for a Minnesota prison inmate told the Supreme Court on Thursday that judges in “no fewer than 15 states” have reached conflicting conclusions about whether state courts are free under state law to make retroactive criminal law decisions by the Supreme Court, that the Court has held are not retroactive in federal cases. The filing of this supplemental reply (it can be found here) sets the stage for the Court to act on the case of Danforth v. Minnesota (06-8273).
The Court itself has never explicitly answered the question that the Danforth case raises — an issue that the Court found sufficiently interesting as to ask the state for a full response on it. The state insisted that the Court has already made clear that the retroactivity of its criminal law decisions is a federal question, so the Court’s refusal to make such a decision apply to early cases is binding on the state courts.
Answering that contention, the public defender for Stephen Danforth commented: “If the question presented was as settled as [the state] claims it to be, it is hard to imagine that courts in so many states would have gotten the law so wrong.” Danforth is seeking to take advantage, under Minnesota law, of the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington limiting use at trial of pre-trial testimony not subjected to cross examination. The Supreme Court has ruled, in Whorton v. Bockting, that Crawford is not retroactive in federal habeas cases under the analytical approach laid down in 1989 in Teague v. Lane..
(An earlier post discussing the Court’s interest in this case can be found here and a report on Minnesota’s response is here.)
