Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U.S. 320, 11 (1997)

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330

LINDH v. MURPHY

Opinion of the Court

provision in chapter 154. But those are not the circumstances here. Although chapters 153 and 154 may have begun life independently and in different Houses of Congress,5 it was only after they had been joined together and introduced as a single bill in the Senate (S. 735) that what is now § 107(c) was added.6 Both chapters, therefore, had to have been in mind when § 107(c) was added. Nor was there anything in chapter 154 prior to the addition that made the intent to apply it to pending cases less likely than a similar intent to apply chapter 153. If anything, the contrary is true, as the discussion of § 2264(b) will indicate.

The insertion of § 107(c) with its different treatments of the two chapters thus illustrates the familiar rule that negative implications raised by disparate provisions are strongest when the portions of a statute treated differently had already been joined together and were being considered simultaneously when the language raising the implication was inserted. See Field v. Mans, 516 U. S. 59, 75 (1995) ("The more apparently deliberate the contrast, the stronger the inference, as applied, for example, to contrasting statutory sections originally enacted simultaneously in relevant respects . . ."). When § 107(c) was added, that is, a thoughtful Member of the Congress was most likely to have intended just what the later reader sees by inference.

The strength of the implication is not diminished by the one competing explanation suggested, see Brief for Respondent 11-12, which goes as follows. Chapter 154 provides for expedited filing and adjudication of habeas

5 See 96 F. 3d 856, 861 (CA7 1996). Lindh concedes this much. Brief for Petitioner 23, n. 15.

6 Amendment 1199, offered by Senator Dole on May 25, 1995, added what was then § 607(c) and now is § 107(c). See 141 Cong. Rec. 14600, 14614 (1995). A comparison of S. 735 as it stood on May 1, 1995, and S. 735 as it passed the Senate on June 7, after the substitution of Amendment 1199, reveals that the part of the bill dealing with habeas corpus reform was substantially the same before and after the amendment in all ways relevant to our interpretation of § 107(c).

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