456
Scalia, J., dissenting
duty conveys a message more significant than even the most penetrating legal analysis.
Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.
In a sensible system of criminal justice, wrongful conviction is avoided by establishing, at the trial level, lines of procedural legality that leave ample margins of safety (for example, the requirement that guilt be proved beyond a reasonable doubt)—not by providing recurrent and repetitive appellate review of whether the facts in the record show those lines to have been narrowly crossed. The defect of the latter system was described, with characteristic candor, by Justice Jackson:
"Whenever decisions of one court are reviewed by another, a percentage of them are reversed. That reflects a difference in outlook normally found between personnel comprising different courts. However, reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done." Brown v. Allen, 344 U. S. 443, 540 (1953) (opinion concurring in result).
Since this Court has long shared Justice Jackson's view, today's opinion—which considers a fact-bound claim of error rejected by every court, state and federal, that previously heard it—is, so far as I can tell, wholly unprecedented. The Court has adhered to the policy that, when the petitioner claims only that a concededly correct view of the law was incorrectly applied to the facts, certiorari should generally (i. e., except in cases of the plainest error) be denied. United States v. Johnston, 268 U. S. 220, 227 (1925). That policy has been observed even when the fact-bound assessment of the federal court of appeals has differed from that of the district court, Sumner v. Mata, 449 U. S. 539, 543 (1981); and under what we have called the "two-court rule," the policy has been applied with particular rigor when dis-
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