154
Opinion of the Court
minimis exception" presumption as "part of the established background of legal principles against which all enactments are adopted," where text did not provide a "contrary indication").
Moreover, the Agreement makes no distinction among different kinds of IV(c) "arrivals," say, by exempting those that are followed by return within a short, specified period of time, or those that are simply for the purpose of arraignment. Given the Agreement's language and the important consequences of starting the running of the 120-day time limit, we see no basis for such a distinction. Hence, we must assume that every prisoner arrival in the receiving State, whether followed by a very brief stay or a very long stay in the receiving State, triggers IV(e)'s "no return" requirement.
B
Second, even were we to assume for argument's sake that the Agreement exempts violations that, viewed in terms of the Agreement's purposes, are de minimis, cf. Article IX (stating that Agreement "shall be liberally construed so as to effectuate its purposes"), we could not say that the violation at issue here qualifies as trivial. That is because the purpose of the "no return" provision cannot be as Alabama and the Solicitor General describe it, namely, as a simple, direct effort to prevent the interruption of rehabilitation. A provision that prevents returning a prisoner who has arrived in the receiving State does not directly increase the number of days the prisoner will spend in rehabilitation in the sending State. Rather, it directly and intentionally decreases the number of days that prisoner will spend in the sending State.
This point is obvious once one keeps in mind that the trial must take place within 120 days of the prisoner's arrival in the receiving State. Article IV(e)'s requirement that the prisoner remain in the county jail means that the prisoner will spend all of those 120 days away from the sending
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007