Danforth arguments

“In a lively hour of argument last Wednesday,” Law.com relayed last week, “the U.S. Supreme Court justices debated the distinction between rights and remedies, its authority to promulgate new constitutional rules thru its decisions, and an issue that Justice Stephen Breyer termed ‘metaphysical’.”


The case before the Supreme Court was Danforth v. Minnesota, but that now comes down to pitting the Court’s decision in Crawford v. Washington against standards set fifteen years earlier in the Court’s precedent Teague v. Lane.

Danforth is asking two questions. First, whether state supreme courts are required to use the standard set in Teague to determine whether Supreme Court decisions apply retroactively to state-court criminal cases or their own tests?

Secondly, it asks whether Crawford sought to establish a “new rule of constitutional criminal procedure ,” according to the Teague definition of that phrase, and, if so, whether it was a watershed rule of procedure subject to full retroactive application?”

Chief Justice Roberts commented that “the Court’s decision in Teague is at the ‘very least’ federal common law regarding retroactivity: I think it’s more than that. I think it’s… substantive federal constitutional law. But it’s at least federal common law, and doesn’t federal common law pre-empt state common law?”

Crawford overruled the near-quarter century old Ohio v. Robert. Perhaps prophetically and in echoing Teague, Chief Justice Rehnquist in his concurring opinion wrote of the decision as presenting a “new rule,” but he added that “though there were no vested interests involved (in Crawford ), unresolved questions for the future of everyday criminal trials throughout the country surely counsel the same sort of caution (with) the Court grandly declaring that ‘we leave for another day any effort to spell out a comprehensive definition of testimonial.’ …But the thousands of federal prosecutors, and tens of thousands of state prosecutors, need answers as to what beyond the specific kinds of ‘testimony’ the Court lists is covered by this new rule. They need them now, not months or years from now. Rules of criminal evidence are applied every day in courts throughout the country, and parties should not be left in the dark in this manner.”


Asst. Minnesota State Public Defender Benjamin Butler noted that different state appellate processes last different periods of time, which could compromise the goals of uniformity and finality in retroactivity contexts -- which is where the “metaphysics” came in with Justice Breyer pressing the hypothetical question of three defendants in three separate states with appeals that take different lengths of time.

(Arguments)