Vasquez v. Hillery , 106 S. Ct. 617 ( 1986 )

Justice Marshall

delivered the opinion of the Court.

The Warden of San Quentin State Prison asks this Court to retire a doctrine of equal protection jurisprudence first announced in 1880. The time has come, he urges, for us to abandon the rule requiring reversal of the conviction of any defendant indicted by a grand jury from which members of his own race were systematically excluded.

I-H

In 1962, the grand jury of Kings County, California, indicted respondent, Booker T. Hillery, for a brutal murder. Before trial in Superior Court, respondent moved to quash the indictment on the ground that it had been issued by a grand jury from which blacks had been systematically excluded. A hearing on respondent’s motion was held by Judge Meredith Wingrove, who was the sole Superior Court Judge in the county and had personally selected all grand juries, including the one that indicted respondent, for the previous seven years. Absolving himself of any discriminatory intent, Judge Wingrove refused to quash the indictment.¹ Respondent was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder.

For the next 16 years, respondent pursued appeals and collateral relief in the state courts, raising at every opportunity his equal protection challenge to the grand jury that indicted him.² Less than one month after the California Supreme Court foreclosed his final avenue of state relief in 1978, respondent filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court, raising that same challenge. The District Court concluded that respondent had established discrimination in the grand jury, and granted the writ. See Hillery v. Pulley, 563 F. Supp. 1228 (ED Cal. 1983). The Court of Appeals affirmed, 733 F. 2d 644 (CA9 1984), and we granted certiorari, 470 U. S. 1026 (1985).

1 — 1 I

As a threshold matter, we turn to petitioner s contention that respondent has circumvented his obligation to exhaust state remedies before seeking collateral relief in federal court. 28 U. S. C. § 2254(b). The exhaustion issue had its genesis in this case when the Federal District Judge saw a need to “supplement and clarify” the state-court record presented for review. Record, Doc. No. 8, p. 2. Upon authority of 28 U. S. C. § 2254 Rule 7, the judge directed the State to provide more figures “demonstrating what portion of the Black population in Kings County was eligible for grand jury service.” Record, Doc. No. 8, p. 3. He also directed the parties to present their views regarding the application of statistical probability analysis to the facts of this case, to assist him in “focus[ing] on the likelihood that chance or accident alone could account for the exclusion of a group from grand jury service.” Ibid. Petitioner objects that the submissions made in response to the judge’s order “drastically” altered respondent’s claim and rendered it unsuitable for federal habeas review without prior consideration by the state courts. Brief for Petitioner 81.

The exhaustion doctrine seeks to afford the state courts a meaningful opportunity to consider allegations of legal error without interference from the federal judiciary. Rose v. Lundy, 455 U. S. 509, 515 (1982). Under standards established by this Court, a state prisoner may initiate a federal habeas petition “[o]nly if the state courts have had the first opportunity to hear the claim sought to be vindicated . . . .” Picard v. Connor, 404 U. S. 270, 276 (1971). “It follows, of course, that once the federal claim has been fairly presented to the state courts, the exhaustion requirement is satisfied.” Id., at 275; see also Humphrey v. Cady, 405 U. S. 504, 516-517, n. 18 (1972). We have never held that presentation of additional facts to the district court, pursuant to that court’s directions, evades the exhaustion requirement when the prisoner has presented the substance of his claim to the state courts. See Picard, supra, at 278.

Rule 7(b) permits a federal district court in a habeas proceeding to expand the existing record to “include, without limitation,. . . documents, exhibits, and answers under oath, if so directed, to written interrogatories propounded by the judge. Affidavits may be submitted and considered as a part of the record.” In this case, the District Court sought to clarify the relevant facts, an endeavor wholly consistent with Rule 7 and the purpose of the writ. See Townsend v. Sain, 372 U. S. 293, 313 (1963). The sole question here is whether this valid exercise of the court’s power to expand the record had the effect of undermining the policies of the exhaustion requirement.

Several affidavits challenged here as “new” evidence supported respondent’s allegations that no black had ever served on the grand jury in Kings County and that qualified blacks in the county were available to serve, which he had pressed in his pretrial motion to quash in Superior Court, App. 28-30, and throughout the state proceedings. The California Supreme Court found that the total absence of blacks from the grand jury in the history of Kings County was an undisputed fact. People v. Hillery, 62 Cal. 2d 692, 709, 401 P. 2d 382, 392 (1965), cert. denied, 386 U. S. 938 (1967). That fact was entitled, therefore, to a presumption of correctness on federal review. Sumner v. Mata, 449 U. S. 539, 545-546 (1981); see Hillery v. Pulley, 533 F. Supp. 1189, 1201, n. 25 (ED Cal. 1982). The California Supreme Court also discussed Judge Wingrove’s consideration of blacks’ qualifications, and found that blacks had served as petit jurors, 62 Cal. 2d, at 710, 401 P. 2d, at 392-393, minimum eligibility requirements for which were substantially the same as for grand jurors, see 563 F. Supp., at 1245; Mar, The California Grand Jury: Vestige of Aristocracy, 1 Pac. L. J. 36, 40 (1970). Consequently, the additional affidavits introduced no claim upon which the state courts had not passed.

The remaining “new” evidence under attack, a computer analysis submitted in response to the District Court’s request, assessed the mathematical probability that chance or accident could have accounted for the exclusion of blacks from the Kings County grand jury over the years at issue.³ Petitioner would have us conclude that the “sophisticated computer techniques” rendered respondent’s claim a “wholly different animal.” Brief for Petitioner 80-81. These statistical estimates, however, added nothing to the case that this Court has not considered intrinsic to the consideration of any grand jury discrimination claim. As early as 1942, this Court rejected a contention that absence of blacks on the grand jury was insufficient to support an inference of discrimination, summarily asserting that “chance or accident could hardly have accounted for the continuous omission of negroes from the grand jury lists for so long a period as sixteen years or more.” Hill v. Texas, 316 U. S. 400, 404 (1942). This proposition, which the Court derived solely on the basis of judicial intuition, is precisely what respondent sought to establish by methods now considered somewhat more reliable.

More recently, in reviewing a habeas corpus proceeding, this Court independently applied general statistical principles to the evidence on the record in order to assess the role of chance in the exclusion of Mexican-Americans from a grand jury in Texas. Castaneda v. Partida, 430 U. S. 482, 496-497, n. 17 (1977). Form would indeed triumph over substance were we to allow the question of exhaustion to turn on whether a federal judge has relied on educated conjecture or has sought out a more sophisticated interpretative aid to accomplish the same objective.

We emphasize that the District Court’s request for further information was evidently motivated by a responsible concern that it provide the meaningful federal review of constitutional claims that the writ of habeas corpus has contemplated throughout its history. 533 F. Supp., at 1202-1203; see Townsend v. Sain, supra, at 311-312. Respondent had initially submitted only the evidence that had been considered in state court, and subsequently complied with the court’s request by furnishing materials no broader than necessary to meet the needs of the court. Accordingly, the circumstances present no occasion for the Court to consider a case in which the prisoner has attempted to expedite federal review by deliberately withholding essential facts from the state courts. We hold merely that the supplemental evidence presented by respondent did not fundamentally alter the legal claim already considered by the state courts, and, therefore, did not require that respondent be remitted to state court for consideration of that evidence.

I — I hH hH

On the merits, petitioner urges this Court to find that discrimination in the grand jury amounted to harmless error in this case, claiming that the evidence against respondent was overwhelming and that discrimination no longer infects the selection of grand juries in Kings County. Respondent’s conviction after a fair trial, we are told, purged any taint attributable to the indictment process. Our acceptance of this theory would require abandonment of more than a century of consistent precedent.

In 1880, this Court reversed a state conviction on the ground that the indictment charging the offense had been issued by a grand jury from which blacks had been excluded. We reasoned that deliberate exclusion of blacks “is practically a brand upon them, affixed by the law, an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to that race prejudice which is an impediment to securing to individuals of the race that equal justice which the law aims to secure to all others.” Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 308 (1880).

Thereafter, the Court has repeatedly rejected all arguments that a conviction may stand despite racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury. See, e. g., Neal v. Delaware, 103 U. S. 370, 396 (1881); Bush v. Kentucky, 107 U. S. 110 (1883); Gibson v. Mississippi, 162 U. S. 565 (1896); Carter v. Texas, 177 U. S. 442 (1900); Rogers v. Alabama, 192 U. S. 226 (1904); Pierre v. Louisiana, 306 U. S. 354 (1939); Smith v. Texas, 311 U. S. 128 (1940); Hill v. Texas, supra; Cassell v. Texas, 339 U. S. 282 (1950); Reece v. Georgia, 350 U. S. 85 (1955); Eubanks v. Louisiana, 356 U. S. 584 (1958); Arnold v. North Carolina, 376 U. S. 773 (1964); Alexander v. Louisiana, 405 U. S. 625 (1972). Only six years ago, the Court explicitly addressed the question whether this unbroken line of case law should be reconsidered in favor of a harmless-error standard, and determined that it should not. Rose v. Mitchell, 443 U. S. 545 (1979).⁴ We reaffirmed our conviction that discrimination on the basis of race in the selection of grand jurors “strikes at the fundamental values of our judicial system and our society as a whole,” and that the criminal defendant’s right to equal protection of the laws has been denied when he is indicted by a grand jury from which members of a racial group purposefully have been excluded. Id., at 556.

Petitioner argues here that requiring a State to retry a defendant, sometimes years later, imposes on it an unduly harsh penalty for a constitutional defect bearing no relation to the fundamental fairness of the trial. Yet intentional discrimination in the selection of grand jurors is a grave constitutional trespass, possible only under color of state authority, and wholly within the power of the State to prevent. Thus, the remedy we have embraced for over a century — the only effective remedy for this violation⁵ — is not disproportionate to the evil that it seeks to deter. If grand jury discrimination becomes a thing of the past, no conviction will ever again be lost on account of it.

Nor are we persuaded that discrimination in the grand jury has no effect on the fairness of the criminal trials that result from that grand jury’s actions. The grand jury does not determine only that probable cause exists to believe that a defendant committed a crime, or that it does not. In the hands of the grand jury lies the power to charge a greater offense or a lesser offense; numerous counts or a single count; and perhaps most significant of all, a capital offense or a noncapital offense — all on the basis of the same facts. Moreover, “[t]he grand jury is not bound to indict in every case where a conviction can be obtained.” United States v. Ciambrone, 601 F. 2d 616, 629 (CA2 1979) (Friendly, J., dissenting). Thus, even if a grand jury’s determination of probable cause is confirmed in hindsight by a conviction on the indicted offense, that confirmation in no way suggests that the discrimination did not impermissibly infect the framing of the indictment and, consequently, the nature or very existence of the proceedings to come.

When constitutional error calls into question the objectivity of those charged with bringing a defendant to judgment, a reviewing court can neither indulge a presumption of regularity nor evaluate the resulting harm. Accordingly, when the trial judge is discovered to have had some basis for rendering a biased judgment, his actual motivations are hidden from review, and we must presume that the process was impaired. See Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U. S. 510, 535 (1927) (reversal required when judge has financial interest in conviction, despite lack of indication that bias influenced decisions). Similarly, when a petit jury has been selected upon improper criteria or has been exposed to prejudicial publicity, we have required reversal of the conviction because the effect of the violation cannot be ascertained. See Davis v. Georgia, 429 U. S. 122 (1976) (per curiam); Sheppard v. Maxwell, 384 U. S. 333, 351-352 (1966). Like these fundamental flaws, which never have been thought harmless, discrimination in the grand jury undermines the structural integrity of the criminal tribunal itself, and is not amenable to harmless-error review.⁶

Just as a conviction is void under the Equal Protection Clause if the prosecutor deliberately charged the defendant on account of his race, see United States v. Batchelder, 442 U. S. 114, 125, n. 9 (1979), a conviction cannot be understood to cure the taint attributable to a charging body selected on the basis of race. Once having found discrimination in the selection of a grand jury, we simply cannot know that the need to indict would have been assessed in the same way by a grand jury properly constituted. The overriding imperative to eliminate this systemic flaw in the charging process, as well as the difficulty of assessing its effect on any given defendant, requires our continued adherence to a rule of mandatory reversal.

The opinion of the Court in Mitchell ably presented other justifications, based on the necessity for vindicating Fourteenth Amendment rights, supporting a policy of automatic reversal in cases of grand jury discrimination. That analysis persuasively demonstrated that the justifications retain their validity in modern times, for “114 years after the close of the War Between the States and nearly 100 years after Strauder, racial and other forms of discrimination still remain a fact of life, in the administration of justice as in our society as a whole.” 443 U. S., at 558-559. The six years since Mitchell have given us no reason to doubt the continuing truth of that observation.

IV

The dissent propounds a theory, not advanced by any party, which would condition the grant of relief upon the passage of time between a conviction and the filing of a petition for federal habeas corpus, depending upon the ability of a State to obtain a second conviction. Sound jurisprudence counsels against our adoption of that approach to habeas corpus claims.

The Habeas Corpus Rules permit a State to move for dismissal of a habeas petition when it “has been prejudiced in its ability to respond to the petition by delay in its filing.” 28 U. S. C. §2254 Rule 9(a). Indeed, petitioner filed such a motion in this case, and it was denied because the District Court found that no prejudicial delay had been caused by respondent. Hillery v. Sumner, 496 F. Supp. 632, 637 (ED Cal. 1980). Congress has not seen fit, however, to provide the State with an additional defense to habeas corpus petitions based on the difficulties that it will face if forced to retry the defendant. The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules has drafted a proposed amendment to Rule 9(a), which would permit dismissal of a habeas corpus petition upon a demonstration that the State has been prejudiced, either in defending against the prisoner’s federal claim or in bringing the prisoner to trial again should the federal claim prove meritorious. 52 U. S. L. W. 2145 (1983). That proposal has not been adopted. And, despite many attempts in recent years, Congress has yet to create a statute of limitations for federal habeas corpus actions. See L. Yaekle, Postconviction Remedies § 19 (Supp. 1985) (describing relevant bills introduced in past several Congresses). We should not lightly create a new judicial rule, in the guise of constitutional interpretation, to achieve the same end.

V

Today’s decision is supported, though not compelled, by the important doctrine of stare decisis, the means by which we ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion. That doctrine permits society to presume that bedrock principles are founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals, and thereby contributes to the integrity of our constitutional system of government, both in appearance and in fact. While stare decisis is not an inexorable command, the careful observer will discern that any detours from the straight path of stare decisis in our past have occurred for articulable reasons, and only when the Court has felt obliged “to bring its opinions into agreement with experience and with facts newly ascertained.” Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U. S. 393, 412 (1932) (Brandéis, J., dissenting).

Our history does not impose any rigid formula to constrain the Court in the disposition of cases. Rather, its lesson is that every successful proponent of overruling precedent has borne the heavy burden of persuading the Court that changes in society or in the law dictate that the values served by stare decisis yield in favor of a greater objective. In the case of grand jury discrimination, we have been offered no reason to believe that any such metamorphosis has rendered the Court’s long commitment to a rule of reversal outdated, ill-founded, unworkable, or otherwise legitimately vulnerable to serious reconsideration. On the contrary, the need for such a rule is as compelling today as it was at its inception.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals, accordingly, is affirmed.

It is so ordered.

1 Three thorough and well-reasoned opinions of the District Court discuss in detail the evidence adduced at the hearing, as well as other aspects of the case. See Hillery v. Pulley, 563 F. Supp. 1228 (ED Cal. 1983); Hillery v. Pulley, 533 F. Supp. 1189 (ED Cal. 1982); Hillery v. Sumner, 496 F. Supp. 632 (ED Cal. 1980). We repeat here only those portions relevant to the issues before the Court.

2 See People v. Hillery, 34 Cal. Rptr. 853, 386 P. 2d 477 (1963) (affirming conviction; rejecting discrimination claim); People v. Hillery, 62 Cal. 2d 692, 401 P. 2d 382 (1965) (on rehearing, rejecting discrimination claim; reversing sentence), cert. denied, 386 U. S. 938 (1967); People v. Hillery, 65 Cal. 2d 795, 423 P. 2d 208 (1967) (after remand, affirming sentence), cert. denied, 389 U. S. 986 (1968); In re Hillery, 71 Cal. 2d 857, 457 P. 2d 565 (1969) (on original petition for habeas corpus, reversing sentence); People v. Hillery, 10 Cal. 3d 897, 519 P. 2d 572 (1974) (after remand, reducing sentence); In re Hillery, Crim. No. 20424 (Cal. 1978) (affirming denial of state habeas corpus).

3 The statistical expert concluded that if the grand juries selected in Kings County between 1900 and 1962 had been chosen by chance, the probability that no black would have been selected was 57 in 100,000 million. Although the State made no attempt to rebut this testimony, the District Court questioned the reliability of the expert’s analysis, performed its own analysis of the data, and ultimately accepted the expert’s conclusions only for the 7-year period of Judge Wingrove’s tenure, which yielded a probability of 2 in 1,000 that the phenomenon was attributable to chance. 563 F. Supp., at 1241-1244.

4 The dissent attempts to lessen the precedential weight of Mitchell by characterizing it as an advisory opinion. Post, at 270, n. 4. In Part II of Mitchell, three Justices reaffirmed the principle that grand jury discrimination requires reversal of the conviction in all cases; in Parts III and IV, they concluded that the prisoner had failed to make out a prima facie case of discrimination. 443 U. S., at 574. Two additional Justices explicitly joined Part II, but dissented from the judgment because they believed that discrimination had been established, and that the conviction must, therefore, be reversed. Id., at 588 (White, J., joined by Stevens, J., dissenting). The dissent here offers a citation to Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 169, n. 15 (1976) (opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.), in support of its unprecedented argument that a statement of legal opinion joined by five Justices of this Court does not carry the force of law. The cited passage, however, refers only to the manner in which one may discern a single holding of the Court in cases in which no opinion on the issue in question has garnered the support of a majority. That discussion is inapplicable to Part II of Mitchell, to which five Justices expressly subscribed.

5 As we pointed out in Rose v. Mitchell, alternative remedies are ineffectual. Federal law provides a criminal prohibition against discrimination in the selection of grand jurors, 18 U. S. C. § 243, but according to statistics compiled by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, that section has not been the basis for a single prosecution in the past nine years. With respect to prior years, for which precise information is not available, we have been unable to find evidence of any prosecution or conviction under the statute in the last century. The other putative remedy for grand jury discrimination is 42 U. S. C. § 1983, which, in theory, allows redress for blacks who have been excluded from grand jury service. See Carter v. Jury Comm’n of Greene County, 396 U. S. 320 (1970). These suits are also extremely rare, undoubtedly because the potential plaintiffs, eligible blacks not called for grand jury service, are often without knowledge of the discriminatory practices and without incentive to launch costly legal battles to stop them.

6 Justice White does not join in the foregoing paragraph.