Reed v. Goertz/Opinion of Justice Alito
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 21–442
RODNEY REED, PETITIONER v. BRYAN GOERTZ
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
[April 19, 2023]
Justice Alito, with whom Justice Gorsuch joins, dissenting.
This case involves a suit brought by petitioner Rodney Reed under Rev. Stat. §1979, 42 U. S. C. §1983, against Bryan Goertz, the District Attorney of Bastrop County, Texas. Reed claims that Goertz violated his due process rights when, based on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ interpretation of the Texas statute that allows post-trial DNA testing under specified circumstances, Article 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Goertz continued to deny Reed’s request for DNA testing of certain items found near the scene of the murder for which he was convicted 25 years ago.
As the Court notes and the parties agree, the statute of limitations for Reed’s claim is two years. Ante, at 4; Brief for Petitioner 17; Brief for Respondent 17. Reed filed his complaint on August 8, 2019, and the lower courts held that this was too late. The question before us is when the 2-year statute of limitations began to run, that is in legal parlance, when Reed’s claim “accrued.” As the parties agree, the general rule is that a claim accrues when the plaintiff has “a complete and present cause of action,” Wallace v. Kato, 549 U. S. 384, 388 (2007) (internal quotation marks omitted). Reed contends that his claim did not accrue until the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) denied his petition for rehearing on October 4, 2017, and thus refused to retract the interpretation of Article 64 that the court had unanimously adopted on April 12, 2017. Goertz, on the other hand, argues that Reed’s claim accrued no later than the date of the CCA’s April 12 decision, and because that date preceded the federal lawsuit by more than two years, Goertz maintains that we should affirm the Fifth Circuit’s decision that Reed’s complaint was filed too late.
As I will explain, there is room for debate about exactly when Reed’s DNA testing claim accrued, but in my view, the notion that this did not take place until rehearing was denied is clearly wrong.
I
Before getting to the nub of this case, I briefly explain why Reed’s claim might have accrued even earlier than April 12, 2017. First, it can be argued that Reed’s claim against Goertz accrued on or before July 2014, when Goertz initially refused Reed’s testing request.[1] The general rule is that a plaintiff’s §1983 claim against a state official for violating a constitutional right accrues when the alleged violation takes place. See Wallace, 549 U. S., at 384 (§1983 claim “normally commence[s] to run” from when wrong occurs). And the Court does not disclaim the possibility that a plaintiff could file a §1983 claim as soon as a state prosecutor denies a DNA testing request. See ante, at 6, and n. 1.
Another possibility is that the particular claim Reed now asserts did not accrue until the state trial court held that Goertz had properly denied Reed’s testing request. Reed does not claim that the bare text of Article 64 is unconstitutional. (Had he done so, he could hardly argue, as he does now, that his claim did not accrue until the end of the appellate process.) Instead, he stresses that his claim concerns the state courts’ construction of that statute and in particular, their holding that the evidence for which testing is sought must not be contaminated. Brief for Petitioner 3, 15, 29. In response to this argument, Goertz contends that every allegedly unconstitutional aspect of the judicial interpretation of the statute was adopted by the time the state trial court issued amended findings of fact and conclusions of law in 2016, and Goertz therefore takes the position that Reed’s unconstitutional-construction claim accrued at that time. Brief for Respondent 18–19.
II
A
For present purposes, it is not necessary to decide whether Reed’s claim accrued on either of these two dates. We need only decide whether accrual was put off until the CCA denied rehearing, and it is clear to me that this delayed accrual date is wrong.[2] As noted, the claim that Reed asserts is not based on the bare text of Article 64, but on what he claims is an erroneous interpretation of that provision by the Texas courts. He thus submits that his claim accrued when the “authoritative construction of Article 64” that he challenges was pronounced by the CCA. Brief for Petitioner 17.
I will assume for the sake of argument that Reed’s claim accrued when the CCA issued its “authoritative construction of Article 64,” but I cannot agree with Reed’s argument—which the Court conspicuously declines to defend—that the CCA’s interpretation did not become “authoritative” until rehearing was denied.
Reed cites no authority for the proposition that the filing of a petition for rehearing typically suspends the authoritative force of an appellate court’s decision, and in fact, it appears that the opposite is true—as this Court’s “GVR” practice illustrates. On or shortly after the day when we hand down a decision, we often “GVR” cases in which petitions raising similar issues are pending before us. (That is, we grant the petition, vacate the decision below, and remand the case for reconsideration in light of the decision we have handed down.) On June 30, 2022, for example, we did this in no fewer than 33 cases.[3] We do not wait to see if a petition for rehearing will be filed; nor do we hold off until a mandate is issued or a certified copy of the judgment is prepared. See this Court’s Rules 45.2 and 45.3. If our decisions did not become authoritative and binding as soon as they are issued, this practice would be impermissible.
There is no reason why decisions of the CCA should be viewed any differently. On the contrary, it appears that the CCA has followed a practice similar to our GVR practice. See Oliver v. State, 872 S. W. 2d 713, 716 (Tex. Crim. App. 1994) (vacating judgment and remanding for reconsideration in light of decision on same day). And neither Reed nor the Court has cited any contrary Texas authority. Accordingly, Reed’s “authoritative construction” argument became complete, at the latest, when the CCA adopted that construction on April 12, 2017, two years and 11 months before Reed filed his §1983 complaint.
B
Unlike Reed, the Court does not contend that the CCA’s interpretation lacked “authoritative” status until rehearing was denied. Instead, the Court merely proclaims that the State, acting through Goertz, did not deny Reed due process of law until “the state litigation ended.” Ante, at 5.[4] I certainly see the logic in this view: until the process afforded by a State has been exhausted, it may be said that the State has not definitively denied the process that the Constitution is alleged to demand. This logic leads to the conclusion that a prisoner like Reed should exhaust state remedies—something that would generally be required if the proper vehicle for contesting the denial of a DNA testing claim were a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. See 28 U. S. C. §2254(b)(1). But the Court rejected that proposition in District Attorney’s Office for Third Judicial Dist. v. Osborne, 557 U. S. 52 (2009), and it is well-established that a §1983 plaintiff need not exhaust state remedies. Patsy v. Board of Regents of Fla., 457 U. S. 496, 500–501 (1982); Edwards v. Balisok, 520 U. S. 641, 649 (1997). Not only is this the general rule, but the Osborne Court found that the rule applies in cases involving constitutional challenges to the denial of requested DNA testing. 557 U. S., at 71. Thus, the Court’s reasoning collides with precedent.
On top of this, the Court’s reasoning, if taken to its logical conclusion, points to a result that neither Reed nor the Court is willing to embrace: namely, that a due process challenge to the denial of a request for DNA testing is not ripe until state remedies have been exhausted. (Reed squarely rejects that conclusion, Brief for Petitioner 48; Tr. of Oral Arg. 12–13, and the Court reserves judgment. Ante, at 6, n. 1.) But that is where the Court’s reasoning is likely to lead.
Reed tries to circumvent this problem by distinguishing between a claim that challenges the literal terms of a state law and one that challenges the law as authoritatively interpreted by the State’s highest court. Brief for Petitioner 30, 48. On this view, only claims of the latter type would have to proceed through the entire state court appellate process before a §1983 challenge could be brought. But this categorization of DNA-testing claims is problematic. When a State’s high court interprets a state law, it generally settles what the law always meant, and therefore it is hard to see the difference between a claim that the text of a state statute is unconstitutional and a claim that the text is unconstitutional as interpreted by the State’s highest court. In the case of a state law like Article 64, which permits DNA testing under limited circumstances, the court may interpret the statute to impose requirements that are not expressly spelled out in the statutory text. (That is what happened here.) Or the state high court may interpret requirements in the text more leniently than a literal reading of the text would demand. In either event, the statute means what the state high court says it means, and if accrual in the first of these situations does not take place until the end of appellate review, it is hard to see why the same should not be true in the second as well.
In light of these problems, it is not surprising that the Court declines to say anything about whether prisoners who wish to challenge a state DNA testing law may sue as soon as their testing requests are denied. The Court says only that it “need not address th[e] hypothetical scenario” of a plaintiff who declines “full appellate review,” ante, at 6, n. 1, but what does that mean? Does it mean that such a plaintiff must exhaust state remedies at the trial level but need not appeal? Does it mean that such a plaintiff must pursue some (but not “full”) appellate review? Litigants and the lower courts are left to guess. Instead of clarifying the law, the Court’s decision may sow confusion.
C
Much of Reed’s argumentation is not aimed at the argument that his claim accrued when the CCA issued its contested interpretation of Article 64. Instead, Reed directs his attack on the earlier possible accrual dates discussed in Part I of this opinion and in particular the Fifth Circuit’s holding that a claim like Reed’s accrues when testing is denied at the trial level. He says that this rule is unfair because he “isn’t Nostradamus,” lacks “supernatural foresight,” and therefore could not have predicted at the time of the trial court decision whether the CCA would ultimately agree. Brief for Petitioner 26, 32. He argues that his rule promotes federalism (because it encourages resort to state court litigation before turning to the federal courts), judicial economy (because it tends to avoid contemporaneous litigation in both state and federal court), comity (because it allows state courts to adopt interpretations of their statutes that avoid federal constitutional problems), and practical reality (because a prisoner bringing an authoritative-construction claim cannot know in advance how a State’s high court will interpret the relevant statute). Id., at 36–39. The Court makes related arguments. Ante, at 5–6.
Whatever merit these arguments might have in relation to the accrual date adopted by the Fifth Circuit, they ring hollow as applied to the choice between the date when a state high court issues a decision interpreting the state testing statute and the date when that court refuses to rehear and overturn that interpretation. One need not have “supernatural foresight” in order to predict that rehearing is unlikely to be granted. And it is hard to see how requiring a §1983 plaintiff to sue within two years after a state high court decision is issued is unfair or does any damage to federalism, comity, or judicial economy.
Reed has provided no explanation why he could not have filed his §1983 action within two years after the CCA’s decision. Instead, he waited until an execution date was set. While that event may have “concentrate[d] his mind wonderfully,” that is not an excuse for the basic mistake of missing a statute of limitations.[5] *** For these reasons, I would affirm the judgment below, and I therefore respectfully dissent.
- ↑ We are told that Reed and Goertz engaged in lengthy negotiations about the testing of certain items prior to the date in July 2014 when Reed filed his claim in the District Court of Bastrop County under Article 64. Brief for Petitioner 13; Brief for Respondent 5–6; see Reed v. State, 541 S. W. 3d 759, 779 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017).
- ↑ We have noted that a couple special cases can displace that “presumptiv[e]” accrual rule, such as where “a particular claim may not realistically be brought while a violation is ongoing,” or where a special accrual rule governed “the most natural common-law analogy.” McDonough v. Smith, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 4). But the majority (correctly) does not adopt Reed’s view, see Brief for Petitioner 32–39, that this matter raises one of those special cases. Under Reed’s theory as expressed as argument, he could have proceeded with a claim under Skinner v. Switzer, 562 U. S. 521 (2011), at any time in the process. Tr. of Oral Arg. 12 (stating that “a prisoner could exit the state court procedures at any point” and bring a challenge).
- ↑ Journal of the Supreme Court 711–716 (June 30, 2022); see, e.g., id., at 685–689 (June 27, 2022) (granting, vacating, and remanding 28 cases).
- ↑ Even the CCA’s denial of rehearing in a DNA testing case may not mark the end of state court litigation on that issue, to the extent that the issue may be taken up again in a state collateral review proceeding or otherwise renewed. Cf. Darnell v. State, 2004 WL 1088755, *1 (Tex. App., May 13, 2004) (discussing “reconsider[ation]” granted in DNA-testing action “after submission of additional information”).
- ↑ J. Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, in 44 Great Books of the Western World 351 (R. Hutchins & M. Adler eds. 1952).