Chicago Daily Law Bulletin
March 13, 2009 Volume: 155 Issue: 50

Organizational thinking leads to injustice

What should a court do when it is compelled to follow law that creates an injustice? This dilemma is not just confined to students in seminar rooms discussing ''Antigone'' and ''Billy Budd.'' In fact, the 1st District Appellate Court recently faced this situation in People v. Addolfo Davis, 2009 Ill. App. LEXIS 76, decided Feb. 25.

While a juvenile, Addolfo Davis was transferred to criminal court, convicted of two counts of first-degree murder based on accountability, and sentenced to mandatory natural life. By 1996, his convictions and sentence had been affirmed on direct appeal. Within the next few years, Davis filed several post-conviction petitions that were summarily rejected.

This appeal concerns a supplemental post-conviction petition Davis filed asking the court to retroactively apply the Illinois Supreme Court's decision in People v. Miller, 202 Ill.2d 328 (2002). Like Davis, Miller was a juvenile who was tried as an adult and convicted of first-degree murder based on accountability. The trial judge, however, refused to sentence Miller to mandatory natural life, and instead sentenced him to 50 years imprisonment. The Supreme Court affirmed the trial court's decision, holding that a mandatory life sentence in Miller's case would have been unconstitutionally disproportionate. The court held that use of the mandatory life statute would have been unconstitutional in Miller's case because it is not always true that ''under any circumstances a juvenile defendant convicted solely by accountability is incorrigible and incapable of rehabilitation for the rest of his life.'' At 342-43.

The court did not say that life imprisonment of a juvenile convicted of murder based on accountability was always unconstitutional; but it did hold that under the facts of Miller it was.

The 1st District refused to allow Davis to retroactively attempt to apply Miller to his case. This is because the Illinois Supreme Court's test for the retroactive application of new constitutional rules of criminal procedure is based entirely on the U.S. Supreme Court case of Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989). (The Illinois Supreme Court adopted Teague in People v. Flowers, 138 Ill.2d 218 (1990).) Miller is a new rule, and Teague holds that new rules cannot be retroactively applied to cases that have completed the direct appeal process unless the new rule either: 1) places certain kinds of private conduct beyond the scope of criminal prohibitions, or 2) requires the observance of procedures that are implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. Since neither of these exceptions applies to the Miller rule, Davis loses because his direct appeal was completed before Miller was decided.

But not so fast. The 1st District acknowledged that ''there is an element of inequity'' in refusing to allow Davis to utilize Miller merely because he was on collateral, rather than direct, review. The court also noted that because there are so few juveniles serving mandatory life based on accountability for first-degree murder, allowing these prisoners to use Miller would create absolutely no burden on the Illinois court system. But the 1st District correctly acknowledged that it was powerless in this case, because it was legally bound to follow the Illinois Supreme Court's adoption of Teague. The 1st District concludes its discussion on this plaintive note: ''It is the opinion of this panel of the appellate court that if there was ever a case that should be applied to cases on collateral review even though it does not meet the requirements of Teague, Miller is that case.''

So how did we get into a position where an appellate court has to admit that following precedent produces an unfair decision?

Let's begin with a basic distinction. In his recent book On Thinking Institutionally (Paradigm, 2008), Hugh Heclo distinguishes ''institutional thinking'' from ''organizational thinking.'' Heclo says that ''[I]nstitutional thinking has to do with living committed to the ends for which organization occurs, rather than [living committed] to an organization as such.'' (90) (emphasis added).

Applied to courts, you could say that their ''institutional end'' is achieving justice. On the other hand, the ''organizational end'' is a smooth-running, efficient court system. Ideally, a judge should be loyal to both goals. Yet, as Heclo notes, ''institutional loyalty is not necessarily the same thing as organizational loyalty, and in practice the two can be in profound conflict.'' (90)

In adopting Teague, the Illinois Supreme Court showed no awareness that it was a case that had everything to do with the ''organizational end'' of maintaining good relations between the federal and state court systems, and absolutely nothing to do with the ''institutional end'' of achieving justice. The Illinois Supreme Court's knee-jerk adoption of the Teague rule in 1990 is responsible for the 1st District's belief that it was forced to reach an unjust result in Davis.

In Teague, the U.S. Supreme Court faced a serious issue: when should a federal court on habeas corpus overrule a state criminal conviction based on a new rule of constitutional criminal procedure that became effective after direct review of the case was completed in the state courts? The Teague majority concluded that in this situation organizational concerns trumped institutional concerns. The court held that as a general rule the ''organizational end'' - i.e., the comity manifested by federal court deference to final state court judgments - was more important than the ''institutional end'' - i.e., reaching the absolute fairest decision. And the U.S. Supreme Court was transparent about this. Then-Justice Sandra Day O'Connor described the ''prudential concerns'' underlying Teague as being ''federalism and comity.'' Withrow v. Williams, 507 U.S. 680, 699 (1993) (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).

So what relevance do the federalism and comity concerns of Teague have on the inner-workings of a unitary state court system? In a word: none. Unfortunately, the Illinois Supreme Court adopted the Teague rule in the same way it usually adopts anything with a U.S. Supreme Court imprimatur: without hesitation. The whole philosophy behind Teague is that we should trust that state courts have already tried to achieve the ''institutional end'': reaching the fairest possible result in every criminal case. And because we trust state courts to do this, the ''organizational end'' established by Teague is that federal courts should generally defer to these presumptively well-considered state court decisions.

But when a state court system adopts Teague, it short-circuits the entire system. A state system that follows Teague is purposely avoiding trying to reach the optimal result in a criminal case, thus destroying the whole point of why federal courts defer to state court judgments in the first place! As one judge has noted, a state court's adoption of Teague does not promote the goals of federalism; rather, ''[I]n self-defeating circularity, [the state court] blindly replicates the very federal habeas rule by which the High Court attempts to accord comity to our state laws and decisions.'' State ex rel. Taylor v. Whitley, 606 So.2d 1292, 1303 (La. 1992) (Dennis, J., dissenting). (If you are getting dizzy, you understand his point.)

So what's next? As the Davis decision points out, the U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly told state courts that they do not have to follow Teague. Danforth v. Minnesota, 128 S.Ct. 1029 (2008). Clearly, it is time for the Illinois Supreme Court to re-consider its adoption of Teague.

The 1st District's decision is heartfelt and honest; the court did what it legally had to do. But when I think of Addolfo Davis, I am reminded of Jason Robards' line from the movie A Thousand Clowns: ''That's the most you should expect from life ... a really good apology for all the things you won't get.'' Here's hoping Addolfo Davis ends up getting more than that.