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Darr v. Burford
Darr v. Burford
	Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 5, 1949; Decided April 3, 1950
Full case name	Darr v. Burford
Citations	339 U.S. 200 (more) 70 S. Ct. 587 ; 94 L. Ed. 761
Case history
Prior	172 F.2d 668 (2d. Cir. 1949)
Court membership
	Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson Associate Justices Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed; Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas; Robert H. Jackson · Harold H. Burton; Tom C. Clark · Sherman Minton
Case opinions
Majority	Reed, joined by Vinson, Burton, Clark, Minton
Dissent	Frankfurter, joined by Black, Jackson
Dissent	Jackson (note)
	Douglas took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Darr v. Burford, 339 U.S. 200 (1950), was a United States Supreme Court case about habeas corpus.

Background

Darr was already confined at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary when he was summoned to appear in another county where he was tried and sentenced for armed bank robbery. He petitioned the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals for habeas corpus claiming he could not afford counsel and was not given enough time to prepare witnesses for his defense. He applied for habeas without appealing the conviction. His habeas petition was denied on the merits.

He then filed in district court without petitioning the United States Supreme Court for certiorari in the state proceeding. He claimed that he did not have access to counsel, time to prepare witnesses and added a new claim that his confession was coerced. The district judge applying the doctrine of comity based on Ex Parte Hawk "examined into the merits sufficiently to assure himself that no extraordinary circumstances existed sufficient to justify federal inquiry into the merits...without the exhaustion of all other available remedies".^[1]^[2]

The Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit affirmed.

Opinion of the Court

The Court affirms the 10th Circuit decision. If a denial of federally-protected constitutional rights is alleged the Supreme Court must be petitioned for certiorari before habeas relief is sought at the district court unless "exceptional circumstances" are shown.^[3]^[4]

The Hawk doctrine (1944) stated that a petition for certiorari presenting the federal question to the Supreme Court was required to exhaust state remedies before the merits of a habeas petition would be considered.

Congress authorized federal courts in 28 USC § 2254 to grant habeas review when the state process was "ineffective to protect the rights of the prisoner". The exhaustion requirement recognized in Ex parte Hawk was codified in the 1948 amendment to § 2254: "This new section is declaratory of existing law as affirmed by the Supreme Court. (See Ex parte Hawk, 1944, 64 S. Ct. 448, 321 U. S. 114, 88 L. Ed. 572.)".^[4] The Court concluded that the "legislative history of § 2254 reveals no suggestion that the draftsmen intended...to differentiate between exhaustion of state remedies and review in this Court."^[5]^[6]

Dissent

The dissent was concerned that "denial of certiorari would in practice attain a significance which the Court is unwilling to give it by candid adjudication".^[7]^[4]

Subsequent developments

Brown v. Allen unambiguously stated that denial of certiorari should not be given weight by district courts considering habeas petitions.^[8] Fay v Noia overruled the requirement to petition the Supreme Court for certiorari before habeas.^[9]

References

^ George, B.J (February 1951). "Habeas Corpus Exhaustion of State Remedies-Denial of Certiorari by Supreme Court as Condition to Obtaining Original Writ in Federal District Court". Michigan Law Review. 49 (4): 615. doi:10.2307/1284924. JSTOR 1284924. Moore v. Dempsey involving a mob-dominated trial, is cited as such a rare and exceptional case in both Ex parte Hawk and Darr v. Burford.
^ Rogge, O. John; Gordon, Murray. "Habeas Corpus, Civil Rights, and the Federal System". The University of Chicago Law Review. 20: 523. The 'extraordinary circumstances' exception to the requirement that state remedies be exhausted prior to federal habeas corpus review originally seemed to contemplate those situations where exigencies—usually pertaining to the protection of some aspect of the federal government from state action—made it inadvisable to permit the state processes to run their course.
^ Darr v. Burford at 219
^ ^a ^b ^c "Federal Habeas Corpus Review of State Convictions: An Interplay of Appellate Ambiguity and District Court Discretion" (PDF). Yale Law Journal. 68: 109–111.
^ Darr v. Burford at 213
^ Morgan, E.M. (1950). "The Privilege against Self-Incrimination". Minnesota Law Review. 34 (1): 665. "Section 2254 of the Code was referred to by the Court as incorporating the rule of the Hawk case...The dissent in the Darr case took an entirely different view of §2254 and of the rule enunciated in the Hawk case. They claimed that...the cases therein cited for that proposition are cases decided while a writ of error to the Supreme Court was a writ of right. Those cases merely held that a petitioner must avail himself of this writ before a federal court would exercise its jurisdiction, and that this was the natural result when petitioner had a statutory right to have his claim adjudicated by the Supreme Court."
^ Darr v. Burford at 225
^ Hart, Henry M. (1959). "The Time Chart of the Justices" (PDF). Harvard Law Review: 112. JSTOR 1337947.
^ Wright, J. Skelly; Sofaer, Abraham D. (1966). "Federal Habeas Corpus For State Prisoners: The Allocation of Fact-Finding Responsibility". The Yale Law Journal. 85 (5): 898.