Blackledge v. Perry

STEWART, Justice.

While serving a term of imprisonment in a North Carolina penitentiary, the respondent Perry became involved in an altercation with another inmate. A warrant issued, charging Perry with the misdemeanor of assault with a deadly weapon, . . . Under North Carolina law, the District Court Division of the General Court of Justice has exclusive jurisdiction for the trial of misdemeanors. . . . Following a trial without a jury in the District Court of Northampton County, Perry was convicted of this misdemeanor and given a six-month sentence, to be served after completion of the prison term he was then serving.

Perry then filed a notice of appeal to the Northampton County Superior Court. Under North Carolina law, a person convicted in the District Court has a right to a trial de novo in the Superior Court. . . . The right to trial de novo is absolute, there being no need for the appellant to allege error in the original proceeding. When an appeal is taken, the statutory scheme provides that the slate is wiped clean; the prior conviction is annulled, and the prosecution and the defense begin anew in the Superior Court.

After the filing of the notice of appeal, but prior to the respondent's appearance for trial de novo in the Superior Court, the prosecutor obtained an indictment from a grand jury, charging Perry with the felony of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and inflict serious bodily injury, . . . The indictment covered the same conduct for which Perry had been tried and convicted in the District Court. Perry entered a plea of guilty to the indictment in the Superior Court, and was sentenced to a term of five to seven years in the penitentiary, to be served concurrently with the identical prison sentence he was then serving.

A number of months later, the respondent filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He claimed that the indictment on the felony charge in the Superior Court constituted double jeopardy and also deprived him of due process of law. In an unreported opinion, the District Court dismissed the petition for failure to exhaust available state remedies. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed, holding that resort to the state courts would be futile, because the Supreme Court of North Carolina had consistently rejected the constitutional claims presented by Perry in his petition. . . . The case was remanded to the District Court for further proceedings.

On remand, the District Court granted the writ. It held that the bringing of the felony charge after the filing of the appeal violated Perry's rights under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, . . . The District Court further held that the respondent had not, by his guilty plea in the Superior Court, waived his right to raise his constitutional claims in the federal habeas corpus proceeding. The Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in a brief per curiam opinion. We granted certiorari, . . . to consider the seemingly important issues presented by this case.

I

As in the District Court, Perry directs two independent constitutional attacks upon the conduct of the State in haling him into court on the felony charge after he took an appeal from the misdemeanor conviction. First, he contends that the felony indictment in the Superior Court placed him in double jeopardy, since he had already been convicted on the lesser included misdemeanor charge in the District Court. Second, he urges that the indictment on the felony charge constituted a penalty for his exercising his statutory right to appeal, and thus contravened the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We find it necessary to reach only the latter claim.

Perry's due process arguments are derived substantially from North Carolina v. Pearce, . . . and its progeny. In Pearce, the Court considered the constitutional problems presented when, following a successful appeal and reconviction, a criminal defendant was subjected to a greater punishment than that imposed at the first trial. While we concluded that such a harsher sentence was not absolutely precluded by either the Double Jeopardy or Due Process Clause, we emphasized that ‘imposition of a penalty upon the defendant for having successfully pursued a statutory right of appeal or collateral remedy would be . . . a violation of due process of law.’ . . . Because ‘vindictiveness against a defendant for having successfully attacked his first conviction must play no part in the sentence he receives after a new trial,’ . . . we held that an increased sentence could not be imposed upon retrial unless the sentencing judge placed certain specified findings on the record.

[. . .]

The lesson that emerges from Pearce, Colten, and Chaffin is that the Due Process Clause is not offended by all possibilities of increased punishment upon retrial after appeal, but only by those that pose a realistic likelihood of ‘vindictiveness.’ Unlike the circumstances presented by those cases, however, in the situation here the central figure is not the judge or the jury, but the prosecutor. The question is whether the opportunities for vindictiveness in this situation are such as to impel the conclusion that due process of law requires a rule analogous to that of the Pearce case. We conclude that the answer must be in the affirmative.

A prosecutor clearly has a considerable stake in discouraging convicted misdemeanants from appealing and thus obtaining a trial de novo in the Superior Court, since such an appeal will clearly require increased expenditures of prosecutorial resources before the defendant's conviction becomes final, and may even result in a formerly convicted defendant's going free. And, if the prosecutor has the means readily at hand to discourage such appeals-by ‘upping the ante’ through a felony indictment whenever a convicted misdemeant pursues his statutory appellate remedy-the State can insure that only the most hardy defendants will brave the hazards of a de novo trial.

There is, of course, no evidence that the prosecutor in this case acted in bad faith or maliciously in seeking a felony indictment against Perry. The rationale of our judgment in the Pearce case, however, was not grounded upon the proposition that actual retaliatory motivation must inevitably exist. Rather, we emphasized that ‘since the fear of such vindictiveness may unconstitutionally deter a defendant's exercise of the right to appeal or collaterally attack his first conviction, due process also requires that a defendant be freed of apprehension of such a retaliatory motivation on the part of the sentencing judge.’ . . . We think it clear that the same considerations apply here. A person convicted of an offense is entitled to pursue his statutory right to a trial de novo, without apprehension that the State will retaliate by substituting a more serious charge for the original one, thus subjecting him to a significantly increased potential period of incarceration. . . .

Due process of law requires that such a potential for vindictiveness must not enter into North Carolina's two-tiered appellate process. We hold, therefore, that it was not constitutionally permissible for the State to respond to Perry's invocation of his statutory right to appeal by bringing a more serious charge against him prior to the trial de novo.

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Accordingly, the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is affirmed.

It is so ordered.

The dissenting opinion Mr. Justice REHNQUIST is omitted.