Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1973

Linda R. S. v. Richard D.

410 U.S. 614

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a person seeking another’s criminal prosecution generally cannot establish standing merely by showing that prosecution might indirectly remedy her injury.

Background

Linda R. S., the mother of a child born outside marriage, alleged that Richard D. was the child’s father and had refused to provide support. She asked a Texas district attorney to prosecute him under Texas Penal Code Article 602, which made it a misdemeanor for a parent to willfully fail to support a child under eighteen.

Texas courts had construed Article 602 to apply only to parents of legitimate children. The district attorney therefore declined to prosecute Richard D. Linda sued on behalf of herself, her child, and a proposed class, claiming that the State’s refusal to apply the criminal nonsupport statute to fathers of children born outside marriage denied equal protection.

A three-judge federal district court dismissed the challenge to Article 602 for lack of standing. It also held that a separate challenge to Texas’s civil-support law was not properly before the three-judge court and remanded that portion to a single district judge. The Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of the criminal-statute challenge.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Linda R. S. had Article III standing to challenge Texas’s refusal to prosecute the father of her child under the criminal nonsupport statute.

Holding

No. Although she alleged a real injury from the father’s failure to provide support, she did not show a sufficiently direct connection between that injury and the State’s decision not to prosecute him.

Reasoning

Standing requires more than an abstract or generalized injury. A federal plaintiff ordinarily must show that she has suffered, or faces an imminent risk of suffering, a concrete injury caused by the governmental action she challenges. The Court acknowledged that Linda and her child were harmed by the lack of support, but that established only the injury component of standing.

The required causal connection was missing because Article 602 was a criminal statute, not a civil-support mechanism. A prosecution would punish the father for a completed offense with a fixed jail term; it would not operate like civil contempt, where a defendant can obtain release by fulfilling an ongoing support obligation. Thus, even if Linda obtained the injunction she sought, its immediate result would be the father’s possible prosecution and incarceration, not a support payment.

Any claim that the threat or fact of prosecution would induce future support payments was too speculative to establish the direct nexus Article III requires. In the Court’s view, a private citizen generally has no judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution or nonprosecution of someone else. Linda had an interest in her child’s support, but she had not shown that enforcing Texas criminal law would directly redress that interest.

Issue #2

Whether Texas’s exclusion of fathers of children born outside marriage from Article 602 violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Holding

The Court did not reach the equal-protection merits because Linda R. S. lacked standing.

Reasoning

Linda argued that Texas irrationally protected legitimate children through its criminal nonsupport law while withholding the same protection from children born outside marriage. The Court noted that recent decisions had closely scrutinized discrimination based on illegitimacy, including Gomez v. Perez, decided after argument in this case.

But jurisdiction and standing had to be resolved before the constitutional claim could be considered. Because Linda was not a proper party to seek the requested relief, the Court expressly intimated no view on whether Article 602’s distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children was constitutional.

Dissents

Justice Blackmun

Reasoning

Justice Blackmun, joined by Justice Brennan, would not have decided the standing question at that point. Gomez v. Perez, decided after oral argument, held that a State may not deny children born outside marriage the right to paternal support that it affords legitimate children, and therefore substantially changed the legal setting of Linda’s dispute.

In his view, Linda’s central objective was to secure paternal support, and Gomez might eliminate her need to use the criminal statute as leverage to obtain it. Because that intervening decision could alter the parties’ positions and perhaps eliminate any live controversy, he would have remanded to the district court to clarify the litigation’s current status rather than decide the difficult standing issue.

Justice White

Reasoning

Justice White, joined by Justice Douglas, agreed that Linda’s complaint raised serious questions about the relief a federal court could grant. A court might lack authority to compel prosecutors to bring charges or to issue what would effectively be a federal child-support order. But he regarded those as remedial questions, not reasons to deny her access to court at the threshold.

Linda and the class she sought to represent were not merely members of the public seeking broader enforcement of criminal law. They alleged that Texas had deliberately excluded them from the protection of a criminal law that the State used to pressure fathers of legitimate children to support their children. That exclusion gave them a direct and personal stake in challenging the statute’s discrimination.

Justice White rejected the majority’s characterization of criminal sanctions’ coercive effect as speculative. Texas itself evidently believed that the threat of prosecution encouraged support payments from fathers of legitimate children, since it accepted complaints from those children’s mothers and prosecuted such fathers. He saw no principled reason to deny mothers of children born outside marriage standing to demand equal protection of the same law, and would have reversed and remanded.