Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1884

Hurtado v. California

110 U.S. 516 | 4 S. Ct. 111 | 28 L. Ed. 232 | 1884 U.S. LEXIS 1716

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, Hurtado held that Fourteenth Amendment due process protects fundamental fairness rather than requiring States to preserve the grand-jury indictment procedure used in federal prosecutions.

Background

Joseph Hurtado was prosecuted in California for murder and was convicted and sentenced to death. California did not proceed by grand-jury indictment. Instead, under its constitution and statutes, the district attorney filed an information after a magistrate conducted a preliminary examination, found probable cause, and committed Hurtado for trial.

Hurtado argued that a capital prosecution begun by information rather than by grand-jury indictment violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s command that no State may deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Supreme Court of California rejected that claim, following its prior decision in Kalloch v. Superior Court, and upheld the conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause requires a State to obtain a grand-jury indictment before prosecuting a person for a capital or otherwise serious crime.

Holding

No. Due process of law under the Fourteenth Amendment does not require States to use a grand jury, and California could prosecute Hurtado by information after a preliminary examination before a magistrate.

Reasoning

The Court began with the Constitution’s text. The Fifth Amendment expressly requires a presentment or indictment by a grand jury for federal capital or otherwise infamous crimes and then separately provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Reading those clauses together, the Court concluded that “due process of law” does not itself, by its own force, include the grand-jury requirement. When the Fourteenth Amendment reused the same phrase to restrain the States without expressly mentioning grand juries, it carried no broader requirement.

The Court rejected the argument that due process freezes every procedural protection recognized in English common law at the founding. Magna Carta’s phrase “law of the land” protects against arbitrary governmental action, but it does not constitutionally preserve every historic form of procedure. A contrary rule would make legal institutions incapable of adaptation and improvement as society changes.

Murray’s Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co. did not compel a different result. That case recognized that a procedure supported by long-settled English and American usage may qualify as due process, but it did not establish historical acceptance as the exclusive test. History can validate a challenged procedure; it does not prevent legislatures from adopting other procedures that preserve fundamental liberty and justice.

Due process requires more than a legislative command dressed up as law. It excludes special, partial, and arbitrary exercises of power, such as bills of attainder, legislative judgments, and confiscatory acts directed at particular persons. But a State retains substantial authority to establish general rules of judicial procedure, so long as those rules afford the essential protections of a lawful and fair process.

Issue #2

Whether California’s information procedure, including a preliminary examination and later jury trial, provided sufficient process before Hurtado could be tried and sentenced to death.

Holding

Yes. California’s procedure preserved the substantive protections required by due process and therefore supported Hurtado’s conviction.

Reasoning

California’s information could be filed only after a magistrate examined the accusation and committed the defendant upon a finding of probable guilt. At that preliminary stage, the accused had the assistance of counsel and could cross-examine the prosecution’s witnesses. These protections supplied a judicial check against an unsupported accusation before the State put the defendant to trial.

The information procedure was only the method of initiating the prosecution; it did not itself produce a final judgment. Any conviction still had to result from a regular judicial trial conducted in the same manner as a trial begun by indictment. Because the process gave Hurtado notice, an opportunity to defend, and a trial before a competent court, the Court held that substituting an information for a grand-jury indictment did not deny due process.

Dissents

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment imposed on the States the same basic understanding of due process that constrained the federal government under the Fifth Amendment. In his view, the phrase derived from Magna Carta’s “law of the land” and had to be interpreted through the settled English and American legal practices that the founding generation treated as fundamental safeguards of liberty.

Under those settled practices, Harlan argued, no person could be required to answer for a capital crime on an information alone. English authorities, including Blackstone, treated grand-jury accusation as indispensable in capital cases, even though informations could be used for lesser offenses. The grand jury was therefore not a dispensable procedural detail but a historic protection against being publicly accused and tried for one’s life on an unfounded charge.

Harlan rejected the majority’s textual inference from the Fifth Amendment’s separate grand-jury clause. Specific constitutional guarantees, such as protection against double jeopardy and compelled self-incrimination, could be stated expressly even if they also reflected the broader security supplied by due process. Their express enumeration did not show that they fell outside the fundamental protections of the law of the land.

The grand jury, Harlan emphasized, protects citizens from malicious, partisan, and oppressive prosecutions by government officers or private enemies. He also noted that, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, every State either expressly or effectively barred capital prosecutions by information. To exclude that protection from due process, he warned, gave States power to discard safeguards that Anglo-American law had long considered essential to personal liberty.