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First opinion of Roberts Court is a win for a criminal defendant! On habeas!

By Douglas Berman

Thanks to a tip from my colleague, I discovered that the very first official opinion from the Roberts Court was handed down today in Dye v. Hofbauer, No. 04-8384 (S. Ct. Oct. 11, 2005) (available here). Criminal defendants will surely hope this decision is a sign of things to come: in Dye, the Supreme Court in a brief per curiam opinion grants review and summarily reverses a Sixth Circuit panel decision to deny habeas relief and thereby reinstates the federal habeas petition of a Michigan man convicted of murder in state court.

The procedural particulars of Dye are complicated, but this summary reversal ultimately reveals some real ugliness in the way the Sixth Circuit handled this habeas petition (and perhaps others) .  Dye also raises interesting questions about Chief Judge Roberts’ involvement in the decision.  My (uniformed) guess is that the decision in Dye might have been (tentatively) reached in a conference led by Justice Stevens before CJ Roberts officially joined the Court last Monday.  But, notably, the per curiam Dye opinion does not have any notation indicating that the Chief did not participate. 

So, when playing the “law nerd” version of Trivial Pursuit, remember that the question “Who prevailed in the first written decision of the Roberts Court?,” should be answered “convicted murderer Paul Allen Dye.”

FOLLOW-UP:  I received an interesting e-mail which, based on the docket sheet entries in Dye, had this to say about my speculation about who was involved in the decision-making in this case:

Your blog speculates that the decision to reverse summarily in Dye v. Hofbauer was first reached at a conference presided over by Justice Stevens.  It is actually more likely that the decision to reverse summarily was tentatively reached at a conference presided over by Chief Justice Rehnquist on June 16, 2005, and firmed up over the summer after the Court received the full record June 23, 2005, and July 12, 2005 (with the author of the per curiam opinion — which stylistic cues suggest may have been Justice Kennedy — drafting over the summer). It is certainly the case that Chief Justice Roberts signed onto the opinion after the vast majority of the Court’s consideration was already complete.