Fay v. Noia

Mr. Justice Brennan delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case presents important questions touching the federal habeas corpus jurisdiction, 28 U. S. C. §§ 2241 et seq., in its relation to state criminal justice. The narrow question is whether the respondent Noia may be granted federal habeas corpus relief from imprisonment under a New York conviction now admitted by the State to rest upon a confession obtained from him in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, after he was denied state post-conviction relief because the coerced confession claim had been decided against him at the trial and Noia had allowed the time for a direct appeal to lapse without seeking review by a state appellate court.

Noia was convicted in 1942 with Santo Caminito and Frank Bonino in the County Court of Kings County, New York, of a felony murder in the shooting and killing of one Hammeroff during the commission of a robbery. [*395] The sole evidence against each defendant was his signed confession. Caminito and Bonino, but not Noia, appealed their convictions to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. These appeals were unsuccessful, but subsequent legal proceedings resulted in the releases of Caminito and Bonino on findings that their confessions had been coerced and their convictions therefore procured in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.[1] Although it has been stipulated that the coercive nature [*396] of Noia’s confession was also established,[2] the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York held in Noia’s federal habeas corpus proceeding that because of his failure to appeal he must be denied relief under the provision of 28 U. S. C. § 2254 whereby “An application for a writ of habeas corpus in behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted unless it appears that the applicant has exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State . . . .” 183 F. Supp. 222 (1960).[3] The Court of [*397] Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, one judge dissenting, and ordered that Noia’s conviction be set aside and that he be discharged from custody unless given a new trial forthwith. 300 F. 2d 345 (1962). The Court of Appeals questioned whether § 2254 barred relief on federal habeas corpus where the applicant had failed to exhaust state remedies no longer available to him at the time the habeas proceeding was commenced (here a direct appeal from the conviction), but held that in any event exceptional circumstances were present which excused compliance with the section. The court also rejected other arguments advanced in support of the proposition that the federal remedy was unavailable to Noia. The first was that the denial of state post-conviction coram nobis relief on the ground of Noia’s failure to appeal barred habeas relief because such failure consti [*398] tuted an adequate and independent state ground of decision, such that this Court on direct review of the state coram nobis proceedings would have declined to adjudicate the federal questions presented. In rejecting this argument, the court — while expressing the view that “[j]ust as it would be an encroachment on the prerogatives of the state for the Supreme Court upon direct review to disregard the state ground, equally — if not more so— would it be a trespass against the state for a lower federal court, upon a petition for habeas corpus, to disregard the state ground in granting relief to the prisoner,” 300 F. 2d, at 359 — held that the exceptional circumstances excusing compliance with § 2254 also established that Noia’s failure to appeal was not a state procedural ground adequate to bar the federal habeas remedy: “The coincidence of these factors: the undisputed violation of a significant constitutional right, the knowledge of this violation brought home to the federal court at the incipiency of the habeas corpus proceeding so forcibly that the state made no effort to contradict it, and the freedom the relator’s codefendants now have by virtue of their vindications of the identical constitutional right leads us to conclude that the state procedural ground, that of a simple failure to appeal, reasonable enough to prevent federal judicial intervention in most cases, is in this particular case unreasonable and inadequate.” 300 F. 2d, at 362. The second argument was that Noia’s failure to appeal was to be deemed a waiver of his claim that he had been unconstitutionally convicted. The Court of Appeals rejected this argument on the ground that no waiver could be inferred in the circumstances. Id., at 351-352.