Darr v. Burford, Warden (339 U.S. 200)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided April 3, 1950 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 339 U.S. 200 · 70 S. Ct. 587
- Decided
- April 3, 1950
- Term
- October Term 1949
- Vote
- 5–3
- Majority author
- Justice Reed
- Issue area
- Judicial Power
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
- Precedent
- This decision overruled or formally altered earlier precedent
Opinion excerpt
Mr. Justice Reed delivered the opinion of the Court. Petitioner Darr, an inmate of the Oklahoma state penitentiary, has been denied federal habeas corpus for failure to exhaust his other available remedies. Petitioner’s omission to apply here for certiorari from the state court’s denial of habeas corpus was held an error, fatal to consideration on the merits. Therefore the merits of petitioner’s claims of imprisonment in violation of the Constitution are not before us. The petition for certiorari requires us to pass solely upon the correctness of the lower court’s view that ordinarily a petition for certiorari must be made to this Court from a state court’s refusal of collateral relief before a federal district court will consider an application for habeas corpus on its merits. Petitioner was serving a term in the Oklahoma state penitentiary when, on November 28, 1930, he was summoned to appear in another Oklahoma county to plead to two separate charges of armed bank robbery. In January of 1931, he was tried by jury, and convicted on the first charge; petitioner then pleaded guilty to the second. He was sentenced to two terms of forty years each, to run consecutively, and the first sentence is now being served. No appeal from the conviction was taken, but in 1947 petitioner applied to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals for habeas corpus. Judging only from the state…
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