Harvey F. Garlotte v. Kirk Fordice, Governor of Mississippi (515 U.S. 39)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided May 30, 1995 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 515 U.S. 39 · 115 S. Ct. 1948
- Decided
- May 30, 1995
- Term
- October Term 1994
- Vote
- 7–2
- Majority author
- Justice Ginsburg
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Ginsburg delivered the opinion of the Court. To petition a federal court for habeas corpus relief from a state-court conviction, the applicant must be “in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.” 28 U. S. C. § 2254(a); see also 28 U. S. C. § 2241(c)(3). In Peyton v. Rowe, 391 U. S. 54 (1968), we held that the governing federal prescription permits prisoners incarcerated under consecutive state-court sentences to apply for federal habeas relief from sentences they had not yet begun to serve. We said in Peyton that, for purposes of habeas relief, consecutive sentences should be treated as a continuous series; a prisoner is “in custody in violation of the Constitution,” we explained, “if any consecutive sentence [the prisoner is] scheduled to serve was imposed as the result of a deprivation of constitutional rights.” Id., at 64-65. The case before us is appropriately described as Peyton’s complement, or Peyton in reverse. Like the habeas petitioners in Peyton, petitioner Harvey Garlotte is incarcerated under consecutive sentences. Unlike the Peyton petitioners, however, Garlotte does not challenge a conviction underlying a sentence yet to be served. Instead, Garlotte seeks to attack a conviction underlying the sentence that ran first in a consecutive seríes, a sentence already served, but one that nonetheless persists to…
Excerpt of a 13,610-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.