Concept
Independent State Grounds
The “adequate and independent state ground”
Independent State Grounds
Adequacy asks whether a state ground fully supports the judgment without conflicting with federal law. Independence, the second requirement, asks where the state ground gets its content: an independent ground is one that is not based on the state court's understanding of federal law.1 The requirement reduces to one diagnostic question. If the Supreme Court were to correct the state court's view of federal law, would the state ground survive? A ground that would survive is independent, so the judgment stands on it whatever the Court says about the federal question. A ground that would collapse along with the federal ruling is not independent, and a reversal on the federal point can then change the result.2
The reason for the requirement follows from the reason for the bar itself. The Court declines to review a federal ruling only because reversing it could not alter the judgment, and that is true only when the state ground rests on state law in its own right.3 A state court may interpret its own constitution out of a desire to mirror a comparable federal provision. In that event a mistake about federal law undermines both the federal ground and the state ground, because the state holding was derived from the federal one.4 The two alternative holdings are then a single holding stated twice, and correcting the federal half brings down the other half with it. This situation is sometimes called conscious decisional dependence, because the state court's view of state law depends on what it believes federal law requires or permits.5 An incentive concern points the same way. If a citation to the state constitution were enough, a state court could shield any federal-law decision from correction by pairing it with a state-law label, and federal errors would become uncorrectable whenever they traveled in that company. Requiring genuine independence keeps the bar from becoming a loophole.
The Court has found independence missing in several settings. In Foster v. Chatman it held that a state-law ground is not independent when applying the state rule depends on federal constitutional precedent.6 The Georgia courts there had examined the defendant's jury-selection claim while deciding whether res judicata barred it, which cast doubt on the independence of the procedural ground.7 In Hawaii v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs the state ground failed because the state court described its decision as dictated by federal law.8 In Ohio v. Reiner the Court took jurisdiction because the state court's interpretation of state law had been influenced by its interpretation of the Fifth Amendment.9 In all three the federal question helped produce the state-law result, so a correction on the federal question could change the state-law result too. They differ in how the dependence showed itself: through reliance on federal precedent in applying the state rule, through the court's own statement that federal law compelled the outcome, and through a federal ruling that shaped the reading of state law.
The death-penalty illustration from the previous section shows how the question is answered on an actual opinion. Abbey Jones was sentenced to death, and the state supreme court held the sentence invalid under both the Eighth Amendment and a similar provision of the state constitution. The state ground was adequate because it adds to Jones's rights. Now give that court an opinion that relies primarily on prior U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Eighth Amendment, cites only a few state death-penalty cases, and concludes that the sentence violated both the federal and state constitutions.10 The state petitions for certiorari, and the question is whether the judgment rests on an adequate and independent state ground. The opinion supports two readings, and the answer depends on how the state court used the federal cases.
On the first reading, the heavy reliance on Eighth Amendment decisions shows that the court read its own clause in light of its understanding of federal law and treated the state provision as a mirror of the federal one. If the Supreme Court concluded that the Eighth Amendment allows this sentence, the premise of the state holding would disappear, and the state ground would fall because the two grounds were inextricably linked.11 The ground is then not independent, and the Court may hear the case.
On the second reading, the court cited the federal cases only because it thought they reinforced its reading of the state clause, with no aim of making the state clause track the federal one. That court would presumably have reached the same conclusion under its own constitution even if it had been mistaken about the Eighth Amendment. The ground is then independent, and because it adds rights and is therefore adequate, the Court cannot review the case.12 The two readings differ in the job the federal cases performed: they were either the foundation of the state holding or a supporting voice for a holding built on state law.
Decided cases mark the same two poles. In Delaware v. Prouse the Delaware Supreme Court had previously said that any Fourth Amendment violation necessarily violated the cognate state provision, and it had described that provision as substantially similar to the Fourth Amendment. The Court concluded that the state court did not intend to rest its decision independently on the state constitution and took jurisdiction.14 The second of those observations carries the weight. The first amounts to little more than a recognition of the Supremacy Clause, while calling the state clause a near twin of the federal one shows that the state court used the federal provision as its model.15 Other states have said expressly that a provision mirroring federal language nonetheless gives broader protection, and in that case the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction, since a state may restrain its officials more strictly than the federal Constitution does.16 A state court that cites federal cases the way it would cite the decisions of any other jurisdiction, as persuasive guidance, likewise leaves the independence of its ground intact.17
The opinion in Michigan v. Long showed the dependent pattern. The Michigan Supreme Court held a vehicle search invalid under both the Fourth Amendment and the state constitution, but apart from two citations to the state constitution it relied exclusively on its understanding of Terry v. Ohio and other federal cases, and it cited no state case for its holding.18 The Supreme Court was unconvinced that the decision rested on an independent state ground, because the references to the state constitution in no way indicated that the result was independent of the court's reading of federal law.19 Students lose this issue when they treat a citation to the state constitution as enough, since the question is whether the state ground would survive a correction of federal law. The same point applies when a state wants to give more protection than the federal Constitution does. It must do so under its own constitution and laws, interpreted entirely independently of federal law, and it may not read the federal Constitution to demand more than the Supreme Court has prescribed.20
Independence also feeds back into the first requirement. A state ground that would fall with the federal ruling does not fully sustain the result, so a state ground that is not independent of federal law cannot be adequate.21 That is why the Jones opinion, adequate in the abstract because a state may add rights, still fails on the first reading. One refinement concerns a state that adopts federal law by reference. When California exempted federal government departments from its motor vehicle fuel tax, it implicitly adopted federal law on what counts as a department, and the Court held it could review the state's interpretation because federal law does not lose its federal character merely because a state adopts it.22
Step two supplies the evidence and step three supplies the answer, and the evidence in step two is often mixed. Opinions that cite both state and federal law frequently do not say which reading the state court intended, and for that situation the Court adopted the presumption announced in Michigan v. Long, which the next section takes up.23