Harvey V. Horan - The Appeal

The Appeal

On September 26, 2001, Horan's lawyer, Jack L. Gould, appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He contended that § 1983 was not an appropriate vehicle for Harvey’s action. He stated that the procedural flaws in the claim required that it be dismissed because it was really a successive petition for a writ of habeas corpus and an attempt to get around strict rules and deadlines.

On January 23, 2002, the court concluded that Harvey's rights had not been violated and that the lower court had erred in its decision. Fourth Circuit Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote the opinion, in which Judge Niemeyer joined. Judge King wrote a concurring opinion.

The majority opinion stated that the claim was, in effective, a petition for a writ of habeas corpus brought without leave of court. According to a previous case, Heck v. Humphrey (1994), a convicted criminal defendant cannot bring a § 1983 action that would "necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence" unless the defendant can prove that his "conviction or sentence has already been invalidated." In this decision, the Supreme Court found that civil tort actions are "not appropriate vehicles for challenging the validity of outstanding criminal judgments." As such, the majority opinion in the appeal overturned the lower court's ruling because it found that Harvey had substantively failed to make a claim under § 1983. Judge Wilkinson wrote that Harvey had attempted to circumvent habeas corpus requirements, which required exhaustion of remedies at the state level before moving to the federal level. By bringing his claim directly to federal court under § 1983, Harvey had violated procedure:

While we agree with Harvey that the question of guilt or innocence lies at the heart of the criminal justice system, we also believe that the proper process for raising violations of constitutional rights in criminal proceedings cannot be abandoned. Because the substance of a claim cannot be severed from the proper manner of presenting it, we find Harvey’s § 1983 action to be deficient.

The opinion went on to state that Harvey's action under § 1983 "sought to invalidate a final state conviction whose lawfulness has in no way been impugned". Harvey claimed that he was challenging neither the fact nor the duration of his confinement, pointing out that he merely seeks evidence which could also prove his guilt. The court found this argument to be an evasion, saying, "He is trying to use a § 1983 action as a discovery device to overturn his state conviction". The majority opinion asserted that the finality of convictions could not be challenged by advances in technology:

The possibility of post-conviction developments, whether in law or science, is simply too great to justify judicially sanctioned constitutional attacks upon final criminal judgments. …Establishing a constitutional due process right under § 1983 to retest evidence with each forward step in forensic science would leave perfectly valid judgments in a perpetually unsettled state.

According to the majority opinion, the only purpose of Harvey's claim was to challenge his conviction based on evidence that was available to him at the time of his trial. As such, the court concluded that Harvey's rights had not been violated by Horan. The court also stated that Harvey could only make his claim in habeas corpus, but that even if he had the court would be forced to dismiss it, for he had already filed such a petition in federal court.

Circuit Judge King concurred in part and in judgment with the majority decision. While he agreed that the lower court's decision was incorrect, he also contended that Harvey's claim could properly be brought under § 1983. The judge stated that the act of providing Harvey access to evidence did not alone necessarily imply the invalidity of Harvey's conviction. King agrees with Harvey's attorney, Peter J. Neufeld, that the evidence could indeed inculpate Harvey and thus that § 1983 was a proper vehicle for bringing the action. However, King determined that since the material had been available to him at trial and since he had not been denied access to the legal system or evidence known to be exculpatory, Harvey did not have a legal claim to discover evidence under Brady v. Maryland. He stated that Harvey's claim was invalid not because he violated procedure, but because he could not prove that a state actor deprived him of a federally protected right.