Supposed you are convicted of a felony and serve a year or two in jail, then get out and move on with your life. A few years after the SCOTUS decides the law you were convicted of violating was unconstitutional. Does this mean that you are no longer considered a felon, and get back all your rights like voting and owning a firearm?
I tried to google this but was getting nothing but false hits, so we’ll have to wait for the real lawyers to show up. In the meantime, though, I imagine that the policy governing this situation would look at a couple of things:
(1) the fact that the law has been found to be bad, and therefore repealed–which obviously would be in the convict’s favor
(2) but also the fact that he or she broke the law at all. We’re expected to obey laws when they are on the books, even if they are ill-conceived, and work through the system to change or repeal them.
I don’t know what the end result of this calculation works out to be.
If the law that you broke to become a felon is unconstitutional, the appellate court states that your conviction is reversed and remanded (or vacated and remanded) to the the trial court for “further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.” Since your old felony conviction was reversed and/or vacated and there’s no law to retry you on, there’s no felony conviction.
However, having your felony conviction vacated is a different matter from having your arrest record expunged, which courts have sometimes called a “judicial editing of history.” On the federal level, even an acquittal doesn’t mandate an expungement. If your sentence was vacated on constitutional grounds, a federal district court may expunge your records upon your motion, but doesn’t have to.
no more comments on this one?
So what happened to the huge number of people who were arrested and imprisoned under the “Volstead Act” (national prohibition of alcohol, from 1919-1932). Were they rehabilitated? heck, my grandfather was busted in 1924 for buying a bottle of liquor-were his arrest records expunged?
I know I’m really hanging my neck out here, so DON’T assume this is valid…but I’m thinking that the Volstead Act was repealed, not declared unconstitutional?
If so, that is a different situation than the one pravnik and Spectre were talking about.
But let tose more knowledgeable than I give you the Straight Dope on this one!
But, since the SCOTUS doesn’t have original jurisdiction over most cases, don’t you usually have to break the law in order to have standing with the court to challenge the Constitutionality of the law?
Exactly. This is why South Dakota passed such a restrictive abortion law. Unlike some countries, the Supreame Court will not issue advisory opinons. Only real ones.
Yeah prohibition was repealed so I would think that folks might have been released from jail but the convictions would stay on the record. After all it was never ruled unconstitutional. Nor could it be since it was in the constitution.
I doubt they would have been let out of jail. There are people still serving very long jail sentences for marijuana convictions, that would not be imposed today.
I don’t get it. Did the Federal Government just legalize marijuana?
Well, an act of Congress was required in order to punish anyone for making, selling, or transporting liquor because the amendment didn’t specify any punishment. A law implementing the amendment could have hypothetically declared unconstitutional if it violated some other part of the constitution, such as the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Isn’t it also true that an amendment isn’t a law and must be followed up by passing a law in order to make the subject of the amendment illegal?
No, the Constitution, including amendments, is by its own explicit definition the supreme law of the land. But it tends to state things in general terms, which is understandable in view of what it is. So laws implementing its provisions are regularly a part of what enacting and ratifying an amendment entails.
Some amendments are self-empowering, like the 17th. It defined that senators would be directly elected by popular vote. No enabling act was required.
But the majority of Amendments include a section or clause: “The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Amendments 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 24, and 26 all have this clause or the same content in revised wording.
It’s possible you are regarding “law” in the sense of penal statute. The only crime defined in the Constitution is treason. To take any other action made improper by the Constitution is not, in the strict sense, a criminal act by virtue of the Constitution itself, and requires a law saying, “A person is guilty of X when he intentionally and criminally does Y in violation of the provisions of the Constitution” to turn it into a crime. There is actually a section somewhere early in the U.S. Code that provides that wilfully depriving someone else of his rights under the Constitution is a crime.
I would respectfully disagree: enabling legislation was required. Each state would have to amend their electoral laws to provide mechanisms for the election of senators, primaries in senate elections, and so on.
No, this is not correct, as explained in this recent thread: Do you have to break a law before challenging a law? There are ways to challenge a law without breaking it. It’s widely expected that such challenges will be used in the case of the South Dakota law, including a request to enjoin the state from enforcing it while the challenges wend their way through the court system. My own guess would be that they would have one of the doctors who flys into South Dakota to perform abortions be the lead plaintiff, alleging that the law will interfere with his/her constitutional rights.
Oh, and by the way - operating in a legal system where advisory opinions are an important part of the judicial system, I can advise that they are very real, thank you very much.
I think what askeptic is talking about is when someone is convicted for, say, 10 years, then the law is changed for that particular crime to allow only 1 year sentences max. Although the crime is not made a non-crime, the long sentence would seem to be unfair.
IANAL, but it would seem that such an incarcerated person would have to appeal to the court for a sentence reduction (I doubt that it’s automatic), and, mercifully, it would be granted.
In the end its still apples and oranges. With drug laws, even if punishments are less serious than in the past, I would think they would stand up. You might get paroled if the state now thinks that you have served your time. But you might not. That’s unfortunate, but when you commit a crime, you may be at the mercy of the laws on the books when you commit the crime, assuming its constitutionally upheld.
Nor do I think that everyone would have been let out after prohibition. A lot of folks in prison in those days may have been more serious criminals just serving time on bootlegging offenses. So parole boards and governors may have frowned on giving early release or commutations even if their crime was no longer a crime. Whoever mentioned