Rogers V. Tennessee - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

The Court evaluated this case under the rubric of due process rather than the limitations on ex post facto lawmaking present in the Constitution. This is so because the Ex Post Facto Clause limits only legislative actions rather than judicial decisions. However, limitations on ex post facto judicial decisionmaking are inherent in the notions of due process. For instance, in Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347 (1964), the Court had held that due process forbade applying a novel interpretation of South Carolina's criminal trespassing statute to a criminal defendant who had no prior warning that the statute might be interpreted in a manner adverse to the defendant.

Bouie and subsequent cases applying Bouie made clear that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not incorporate the Ex Post Facto guarantee against the states in any particular manner. The rationale of Bouie rested on "core due process concepts of notice, foreseeability, and, in particular, the right to fair warning as those concepts bear on the constitutionality of attaching criminal penalties to what previously had been innocent conduct." Although the Due Process and Ex Post Facto Clauses might protect against common interests, to elide the distinction between the two as set forth in Bouie would be to ignore the textual differences between the clauses as well as the contextual differences between legislative and judicial lawmaking. Put another way, imposing a strict prohibition against ex post facto lawmaking on common law courts would deprive such courts of the ability to interpret the law in a manner consistent with settled expectations of parties before it who live in the modern world.

Common law courts at the time of the framing undoubtedly believed that they were finding rather than making law. But, however one characterizes their actions, the fact of the matter is that common law courts then, as now, were deciding cases, and in doing so were fashioning and refining the law as it then existed in light of reason and experience. Due process clearly did not prohibit this process of judicial evolution at the time of the framing, and it does not do so today.

Rogers should have anticipated that the year-and-a-day rule might no longer exist under modern circumstances. Thirteenth century medical science was not capable of determining the cause of death beyond a reasonable doubt after a significant amount of time had elapsed following the ultimately fatal blow. For this reason, the year-and-a-day rule served as a kind of limitation period on murder prosecutions. However, as medical science has advanced, forensic scientists have been able to determine the cause of a person's death later and later after the fatal event occurs. "For this reason, the year and a day rule has been legislatively or judicially abolished in the vast majority of jurisdictions recently to have addressed the issue," as the Tennessee Supreme Court observed. This pervasive change in the law should have put Rogers on notice that, although the rule had not been formally abolished in Tennessee, it was clearly moribund in 1994 in American law generally and Tennessee law specifically. Accordingly, it was hardly unexpected and indefensible for the Tennessee Supreme Court, while considering an appeal from Rogers's own conviction, to first formally abolish the rule and then to apply that decision retroactively to his own case.