Rehnquist Says New Cases Tax Federal Courts

The federal courts are in danger of being overwhelmed if Congress persists in assigning U.S. judges the responsibility for handling new cases involving guns, drug murders and sexual assaults, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said Tuesday in a year-end report.

Rehnquist, a former Phoenix attorney, compared the federal court system to a Western desert town facing overdevelopment amid a water shortage.

“In that situation, we must conserve water, not think of building new subdivisions,” he said.

Most criminal cases have “traditionally been reserved to state courts,” while the federal courts have been reserved for “issues where important national interests predominate,” he said.

Yet, Congress in the past year has created a new federal death penalty for dozens of crimes. Moreover, it seriously considered measures that would have made it a federal crime to commit murder with a gun and that would have given female rape victims a right to file civil suits in federal courts against their attackers.

Both measures, though well-intentioned, would send tens of thousands of new cases into the already overburdened U.S. court system and erode its ability to handle disputes fairly and expeditiously, the chief justice said.

The two measures did not become law “but could resurface when that legislation is reconsidered in 1992,” Rehnquist said. “I urge Congress to consider the serious implications to the federal courts.” Congress, he declared, should not expand federal court jurisdiction to “intrude into areas of the law that have traditionally been reserved to state courts.”

The proposed murder-with-a-firearm bill would have meant the “federalization of virtually all murders,” he said. The proposal to allow federal civil suits for sexual assault victims “would involve the federal courts in a whole host of domestic relations disputes,” he said.

The chief justice recommended “modest curtailment” rather than expansion of federal court jurisdiction.

In addition to asking that the federal courts not be given new duties, the chief justice renewed his request to Congress to limit the ability of state Death Row inmates to repeatedly appeal their cases in federal courts. The Supreme Court recently limited the inmates’ rights to file habeas corpus petitions and Rehnquist urged Congress to enact into law a bill that would give such inmates one chance--and one chance only--to appeal in the federal courts.

“Unless actions are taken to reverse current trends or slow them down considerably, the federal courts of the future will be dramatically changed,” he said. Judges will not neither be able to spend much time on cases nor feel the same “sense of personal responsibility and accountability for the work they produce. Unless checked, the result will be a degradation in the high quality of justice the nation has long expected of the federal courts.”

The chief justice said that adding more judges is not the solution to the judicial system’s problems. “Although the provision of some additional judicial resources is necessary in the short run, the long-term implications of expanding the federal judiciary should give everyone pause,” he said.

The federal courts now have 649 trial judges and 179 appeals court judges. The 1992 budget for the judiciary is $2.3 billion.

Workloads for federal trial judges actually declined in 1991, Rehnquist reported.

The year-end report noted that the fastest-growing types of cases include fraud related to the savings and loan crisis (up 21% in 1991) and personal bankruptcy filings (up 23%). At year’s end, the number of personal bankruptcy cases pending in the federal courts reached 1.1 million, the report said.

Criminal case filings fell 4%, the first drop in more than 10 years. Civil, or non-criminal, case filings in federal trial courts also declined in 1991, by 5% to 208,000.