Writer: Matt Rigby
Editor: Amalia Laskaris
March 24, 2024
The current structure of the United States federal and circuit court system has incited issues of ambiguous and conflicting rulings in instances of “circuit splits” which is defined by the Legal Information Institute (LII) of Cornell Law as “when two or more circuits in the U.S. Court of Appeals reach different decisions on the same legal issue.” This disunity means that interpretation of laws is applied differently in different regional courts, and leads to conflicting rulings on appeals of a similar nature brought forth in various jurisdictions. The application of the law is designed to be uniform and standardized across federal jurisdictions; circuit court splits undermine this uniformity and create substantial issues when applying federal law to cases heard in district courts of appeals and cause ambiguity in establishing accepted precedents.
The early structure of the United States Judiciary System, as established by Article III of the U.S. Constitution, depends on the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution and conduct judicial reviews of legislative acts as they relate to the written laws of the United States. According to Article III, the implementation of lower federal courts was to be considered by Congress and adjusted as the country further expanded and progressed. In 1789, Senator Oliver Ellisworth of Connecticut, among others, exercised this judgment when he authored the Judiciary Act of 1789 which established the jurisdiction of the federal court system and introduced the position of attorney general. The act, signed into effect by President George Washington on September 24th, 1789, granted jurisdiction to the district and lower circuit courts while retaining the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction and appellate jurisdiction in the case of a ruling in a lower court conflicting with Federal law. This stipulation should have, in theory, standardized law and remedied instances where lower courts produced either multiple different rulings or conflicting rulings with previously established federal legislation. With the exception of minor changes and amendments, this structure has largely been retained and continues to be the status quo in contemporary America. The current protocol to remedy this split is for the Supreme Court to weigh in and hear cases to implement a unified interpretation of the law that then becomes binding in all lower courts. However, the purpose of lower courts was to lift the judicial burden off the Supreme Court so instances of splits become counterintuitive to what the court structure hopes to accomplish with lower-level courts.
A recent appeals split that gained traction in federal courts compares a Ninth Circuit case, United States v. Velarde-Gomez, 269 F.3d 1023 (9th Cir. 2001) which ruled that Mr. Velarde-Gomez’s silence during an arrest prior to the reading of his Miranda rights is inadmissible on the part of the prosecution as it violates his constitutional right and a later, Eighth Circuit case, United States v. Osuna-Zepeda, 416 F.3d 838 (8th Cir. 2005) which held that pre-Miranda silence is acceptable evidence for the prosecution to comment on during the course of a trial to establish a picture. This discrepancy in ruling by each respective circuit is an illustration of the way in which circuit splits are present. There is now a blatant difference in rulings for litigants of a similar situation depending on the district they are tried in, and this creates serious problems in standardizing federal law and ensuring uniformity in the courts. A similar case settled in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Commonwealth v. Rivera, 22 MAP 2022, turned the issue in the direction of the Supreme Court for review. The Court acknowledged the ambiguity from court to court with the introduction of a defendant's silence in the prosecutor’s case yet maintained that this particular case was not a candidate to set future precedent for federal law, writing “We need not square the circle here.” This neglect by the Supreme Court to create a uniform ruling on this matter is just one example of the perpetuating concerns with circuit splits and allowing flaws in our justice system to further become exposed.
Despite its relative success over time, the circuit system as it stands today opens the door for damaging indecisions and the mishandling of justice across cases. The discrepancies from circuit to circuit hinder the Supreme Court's model of unified justice under federal laws and precedent needs to be set to amend this continuous issue.
References
“Circuit Split.” Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute, July 2022,
Cohen, Johnathan M, and Daniel S Cohen . “Iron-ing out Circuit Splits: A Proposal for the
Use of the Irons Procedure to Prevent and Resolve Circuit Splits Among United States Courts of Appeals.” Berkeley Law Journal , vol. 108, no. 989, 2020, pp. 1–1010.
Mangino, Matthew T. “Recent PA.. Supreme Court Case Tackles Pre-Arrest and Post-Arrest
Silence.” The Legal Intelligencer, 7 Sept. 2023, www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2023/09/07/recent-pa-supreme-court-case-tackles-pre-arrest-and-post-arrest-silence/.
“US 9th Circuit Opinions and Cases | Findlaw.” CaseLaw, July 2017,
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