Due Process and Supremacy as Foundations for the Adequacy Rule: The Remains of Federalism after Wilbur v. Mullaney

Stillman E. Wilbur, Jr., was found guilty of murder by a jury in a Maine Superior Court and appealed, contending that the trial judge's instructions violated due process. In essence, the trial court instructed the jury that if it were satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Wilbur had committed a voluntary and intentional killing, malice aforethought was presumed, and therefore, the defendant would be guilty of murder unless he established by a preponderance of the evidence that he had killed in the heat of passion upon sudden provocation, in which case the jury could find him guilty of manslaughter. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction. Wilbur petitioned for habeas corpus in the federal district court. The district court rejected the Maine court's interpretation of its own law on murder, found that murder and manslaughter were crimes, not punishment categories, and concluded that malice aforethought was a fact necessary to constitute the crime of murder. The First Circuit affirmed and elaborated upon the grounds set forth by the district court. The more intricate—and important—question provoked by the sequence of Wilbur cases centers not upon the final resolution of the uncertainties in Maine law, but upon the final resolver of those uncertainties. This difficult issue can be framed very narrowly: when can a federal court on habeas reject a state court's interpretation of state substantive law and substitute another construction? In this regard, the First Circuit's sortie into Maine law reveals two recurrent problem areas of our federalism: the proper role of federal habeas corpus in protecting the rights of state prisoners and the extent to which a federal court must defer to a state court's interpretation of state substantive law.