SPENCER V. KEMNA

Spencer V. Kemna

Spencer V. Kemna

On October 17, 1990, petitioner began serving concurrent 3-year sentences for convictions of felony stealing and burglary, due to expire on October 16, 1993. On April 16, 1992, he was released on parole, but on September 24, 1992, that parole was revoked and he was returned to prison. Thereafter, he sought to invalidate the parole revocation, first filing habeas petitions in state court, and then the present federal habeas petition. Before the District Court addressed the merits of the habeas petition, petitioner's sentence expired, and so the District Court dismissed the petition as moot. The Eighth Circuit affirmed.

Held: The expiration of petitioner's sentence has caused his petition to be moot because it no longer presents an Article III case or controversy.

(a) An incarcerated convict's (or a parolee's) challenge to his conviction always satisfies the case-or-controversy requirement because the incarceration (or the restriction imposed by the terms of parole) constitutes a concrete injury caused by the conviction and redressable by the conviction's invalidation. Once the sentence has expired, however, the petitioner must show some concrete and continuing injury other than the now-ended incarceration (or parole)—some “collateral consequence”

of the conviction—if the suit is to be maintained. In recent decades, this Court has presumed that a wrongful conviction has continuing simply erects a gateway through which parties may pass into federal court; once they have entered, it does not restrict the legal landscape they may traverse. Thus if, in the course of deciding whether a plaintiff is entitled to relief for the defendant's alleged violation of a contract, the defendant interposes the affirmative defense that the contract was invalid, the court may, consistent with § 301(a), adjudicate that defense. Similarly, a declaratory judgment plaintiff accused of violating a collective-bargaining agreement may ask

a court to declare the agreement invalid. But in these cases,

the federal court's power to adjudicate the contract's validity

is ancillary to, and not independent of, its power to adjudicate

“[s]uits for violation of contracts.”

This would seem to be the end of the matter. Here, the Union neither alleges that Textron has violated the contract, nor seeks declaratory relief from its own alleged violation. Indeed, as far as the Union's complaint discloses, both parties are in absolute compliance with the terms of the collectivebargaining agreement. Section 301(a) jurisdiction does not lie over such a case.

The Union, however, asserts that the outcome is altered by the fact that it seeks relief pursuant to the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U. S. C. § 2201. It argues that in order to determine whether § 301(a) jurisdiction lies over the declaratory-judgment aspect of its suit, we must look to the character of the threatened action to which its suit would interpose a defense, which in this case would be Textron's action for breach of the collective-bargaining agreement. It relies on our decision in Skelly Oil Co. v. Phillips Petroleum se, and Stephen D. Hawke, Stacy L. Anderson, and Michael J. Spillane, Assistant Attorneys ...