Soulia v. O'brien, Warden

WOODBURY, Circuit Judge

(concurring).

A careful reading of the application for writ of habeas corpus discloses nothing to indicate that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts afforded the petitioner no remedy, or that the remedy afforded him by the Commonwealth was in the slightest degree inadequate. Nor is there anything in the petitioner’s application to indicate the existence of any exceptional circumstances of peculiar urgency warranting intervention by a federal court. For all that appears in the application, the courts of the Commonwealth have afforded the petitioner a full and fair opportunity to establish the factual basis upon which his assertions of deprivation of federal constitutional rights rest, and his only complaint is that those courts determined that no factual basis for his assertions existed. Therefore, as I see it (Coggins v. O’Brien, Warden, 1 Cir., 1951, 188 F.2d 130), respect for the delicacy of the relationship between the federal and state governments under our dual system required the court below to deny the petitioner a hearing. However, it is obvious that the error did the petitioner no harm, but, on the contrary, gave him more than h.is due. In my view the petitioner’s application should have been dismissed without hearing.