High Court Limits ‘3 Strikes’ Challenges : Crime: Defendants cannot contest validity of prior convictions. U.S. justices also reject a suit seeking to stay military shipyard closure.

With Congress poised to pass the tough “three strikes and you’re out law,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday that defendants generally do not have a right to raise new challenges to old convictions that now could mean life prison terms.

The 6-3 ruling cited “ease of administration” as a reason for not allowing defendants to contest the validity of past convictions during federal sentencing hearings.

Critics said the decision could send criminals to prison for life in part because of past convictions that were unfair or unconstitutional. Supporters said that the ruling will prevent the “three strikes” law from becoming entangled in endless litigation over old convictions.

Also Monday, in an unrelated ruling, the high court barred federal judges from second-guessing the Pentagon’s plans to close unneeded military bases.

By a 9-0 vote, the justices rejected a lawsuit by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) that sought court intervention in the government’s decision to close the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. If successful, the lawsuit almost certainly would have bred similar challenges from other communities whose economic fortunes are tied closely to military bases being shuttered by the government.

The Pennsylvania senator claimed that Navy officials had wrongly concealed data showing the value of the Philadelphia base. But the high court said that decisions involving bases are left entirely to a special commission and the President.

“Judicial review is not available” to contest base closings, wrote Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist for the court in the case (Dalton vs. Specter, 93-289).

Rehnquist took the same hands-off approach in the career criminals case, which stemmed from the 1991 arrest of a Baltimore man, Darren Custis, while he was holding a bag of cocaine. Police found his loaded gun nearby.

Federal prosecutors moved to sentence him to a mandatory prison term under the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984, which increases sentences for those with previous convictions. They pointed out that Custis had a 1985 conviction in Pennsylvania for robbery and a 1989 Maryland conviction for attempted burglary.

At his sentencing hearing, Custis said he would not have pleaded guilty to the 1989 charges if his lawyer had told him he could have cited his intoxication as a defense. He also contested his 1985 conviction.

But the judge ruled that he had no right to belatedly contest the convictions and he was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond had upheld the judge’s decision.

“We hold that (the 1984 law) does not permit Custis to use the federal sentencing forum to gain review of his state convictions,” Rehnquist wrote in this case (Custis vs. United States, 93-5209). “Congress did not prescribe and the Constitution does not require such delay and protraction of the federal sentencing process.”

Rehnquist noted that a defendant who is “still ‘in custody’ for purposes of his state convictions” can raise a new challenge under federal or state law. But in most states, a defendant cannot raise such a challenge once his sentence for the conviction has been completed.

In dissent, Justices David H. Souter, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens faulted the majority for cutting off challenges to convictions that were “unconstitutionally obtained.”

Lynn Branham, a professor of criminal law at the Thomas Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich., said Monday’s decision departs sharply from earlier rulings involving previous convictions that may be flawed. It also is likely to affect the legal interpretation of the pending crime bill, she said.

In the more liberal House version, the bill says that an earlier conviction that has been found to be unconstitutional should not be counted as one of the so-called three strikes. However, it does not directly say that defendants have a right to challenge a prior conviction as constitutionally flawed.

“This means somebody can spend years in prison because of convictions that were obtained in violation of the Constitution,” Branham said.

But Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation of Sacramento, applauded the decision and predicted that it “will strengthen the enforcement of the ‘three strikes, you’re out’ laws” in California and elsewhere.

Habitual criminals will not be permitted to delay their sentences by “litigating the details of procedures conducted years ago in other states,” he said.

In other actions, the court:

* Ruled 5-4 that nurses who direct other less-skilled employees are supervisors and are not protected by federal labor law (NLRB vs. Health Care & Retirement Corp., 92-1964). Writing for the court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that such workers are really supervisors because they are acting “in the interest of the employer” when they direct others. Federal labor law protections do not extend to management employees.

The ruling is a defeat for three Ohio nurses who were fired after they complained to management about problems at a private nursing home. The nurses’ union, the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, decried the decision in the case and said that it will leave thousands of nurses without any protection for whistle-blowing.

* Indicated on a 7-2 vote that trial lawyers may exclude potential jurors for religious reasons. The court has said that jurors may not be excluded for reasons of race and gender, but they refused to hear an appeal of a Minnesota court ruling that permitted a lawyer to exclude a juror who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented in the case (Davis vs. Minnesota, 93-6577).