Marshall v. United States
The Court upheld a federal law that denies drug-treatment programs, offered as an alternative to prison, to addicts who already have two or more prior felony convictions.
The ruling means Congress can draw sharp lines about who gets a chance at rehabilitation rather than punishment, even though the line-drawing is imperfect and based on incomplete medical knowledge about addiction and crime.
“We therefore hold that Title II of NARA, 18 U. S. C. §§ 4251-4255, does not constitute a denial of due process or equal protection by excluding from rehabilitative commitment, in lieu of penal incarceration, addicts with two or more prior felony convictions.”
The Court's core holding upholding the two-prior-felony exclusion.
How it got here: A federal district court denied Marshall's motion to vacate his sentence, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed; the Supreme Court granted review to resolve a split among circuits over the exclusion's constitutionality.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Robert Edward Marshall pleaded guilty to entering a bank intending to commit a felony. At sentencing he asked to be treated as a narcotics addict under a federal rehabilitation law instead of being sent straight to prison. Because he already had three prior felony convictions, the law's two-prior-felony exclusion made him ineligible, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison instead.
The question before the Court
Could Congress bar drug addicts with two or more prior felony convictions from a rehabilitation program offered to other addicts instead of prison time?
Why it matters
Addicts convicted of federal crimes who already have two or more felonies on their record cannot ask a judge to send them to treatment instead of prison, no matter how strong their individual case for rehabilitation might be. The decision gives Congress wide latitude to use blunt, categorical rules when regulating experimental social programs tied to uncertain science.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, so Marshall's sentence and exclusion from the treatment program stand. The two-prior-felony exclusion remains valid nationwide, resolving the circuit conflict in favor of the law's constitutionality, though Congress remains free to redesign the program's eligibility rules if it chooses.
What this does not decide
The majority's comments suggesting Congress could rationally deny treatment to addicts whose prior crimes were themselves drug-related went beyond the facts of this case, since Marshall's prior offenses were not drug-related; the dissent noted those remarks were not actually necessary to decide this dispute.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (1). Justice Burger (author).
Dissent (1). Justice Marshall (author).
Dissent — Justice Marshall
“permanent irrebuttable presumptions have long been disfavored”Marshall's objection that the law wrongly assumes repeat felons can never be rehabilitated.
Justice Marshall argued the two-felony exclusion was not a rational way to achieve Congress's stated goals of helping addicts whose crimes stemmed from addiction and screening out disruptive, unrehabilitatable offenders. He gave examples showing the rule often excludes addicts whose crimes were addiction-driven while including violent offenders unrelated to addiction. He called the rule an unsupported, irrebuttable presumption contrary to real-world evidence and would have required Congress to draft a more precise, individualized standard. Read the full dissent →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied rational-basis review, the most lenient constitutional test, asking only whether Congress could reasonably have believed the classification served a legitimate purpose, since no fundamental right or suspect classification was involved.
- It looked at the purpose of the rehabilitation law, which was to give treatment to addicts likely to benefit from it while preserving strict punishment for hardened, dangerous offenders.
- The Court reasoned that Congress could rationally assume a person with two or more prior felonies would be less likely to follow the strict discipline treatment requires and more likely to disrupt other participants in the program.
- Because medical knowledge about addiction and its link to crime remained uncertain, the Court held that Congress needed broad room to experiment and draw imperfect lines, and courts should not second-guess where exactly the cutoff was set.
- The Court concluded that excluding addicts with two or more prior felonies was not irrational, even though a different cutoff point might also have been reasonable, and therefore the law did not violate equal protection.