Thomas, J., dissenting
In sum, there is no getting around the essential problem with Reed’s due process claim: To the extent he is not merely seeking an advisory opinion, he is complaining about a court-inflicted injury, and redressing that injury would require an exercise of appellate jurisdiction that the District Court does not possess. In substance, his complaint in this action is a mere reprise of his prior certiorari petition, camouflaged as an original action against the district attorney. Thus, I would vacate the Fifth Circuit’s judgment and remand this case to the District Court with instructions to dismiss the complaint for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction.
B
The majority next holds that Reed’s §1983 due process claim was timely because it did not accrue until the CCA denied rehearing. The little reasoning the majority offers for this conclusion helpfully accentuates its antecedent jurisdictional errors.
First, the majority points out that a procedural due process claim is not necessarily “ ‘complete when the deprivation occurs,’ ” but “only when ‘the State fails to provide due process.’ ” Ante, at 5 (quoting Zinermon v. Burch, 494 U. S. 113, 126 (1990)). Yet, “the general rule” is that due process itself “requir[es] predeprivation notice and hearing,” so the truism for which the majority quotes Zinermon matters only in those “extraordinary situations” in which “[w]e tolerate” postdeprivation process as sufficient. United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property, 510 U. S. 43, 53 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted); see Zinermon, 494 U. S., at 127–130. The majority proceeds to show, however, that it does not regard this case as a postdeprivation case at all, for it says that the State “deprived Reed of his asserted liberty interest in DNA testing” at the very moment
duct on the part of the only defendant in this case. Nothing in our precedents supports that holding.
