In the case of Salvador Godinez, Warden v. Richard Allan Moran (1992), the U.S Supreme Court addressed whether a prisoner's rights were violated when he was transferred to another prison without a hearing. The court held that an inmate does not have a constitutional right to remain at a particular penal institution and therefore, transferring him from one institution to another did not infringe upon his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. This decision was based on the premise that while prisoners do have certain protected liberty interests, these do not extend to remaining in any specific prison once they are within the state's custody. Therefore, as long as conditions at both institutions meet constitutional standards for confinement and there is no significant change in conditions amounting to additional punishment beyond what was imposed by their sentence, such transfers can be made without hearings or other procedural safeguards.

In the dissenting opinion for Salvador Godinez, Warden v. Richard Allan Moran, Justice Blackmun argued that the majority's decision to uphold Moran's death sentence was flawed because it failed to consider whether his counsel provided effective assistance during sentencing. He pointed out that there were significant mitigating factors in this case - including evidence of mental illness and a troubled upbringing - which could have been used by defense counsel to argue against a death sentence but were not presented at trial. Furthermore, he criticized the majority for applying an overly narrow standard when evaluating claims of ineffective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington (1984). In his view, any reasonable attorney would have investigated and introduced these mitigating circumstances during sentencing; thus their absence indicated deficient performance by defense counsel.