Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-7955_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 44.0

4 

GLOSSIP v. GROSS 

THOMAS, J., concurring 

late  judges  and  justices,  reviewing  only  a  paper  record  of 
each side’s case for life or death. 

There  is  a  reason  the  choice  between  life  and  death, 
within legal limits, is left to the jurors and judges who sit 
through the trial, and not to legal elites (or law students).2 
That  reason  is  memorialized  not  once,  but  twice,  in  our 
Constitution: Article III guarantees that “[t]he Trial of all
Crimes, except in cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury”
and  that  “such  Trial  shall  be  held  in  the  State  where  the 
said Crimes shall have been committed.”  Art. III, §2, cl. 3.
And the Sixth Amendment promises that “[i]n all criminal 
prosecutions,  the  accused  shall  enjoy  the  right  to  a  . . .
trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein
the  crime  shall  have  been  committed.”    Those  provisions
ensure  that  capital  defendants  are  given  the  option  to  be
sentenced  by  a  jury  of  their  peers  who,  collectively,  are
better  situated  to  make  the  moral  judgment  between  life
and  death  than  are  the  products  of  contemporary  Ameri-
can law schools. 

It  should  come  as  no  surprise,  then,  that  the  primary
explanation  a  regression  analysis  revealed  for  the  gap
between the egregiousness scores and the actual sentences 
was  not  the  race  or  sex  of  the  offender  or  victim,  but  the 
locality  in  which  the  crime  was  committed.    Donohue, 
supra, at 640; see also post, at 12 (BREYER, J., dissenting). 
What is more surprising is that JUSTICE BREYER considers 

—————— 

2 For some, a faith in the jury seems to be correlated to that institu-
tion’s likelihood of preventing imposition of the death penalty.  See, e.g., 
Ring  v.  Arizona,  536  U. S.  584,  614  (2002)  (BREYER,  J.,  concurring  in
judgment) (arguing that “the Eighth Amendment requires that  a jury,
not  a  judge,  make  the  decision  to  sentence  a  defendant  to  death”); 
Wainwright  v.  Witt,  469  U. S.  412,  440,  n.  1  (1985)  (Brennan,  J.,  dis-
senting) (“However heinous Witt’s crime, the majority’s vivid portrait of 
its gruesome details has no bearing on the issue before us.  It is not for 
this Court to decide whether Witt deserves to die.  That decision must 
first be made by a jury of his peers”).