Opinion ID: 340682
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: 1976 Death Penalty Cases: Furman Reaffirmed

Text: 18 While the post-Furman consensus regarding the invalidity of the death penalty provision of § 1111 was compelling, caution and deference required us to await the results of the Supreme Court's further consideration of capital punishment, a subject that unforseeable delay caused to remain pending in the Court from the time of oral argument in the instant appeal to the close of the most recent term of the Supreme Court. 6 At that time an again fragmented Court gave plenary consideration to the capital punishment statutes passed by five states in response to Furman. See Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 96 S.Ct. 2909, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976); Jurek v. Texas, 428 U.S. 262, 96 S.Ct. 2950, 49 L.Ed.2d 929 (1976); Proffitt v. Florida, 428 U.S. 242, 96 S.Ct. 2960, 49 L.Ed.2d 913 (1976); Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976); Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 325, 96 S.Ct. 3001, 49 L.Ed.2d 974 (1976). 19 The interplay of opinions and rationales leading the Court to uphold three of those statutes and void two is complex if not confounding; we do not here attempt a definitive exegesis. Such exhaustive treatment is unnecessary, for the 1976 opinions, in particular those of the pivotal plurality, 7 do easily vindicate the post-Furman assumptions regarding the unconstitutionality of statutes such as § 1111 and mandate our decision to make that unconstitutionality explicit. With the exception of a single Justice, the Court recognized the continuing validity and vitality of Furman. More fundamentally, the plurality opinions, read in conjunction with the concurrences of Justices Brennan and Marshall, yield principles of eighth amendment review that condemn § 1111, thus eliminating the need to rest our decision solely on the similarity between the provision before us and the statutes condemned in 1972. When that combined authority is considered, there can be no doubt that a majority of the Supreme Court, no matter how they attained their alliance, would strike § 1111 as being within Furman's pall. 20 First, the 1976 cases do demonstrate at least an acquiescence in the Furman holding from almost all quarters of the Court. The plurality commenced its discussion of Furman in the most comprehensive of its five opinions, Gregg, supra, 96 S.Ct. at 2932, with this observation: 21 Because of the uniqueness of the death penalty, Furman held that it could not be imposed under sentencing procedures that created a substantial risk that it would be inflicted in an arbitrary and capricious manner. 22 In conclusion of that discussion, the plurality announced that 23 we adhere to Furman's determination that where the ultimate punishment of death is at issue a system of standardless jury discretion violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. 24 Id. at 2936, n.47. More equivocally, Justice White, speaking for Chief Justice Burger, Justice Rehnquist, and himself, characterized the 1972 decision: 25 In Furman, this Court's judgment operated to preclude the practice of giving the sentencer unguided discretion to impose or not to impose the death penalty for murder . . . . Id. at 2947. 8 26 Although less conclusively, the opinions also demonstrate that Furman was neither founded on nor limited to cases containing empirical evidence of arbitrariness, discrimination, or infrequency in the imposition of the death penalty. 9 Rather, the recent cases reveal majority support for the conclusion that Furman was grounded upon the potential for arbitrariness inherent in granting sentencers uncontrolled discretion in deciding when to impose capital punishment. Note, Discretion and the Constitutionality of the New Death Penalty Statutes, 87 Harv.L.Rev. 1690, 1692 (1974). 27 Evidence of this conclusion runs throughout the plurality opinions. In the above-quoted passage from Justice Stewart's opinion in Gregg, supra, 96 S.Ct. at 2932, he specified that Furman condemned statutes creating a substantial risk of arbitrary and capricious capital punishment. Writing again for the plurality in Woodson, supra, 96 S.Ct. at 2990, Justice Stewart reiterated that the existence of unbridled discretion in a death penalty scheme was intolerable, without intimating that any showing of actual arbitrariness was required: 28 Central to the limited holding in Furman was the conviction that the vesting of standardless sentencing power in the jury violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. 29 Similarly, in Roberts, supra, Justice Stevens's critical plurality opinion condemned the Louisiana mandatory death sentence statute without any consideration of the actual results of sentencing under the new provision, because it failed 30 to comply with Furman's requirement that standardless jury discretion be replaced by procedures that safeguard against the arbitrary and capricious imposition of death sentences. 31 Id. at 3007. 10 Finally, the plurality in Gregg recognized that the Furman conclusion that untrammeled discretion to impose the death penalty violated the eighth amendment was in substantial tension with the holding in McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 91 S.Ct. 1454, 28 L.Ed.2d 711 (1971). The Court in McGautha had found that standardless jury discretion in capital sentencing did not violate the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. Nonetheless, the plurality announced adherence to its reading of Furman. See Gregg, supra, 96 S.Ct. at 2936, n.47. 32 The plurality also attempted to settle the standards which are to guide judicial review of a penalty under the cruel and unusual punishments clause. The constitutional prohibition comprehends contemporary public standards of decency, see Gregg, supra, 96 S.Ct. at 2925, which may be reflected in the actions of legislatures and juries as well as in the society's history and traditions. Id. at 2928-29. The eighth amendment, however, also incorporates a standard of human dignity not subject to majoritarian whim. See id. at 2925. That standard prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain, as well as gross disproportion between punishment and crime. Id. While the plurality clearly rejected a least restrictive alternative analysis, its notion of unnecessary severity definitely embraced the principle that any punishment must demonstrably serve some valid penological justification in order to withstand constitutional scrutiny. See id. at 2929-30. 33 In light of this statement of general eighth amendment principles the reaffirmation of Furman may be read as a determination that standardless discretion in the imposition of the death penalty constitutes, in the terms of Justice White's concurrence in the 1972 decision, 34 the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. 35 92 S.Ct. at 2764. 11 The route is murky from these standards to the Court's ultimate conclusion that the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, far from requiring the elimination of discretion in capital punishment laws, is in fact satisfied only by the presence of some guided discretion. Moreover, the Court's application of that conclusion to the statutes before it raises many questions. Nevertheless, the Constitution's disapproval of standardless discretion in the imposition of the death penalty emerges untainted. 36 In 1971 the Supreme Court found ample reason to reject a due process challenge to unfettered jury discretion in the imposition of capital punishment: 37 To identify before the fact those characteristics of criminal homicides and their perpetrators which call for the death penalty, and to express these characteristics in language which can be fairly understood and applied by the sentencing authority, appear to be tasks which are beyond present human ability. 38 McGautha, supra, 91 S.Ct. at 1466. In 1972 Furman condemned under the eighth amendment discretionary capital punishment schemes identical to the one before us. In 1976 the Court perceived that those statutes had been intolerable not because they granted discretion, but because they failed to guide it. Whether the results are labeled vacillation or refinement, the tortures of the Court's most solemn and deliberate struggle with the subject may suggest the limits of human wisdom when faced with the task of justifying systems for the extinction of fellow human beings. The true course of wisdom may lie in recognizing those mortal limits and abandoning the hangman's trade; the Supreme Court has emphatically reminded us that wisdom is not a standard for application by the judiciary, but by the legislature. 39 Even this self-imposed restricted perspective has not obscured the Court's earlier insight: the imposition of capital punishment even for narrow categories of murder, absent clearly defined channels of sentencing discretion focusing on the particularized circumstances of the crime and the offender, violates both the contemporary index of decency and, serving no demonstrable penological purpose, the transcendent standard of human dignity that inhere in the proscription of cruel and unusual punishment. The anachronism before us, conferring absolute sentencing discretion, easily falls before both of those still vital standards. In this instance at least, the Constitution prohibits society from adding another barbarous, degrading act to the horrible deed of which the defendant before us stands convicted. The death penalty provision of 18 U.S.C. § 1111 being void, we must vacate the judgment below to allow substitution of the alternative punishment under the statute, life imprisonment.