Opinion ID: 2542916
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Application of the Confrontation Clause and Crawford v. Washington to a capital penalty hearing

Text: Summers contends that the Confrontation Clause and Crawford apply to a capital penalty hearing and therefore the admission of nearly 835 pages of documentary exhibits containing testimonial hearsay violated his right to confrontation. [3] We disagree. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him. The United States Supreme Court held in its 2004 opinion Crawford that the admission of testimonial hearsay statements violates the Confrontation Clause unless the declarant is unavailable to testify and the defendant had a prior opportunity to cross-examine him or her. [4] We have never fully addressed the relevance of the Confrontation Clause in a capital penalty hearing. This court recognized in Lord v. State [5] that the right to confrontation applies in capital penalty hearings in one respect: admitting a nontestifying codefendant's confession generally violates a defendant's right to confrontation under Bruton v. United States. [6] Lord addressed only the Bruton question and did not otherwise explore the right to confrontation at a capital penalty hearing. [7] We limit Lord to its facts. Guiding our decision today is the Supreme Court's 1949 opinion Williams v. New York . [8] The Court recognized in Williams that most of the information now relied upon by judges to guide them in the intelligent imposition of sentences would be unavailable if information were restricted to that given in open court by witnesses subject to cross-examination. [9] The Court rejected the contention that a death sentence based on information from witnesses whom the defendant had not been permitted to confront violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. [10] Williams has since been relied upon for the proposition that the Confrontation Clause does not apply to capital sentencing. [11] Although the continuing viability of Williams has been called into question, [12] in our view, and that of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, it remains good law. [13] Crawford did not overrule Williams. [14] Indeed, the Supreme Court has yet to address whether its opinion in Crawford has any bearing on any sentencing proceedings, capital or otherwise. [15] The Court in Crawford indicated no intent or basis to extend the Sixth Amendment to capital penalty hearings. No federal circuit courts of appeals have extended Crawford to a capital penalty hearing, and the weight of authority is that Crawford does not apply to a noncapital sentencing proceeding. [16] We have recognized that under NRS 175.552(3) hearsay is generally admissible [17] in a capital penalty hearing. [18] Absent controlling authority overruling Williams and extending the proscriptions of the Confrontation Clause and Crawford to capital penalty hearings in Nevada, we are not persuaded to depart from our prior jurisprudence and extend to capital defendants confrontation rights under Crawford. We therefore conclude that neither the Confrontation Clause nor Crawford apply to evidence admitted at a capital penalty hearing and the decision in Crawford does not alter Nevada's death penalty jurisprudence. Because Summers did not enjoy a right to cross-examine [19] the declarants who were the source of alleged testimonial hearsay within documentary exhibits admitted at his capital penalty hearing, he has shown no error occurred on this issue. The concurring and dissenting justices in this appeal would extend the Supreme Court's holdings in Ring v. Arizona [20] and Crawford and hold that the right to confrontation applies to the jury's eligibility determination in a capital sentencing proceeding. Notwithstanding this conclusion, however, the separate concurring and dissenting opinion recognizes that the Confrontation Clause does not apply to the jury's deliberations with respect to the penalty that should be imposed on a defendant whom the jury has found to be death eligible. Even assuming that our dissenting and concurring colleagues have correctly foreseen that the Supreme Court will someday hold that Crawford and the Confrontation Clause are applicable to the eligibility phase of a capital sentencing proceeding, in our view, Nevada's capital sentencing scheme permitting unbifurcated penalty hearings would remain constitutionally viable. We submit that such a holding would not require penalty hearings to be fragmented into phases where the jury separately considers and answers the factual questions relating to whether: (1) the alleged aggravating and mitigating circumstances have been established, (2) the aggravating circumstances outweigh any mitigating circumstances, and (3) the penalty of death should actually be imposed on a defendant whom the jury has found to be death eligible. In this, we note that this court generally presumes that juries follow district court orders and instructions. [21] In Tavares v. State, [22] for example, this court implicitly recognized that jurors are intellectually capable of properly following instructions regarding the limited use of prior bad act evidence. If jurors can perform an act of intellectual discrimination permitting consideration of prior bad act evidence for one purpose, but not for another, they are most certainly intellectually capable of following a clear instruction directing that they must refrain from considering testimonial hearsay in deciding a capital defendant's death eligibility, but that they may nonetheless consider such evidence in deciding whether to actually impose a death sentence on a defendant whom they found eligible to receive it. [23] Our view in this respect is confirmed by the fact that the jurors in the instant case found the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances but did not sentence Summers to death. Thus, the jury's verdict in this case clearly evinces the jury's capability to intellectually discriminate between the types of evidence presented and to impose a just sentence.