Opinion ID: 2974873
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Introduction of Additional Evidence

Text: Davis now submits that the decision of the three-judge panel to exclude testimony concerning his exemplary behavior on death row in the time between the two sentencing hearings violated his rights under the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and that the state courts’ decisions affirming the panel’s ruling were contrary to the those of the Supreme Court of the United States in Lockett, Eddings, and Skipper. Based upon a careful examination of these opinions, we agree. In Lockett, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a former provision in the Ohio death penalty statute that did not permit a sentencing judge to consider, as mitigating evidence, factors such as the defendant’s character, prior record, and age. See 438 U.S. at 597. The Court ruled in Lockett that “the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments require that the sentencer, in all but the rarest kind of capital case, not be precluded from considering, as a mitigating factor, any aspect of a defendant’s character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death.” Id. at 604. The Court extended this decision in Eddings, in which it held unconstitutional a capital sentence imposed after the trial judge excluded evidence of the defendant’s family history. “By holding that the sentencer in capital cases must be permitted to consider any relevant mitigating factor, the rule in Lockett recognizes that a consistency produced by ignoring individual differences is a false consistency.” Eddings, 455 U.S. at 112. Thus, “[j]ust as the State may not by statute preclude the sentencer from considering any mitigating factor, neither may the sentencer refuse to consider, as a matter of law, any relevant mitigating evidence.” Id. at 113-14 (emphasis in original). Of course, the Court recognized that its opinions should not be taken as “limit[ing] the traditional authority of a court to exclude, as irrelevant, evidence not bearing on the defendant’s character, prior record, or circumstances of his offense.” Lockett, 438 U.S. at 604 n.12. But the Court has also made clear that evidence of the defendant’s conduct while incarcerated may indeed be relevant to the question of his sentence. In Skipper, for example, the trial court had excluded as irrelevant evidence of the defendant’s good behavior during the period of his incarceration between arrest and trial. The Supreme Court reversed Skipper’s death sentence, holding that such evidence was relevant to refute the state’s allegations of future dangerousness, and noting that “any sentencing authority must predict a convicted person’s probable future conduct when it engages in the process of determining what punishment to impose.” Skipper, 476 U.S. at 5 (quoting Jurek v. Texas, 428 U.S. 262, 275 (1976)). Because, in the capital context, a sentencing authority may consider a defendant’s past conduct as indicative of his probable future behavior, “evidence that the defendant would not pose a danger if spared (but incarcerated) must be considered potentially mitigating” and, under Eddings, may not be excluded from the sentencer’s consideration. Id. Hence, the core of the analysis in Skipper reflects the Court’s understanding that the right of a defendant to present evidence of good behavior in prison is particularly relevant when a prediction of future dangerousness figures centrally in a prosecutor’s plea for imposition of the death penalty. In Skipper, the right to produce such evidence was triggered specifically “by the prosecutor’s closing argument, which urged the jury to return a sentence of death in part because petitioner could not be trusted to behave if he were simply returned to prison.” Id. at 5 n.1. Thus, “it is not only the rule of Lockett and Eddings that requires that the defendant be afforded an opportunity to introduce evidence [of good behavior in prison]; it is also the elemental due process requirement that a defendant not be sentenced to death ‘on the basis of information which he had no opportunity to deny or explain.’” Id. (quoting Gardner v. Florida, 430 U.S. 349, 362 (1977)). Despite these holdings of the Supreme Court, the trial court in this case refused to allow Davis to present witnesses who would have testified as to his adaptation to death row, even over the No. 02-3227 Davis v. Coyle Page 9 state prosecutor’s suggestion that such evidence should be considered admissible.3 The state intermediate appellate court concluded, however, that the trial court “committed no Lockett error,” because “the appellant was permitted to introduce ample evidence in mitigation at the original sentencing hearing, including evidence of his good behavior in prison.” Davis III, 1990 WL 165137, at  (emphasis added). The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed, interpreting Skipper to forbid the exclusion only of a defendant’s good prison record between his arrest and trial, and holding that Skipper has no applicability to post-trial prison behavior. See Davis IV, 584 N.E.2d at 1195. The court observed: In the case at bar, no relevant mitigating evidence was excluded from consideration by the panel during the mitigation phase of appellant’s 1984 trial. All mitigating evidence which was available at that time was duly received and considered by the panel including evidence concerning appellant’s ability to adjust to prison life. That same relevant evidence was again received and considered by the panel in 1989 for purposes of resentencing appellant. The evidence excluded from consideration by the panel at appellant’s resentencing hearing concerned certain post-trial matters. Under these circumstances, we do not believe that Skipper or, for that matter, Lockett, Eddings, or Hitchcock requires that appellant’s death sentence be vacated. Id. (internal citations omitted). In dissent, one justice argued, however, that the directives of Lockett and its progeny should be considered “just as important in resentencing as they are in the original sentencing,” and noted that they “are consistent with the directive in R.C. 2929.04(c) that a defendant ‘be given great latitude’ in presenting evidence of mitigating factors.” Id. at 1199 (Wright, J., dissenting). We conclude that the decision of the state courts to disallow the proffered evidence was “contrary to” United States Supreme Court decisions on this issue and, therefore, that it runs afoul of Williams. See 529 U.S. at 413. Although neither side was permitted to introduce additional evidence at Davis’s resentencing, the state used this opportunity to argue that Davis’s status as a repeat offender rendered him too dangerous for anything other than a death sentence: To outweigh means to be more important than. And when you come right down to it, the issue in this case is the answer to this question. Is anything you heard in this case . . . in the defendant’s mitigation evidence, is there anything more important in this case than the fact that Von Clark Davis is a repeat offender? I submit it’s the most important thing in this defendant’s history, character or background . . . that your Honors can consider . . . . The aggravating circumstances in this case, repeat killing, recognizes a special danger demonstrated by an individual who purposely and repeatedly kills another, purposely and repeatedly disregards the safety, personal integrity and human worth of others. Then, addressing Davis’s exemplary prison record, the prosecution continued: How much weight can we assign that positive prison record? . . . Consider this, the same people who in 1981 looked at this evidence before this positive record, the parole board, made a prediction in 1981 that Von Clark Davis was, and I quote the record, “a minimal risk to persons and property.” How wrong they were in December 3 The prosecution did not object to the presentation of these witnesses. At the motions hearing held July 31, 1989, the prosecutor discussed the holding of Skipper and then stated, “Looking at these cases . . . it’s my considered judgment . . . that perhaps the ruling of this court should be in partial agreement with the defense, that they should be allowed to present evidence . . . limit[ed] to evidence that was not available at the time of the first hearing, that is, the evidence such as good behavior.” No. 02-3227 Davis v. Coyle Page 10 of 1983 in the situation of Suzette Butler. And coupled with [the fact that] the defendant has an explosive personality disorder, it’s hard to say that this defendant is not too dangerous, that we can predict that he’s not too dangerous. (Emphasis added.) In rebuttal, Davis was then forced to rely solely upon the evidence presented at his first sentencing hearing, consisting of testimony from Bohlen, the probation officer who had prepared the presentence report based on records compiled during Davis’s previous stay at the London Correctional Institution. Those records indicated that Davis’s functioning in the prison was “very good” and that he had generally adapted well. Davis was prevented, however, from presenting the testimony of three employees of the Department of Corrections who could have offered relevant information about Davis’s more recent behavior and adjustment to prison life since his incarceration after his trial in 1984. Such testimony would have established that Davis was classified as an “A” prisoner, indicating that he had no discipline or conduct problems; that he was the clerk on death row for the unit manager and helped conduct tours of death row; and that he had created no problems for other inmates or for security personnel and had no conduct write-ups. Davis worked directly for Oscar McGraw, the unit manager for death row, who complimented Davis’s positive attitude and pleasant personality. Herb Wendler, Davis’s case manager, observed that Davis was cooperative and courteous, that he had been given much more freedom than other inmates on death row, and that he had been placed in various positions of trust within the unit. Although there could conceivably be some question about the relevance of such evidence in the abstract, the record in this case establishes without doubt that it was highly relevant to the single aggravating factor relied upon by the state – that future dangerousness should keep Davis on death row. As the Supreme Court observed in Eddings, in such a situation “[t]he sentencer[s] . . . may determine the weight to be given [the] relevant mitigating evidence,” but “may not give it no weight by excluding such evidence from their consideration.” Eddings, 455 U.S. at 114-15. In light of the clear constitutional mandate of the Supreme Court at the time of Davis’s resentencing, we have no choice but to conclude that the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision to exclude the proffered testimony, based on the court’s belief that the facts of Davis’s case could be distinguished from Skipper’s solely on the basis of timing, was both an unreasonable application of the decision in Skipper and contrary to the holding in that opinion and its antecedent cases. We are further persuaded of the correctness of our conclusion based on its ratification by the United States Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Ayers v. Belmontes, 127 S.Ct. 469 (2006). In that case, the Court unmistakably recognized yet again the importance of permitting capital defendants to put forth evidence of the likelihood of future good conduct at sentencing. The Ayers majority stated: [J]ust as precrime background and character and postcrime rehabilitation may “extenuat[e] the gravity of the crime,” so may some likelihood of future good conduct count as a circumstance tending to make a defendant less deserving of the death penalty. Cf. Skipper, 476 U.S., at 4-5 (explaining that while inferences regarding future conduct do not “relate specifically to [a defendant’s] culpability for the crime he committed,” those inferences are “‘mitigating’ in the sense that they might serve ‘as a basis for a sentence less than death.’”). Id. at 475 (citations omitted). Moreover, we are not alone among our sister circuits in recognizing that the holding in Skipper that a defendant be “permitted to present any and all relevant mitigating evidence that is No. 02-3227 Davis v. Coyle Page 11 available,” Skipper, 476 U.S. at 8, requires that, at resentencing, a trial court must consider any new evidence that the defendant has developed since the initial sentencing hearing. See, e.g., Robinson v. Moore, 300 F.3d 1320, 1345-48 (11th Cir. 2002) (counsel is obliged to present newly available evidence at resentencing, although failure to do so in that case was not prejudicial); Smith v. Stewart, 189 F.3d 1004, 1008-14 (9th Cir. 1999) (failure to investigate and present additional evidence at resentencing constitutes ineffective assistance of counsel); Spaziano v. Singletary, 36 F.3d 1028, 1032-35 (11th Cir. 1994) (Lockett requires trial court to consider any new evidence that the parties may present at a resentencing hearing); Alderman v. Zant, 22 F.3d 1541, 1556-57 (11th Cir. 1994) (at resentencing hearing, trial court must consider reliable evidence of relevant developments occurring after defendant’s initial death sentence). Most significantly, in a case with facts virtually indistinguishable from those in Davis’s case, the Ninth Circuit held that Lockett, Eddings, and Skipper dictate that evidence of a defendant’s good behavior and peaceful adjustment while in prison following imposition of the death sentence is indeed mitigating evidence that should be considered at a resentencing hearing. See Creech v. Arave, 947 F.2d 873, 881-82 (9th Cir. 1991). There remains for our resolution the question of a remedy for the rejection of the new evidence that the petitioner sought to introduce before the three-judge panel. The respondent cites precedent to support the proposition that if a sentencer considers improper aggravating circumstances, the state appellate court may reweigh the remaining aggravating circumstances against the mitigating circumstances or may determine that the error was harmless. See Parker v. Dugger, 498 U.S. 308, 319 (1991); Clemons v. Mississippi, 494 U.S. 738, 745-50 (1990). Presumably, the warden, by citing these cases, contends that any constitutional error committed in this matter may be rectified simply by a state court reconsideration of Davis’s suitability for execution or for lifetime incarceration. But, reweighing in this case is not possible because the improperly-excluded evidence was never put into the record. Defense counsel’s proffer concerning the proposed witnesses’ testimony merely summarized his interviews with these witnesses; the actual substance of the witnesses’ testimony was not put before any court and, therefore, no factual basis for reweighing exists. For this reason, the Supreme Court has decided that, when a trial court improperly excludes mitigating evidence or limits the fact-finder’s consideration of such evidence, the case must be remanded for a new sentencing hearing. See Skipper, 476 U.S. at 8. The Skipper error in this case is both indisputable and dispositive. Because we must remand the case for yet another sentencing hearing, we need not address in detail each of the remaining allegations of constitutional error raised before this court by Davis. We will, however, discuss those issues insofar as they should also have affected the outcome in the state litigation or may arise again on remand to the state court.