Opinion ID: 48706
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Continuing Relevance of Williams

Text: 24 If we adhere to the logic of Williams, Fields's Confrontation Clause challenge must fail. The dissent, however, posits that Williams is irrelevant to the issue at hand because it is not explicitly a Sixth Amendment case and because the Williams Court supposed that there was no `constitutional distinction' between capital sentencing and ordinary sentencing. Now that later decisions have suggested that death is different, the dissent takes the position that Williams has nothing to offer on the question of the admissibility of evidence at capital sentencing. We disagree.
25 Although it did not do so under the guise of the Sixth Amendment, the Williams Court plainly discussed the right of confrontation. Furthermore, even in the wake of the Supreme Court's incorporation of the Sixth Amendment against the states and its application of some, but not all, Sixth Amendment rights at sentencing, see infra, Williams has never been overruled. 9 In fact, the Court continues to cite Williams for the proposition that there are no per se constitutional prohibitions on the introduction of hearsay at sentencing. 10 26 These decisions discuss Williams, and the constitutional limitations on the scope and type of information a sentencer may consider, under the umbrella of due process rather than the Sixth Amendment. This circumstance may be significant: In ruling that the enactment of the Sentencing Guidelines did not transform ordinary sentencing into a separate criminal proceeding, requiring, under Specht v. Patterson, 386 U.S. 605, 87 S.Ct. 1209, 18 L.Ed.2d 326 (1967), that a defendant be accorded the full panoply of trial rights, the Eighth Circuit stated the following: 27 We recognize that Williams v. New York, Williams v. Oklahoma [, 358 U.S. 576, 79 S.Ct. 421, 3 L.Ed.2d 516 (1959)], and Specht all considered the application of the right to confront witnesses under the rubric of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, [but] . . . we note that Specht was decided after the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause was found applicable to the States via the Fourteenth Amendment. Pointer v. Texas, 380 U.S. 400, 85 S.Ct. 1065, 13 L.Ed.2d 923 . . . (1965). That the Supreme Court analyzed the right of confrontation both before and after Pointer as an issue of due process suggests that due process, not the Confrontation Clause, provides the relevant framework for testing the use of hearsay testimony at a sentencing proceeding. Other courts have relied on a due process analysis rather than the Confrontation Clause when considering the right of confrontation at sentencing. See, e.g., United States v. Berzon, 941 F.2d 8, 16-21 (1st Cir.1991); United States v. Castellanos, 904 F.2d 1490, 1495-96 (11th Cir.1990); United States v. Carmona, 873 F.2d 569, 574-75 (2d Cir.1989); United States v. Richards, 784 F.Supp. 1373, 1377-78 (N.D.Ind.1992). 28 United States v. Wise, 976 F.2d 393, 398 n. 2 (8th Cir.1992) (en banc) (emphasis added). More recently, in holding that Crawford does not apply at sentencing, the Seventh Circuit has stated that the relevant provision at sentencing is the Due Process Clause, not the confrontation clause; Williams shows that witnesses providing information to the court after guilt is established are not accusers within the meaning of the confrontation clause. United States v. Roche, 415 F.3d 614, 618 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 126 S.Ct. 671, 163 L.Ed.2d 541 (2005). 11
29 Perhaps more importantly, Gardner v. Florida, 430 U.S. 349, 97 S.Ct. 1197, 51 L.Ed.2d 393 (1977), a post-incorporation decision regarding procedural requirements at capital sentencing, establishes that Williams remains relevant in the capital sentencing context. In Gardner, a plurality held that a defendant cannot be sentenced to death on the basis of information undisclosed to a defendant and contained in a presentence investigation report because, to satisfy due process, a capital defendant must be given a chance to rebut or explain adverse information introduced at sentencing. Id. at 362, 97 S.Ct. 1197. At first blush, this ruling appears to call the core holding of Williams into doubt. Any characterization of Gardner as a Williams -killer and a harbinger of the application of the confrontation right at capital sentencing would be misplaced, however, for at least two reasons. 30 First, Gardner, like Williams, is a due process case. Asked to examine what rights defendants have under the Due Process Clause with regard to the presentation of evidence at capital sentencing, the Court noted that defendants were entitled to effective assistance of counsel during sentencing, id. at 358, 97 S.Ct. 1197, but made no mention of a right of confrontation, lending further credence to the notion that the categorization of Williams as a pre-incorporation due process case does not vitiate its relevance to the issue with which we are faced. 31 Second, Gardner explicitly declined to overrule Williams and instead distinguished it, stating that the holding of Williams is not directly applicable to this case. Id. at 356, 97 S.Ct. 1197. [I]n Williams the material facts concerning the defendant's background which were contained in the presentence report were described in detail by the trial judge in open court, affording the defendant the opportunity to challenge the accuracy or materiality of said facts. Id. The Gardner plurality held only that a defendant's due process rights are abridged where he is given no similar opportunity to deny or explain adverse evidence, id. at 362, 97 S.Ct. 1197, and the plurality was careful to note that [t]he fact that due process applies [at capital sentencing proceedings] does not, of course, implicate the entire panoply of criminal trial procedural rights, id. at 358, 97 S.Ct. 1197 n. 9. 32 The dissent notes that the Gardner plurality also distinguishes Williams on the ground that [t]he trial judge in Williams was not asked to `afford appellant a chance to refute or discredit any of [the statements at issue] by cross-examination or otherwise.' Id. at 356, 97 S.Ct. 1197 (quoting Williams ). As the Second Circuit has stated, however, Williams does not turn on any concept of waiver by failure to object. It rests, rather, on the broad ground that due process does not preclude reliance on out-of-court information in imposing sentence. United States v. Fatico, 579 F.2d 707, 712 n. 11 (2d Cir.1978). 33 More importantly, despite making note of the Williams defendant's failure to object at sentencing to the denial of an opportunity to challenge the veracity of the relevant information through, inter alia, cross-examination, Gardner nowhere suggests that cross-examination of hearsay declarants in particular is necessary to satisfy due process. Gardner instead focuses solely on whether information has been disclosed to the defendant so that he can deny or explain it by any means. 34 Gardner offers no basis for assuming that cross-examination of a witness presenting hearsay evidence, for example, would not be sufficient to satisfy constitutional concerns, a fact that Professor John Douglass, whose work is cited frequently by the dissent, fully acknowledges: The Court has never said that the right to `deny or explain' sentencing information includes the confrontation rights that Williams rejected: the right to see, hear, and cross-examine the sources of that information. 12 35 For the same reason, Smith v. Estelle, 602 F.2d 694 (5th Cir.1979), neither compels nor implies the rejection of the principles underlying Williams and the extension of the confrontation right to capital sentencing. There, we held that a defendant's due process rights were violated by the state's calling a psychiatrist as a surprise witness at a capital sentencing proceeding. Reasoning from Gardner, we stated that [s]urprise can be as effective as secrecy in preventing effective cross-examination, in denying `opportunity for (defense) counsel to challenge the accuracy or materiality of' evidence. Id. at 699 (quoting Gardner ). We never hinted, however, that providing a defendant the opportunity to question, with advance preparation, a witness presenting hearsay evidence would not satisfy due process. 13 36 The decision in Del Vecchio v. Ill. Dep't of Corr., 31 F.3d 1363, 1387 (7th Cir.1994), offers support for the proposition that the due process guarantee of an opportunity to deny or explain evidence does not undercut Williams 's sanction of the use of out-of-court statements at capital sentencing. In Del Vecchio, the court was faced with a capital defendant's challenge, on Confrontation Clause grounds, to the in-court testimony of two psychiatrists that they had perused medical reports from other psychiatrists who had examined Del Vecchio, and that the conclusions reached in those reports supported their opinions that the defendant was a sociopath. The court held that Illinois's statute permitting the admission of such hearsay at capital sentencing adequately protected the defendant's constitutional rights by providing that [defendants] `shall be given a fair opportunity to rebut any information received at the hearing.' Id. at 1388. The defendant had in fact been given that opportunity, because [h]e had access to the contested hearsay reports; he could have cross-examined Drs. Rogers and Cavanaugh about the reports; he could have called his own experts. Id. 37 Based on the above, we find wholly unpersuasive the Eleventh Circuit's extension (in reliance on Gardner and Smith ) of the Sixth Amendment confrontation right through the entirety of the capital sentencing process, and we note that that circuit is the only one to have taken that step. 14 The Seventh Circuit has ruled, pursuant to Williams, that the Confrontation Clause does not apply at capital sentencing, 15 and the Fourth Circuit has expressed doubt that it does. 16