Opinion ID: 2616699
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Unreviewable

Text: The resulting lack of judicial review of the penalty imposed under Oregon's standardless fourth question is the same as the lack of judicial review, or power to modify, that the Supreme Court of the United States has held in another context to violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Oberg v. Honda Motor Co., 316 Or. 263, 275, 851 P.2d 1084 (1993), rev'd ___ U.S. ___, 114 S.Ct. 2331, 129 L.Ed.2d 336 (1994) (requiring that appellate review of punitive damage award be made available as matter of Fourteenth Amendment due process); Pacific Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Haslip, 499 U.S. 1, 111 S.Ct. 1032, 113 L.Ed.2d 1 (1991) (due process requires post-verdict review including power to modify the extent or degree of the verdict). No doubt there is as much an acute danger of arbitrary deprivation of life as there is of property to which the Supreme Court spoke in Oberg. ___ U.S. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2340. A punitive verdict ending a life is entitled to the same due process as must be applied to money damage verdicts. The standardless death question, and the lack of any review in Oregon of the answer a jury chooses to give to that question, are as lacking in due process and, therefore, as unconstitutional as the punitive damages awards overturned in Haslip and Oberg. There are those who will argue that due process applied only to property interests in 1867 when the Fourteenth Amendment's due process guarantees were adopted, not to the liberty interest of persons. What a callous disregard that would be of the reality that the Fourteenth Amendment was one of three contemporaneous amendments that transformed the legal status of former slaves from that of property to that of persons entitled to protection of their individual liberty interests as human beings. What a distortion of the reality of the constitutional changes based on the 19th century's concept of civilization's first principles and the outcome of the civil war it would be to say that the liberty interest protected by the Fourteenth Amendment extends to incarceration but not execution. Whether or not death penalties have been subject to judicial review and modification historically, it is difficult to think of a human interest more worthy of due process protection than human life. And the reforms in the middle 1800's changed the purposes of punishment to reformation and required penalties proportional to offenses at the time of adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. See Article I, sections 15 and 16, of Oregon's Constitution of 1857 (so providing). Tuilaepa v. California and Proctor v. California, ___ U.S. ___, 114 S.Ct. 2630, 129 L.Ed.2d 750 (1994), provide further support questioning the adequacy of Oregon's fourth question and accompanying instruction. In California, the jury must, as in Oregon, find one or more of the statutorily prescribed special circumstances to be present in relation to the homicide that aggravate the murder before the defendant is even eligible for the death penalty. But that verdict, determining death eligibility, neither imposes the death penalty nor escapes post-verdict judicial review for due process purposes in California, unlike in Oregon where the answer to the standardless question escapes due process review. After a finding of aggravating circumstances determines death eligibility, another California statute then requires a separate inquiry by the jury, an inquiry that selects, from among those eligible, which ones shall be executed, as also does the Oregon scheme. However, in making that selection in California, the jury does not decide whether defendant should be put to death. Instead it decides whether one or more of the fact-based, statutorily specified factors exist. The factors are much more specific than was the question in Wagner II and the question copied from it in ORS 163.150(1)(b)(D). And they are generally of a more factual nature in California, not an open-ended inquiry as to beliefs about execution as in Oregon. Neither of thosejudicial review nor the requirement for fact-based findingsprocesses or safeguards exists in Oregon. Significant is the difference between the California scheme, that barely passed muster in Tuilaepa v. California, supra, and the Oregon scheme. A major difference is found in the automatic and mandatory judicial review of a death verdict at both the trial and appellate levels. California Penal Code section 190.4(e) states: In every case in which the trier of fact has returned a verdict or finding imposing the death penalty, the defendant shall be deemed to have made an application for modification of such verdict or finding pursuant to Subdivision 7 of Section 11. In ruling on the application, the judge shall review the evidence, consider, take into account, and be guided by the aggravating and mitigating circumstances referred to in Section 190.3, and shall make a determination as to whether the jury's findings and verdicts that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances are contrary to law or the evidence presented. The judge shall state on the record the reasons for his findings. The judge shall set forth the reasons for his ruling on the application and direct that they be entered on the Clerk's minutes. The denial of the modification of the death penalty verdict pursuant to subdivision (7) of Section 1181 shall be reviewed on the defendant's automatic appeal pursuant to subdivision (b) of Section 1239. The granting of the application shall be reviewed on the People's appeal pursuant to paragraph (6). But, no judicial review of the penalty as such is even permitted in Oregon. No judicial power exists to modify the penalty on its own merits in Oregon, unlike the California scheme approved in Tuilaepa. The due process principles and requirements announced in Haslip and Oberg, when applied to the Oregon death decision scheme, dictate that a death penalty assessed by a jury here must be vacated because death without due process is fundamentally unfair. In the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Simmons v. South Carolina, ___ U.S. ___, 114 S.Ct. 2187, 129 L.Ed.2d 133 (1994) reversing a judgment of death, that Court spelled out the need for due process and a heightened standard of reliability. Although applying due process to a different question there, that Court indicates how it would apply due process to another of the questions answered by the jury in an aggravated murder case and thus, by analogy, how it would apply due process to invalidate a death decision resting on Oregon's standardless, unreviewable fourth question. In that case, Justice Blackmun said for the Court that: Where a defendant's future dangerousness is at issue, and state law prohibits his release on parole, due process requires that the sentencing jury be informed that the defendant is parole ineligible.