Opinion ID: 1451362
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the racial impact statistics

Text: Lane brought a motion in district court to preclude the prosecution from seeking the death penalty in this case. Lane claims that the Washoe County District Attorney's office, as a general practice, discriminatorily seeks the death penalty much more frequently when the defendant in a murder case is black. In support of this charge, Lane presented to the trial court a survey covering some eighty-six murder cases prosecuted by the Washoe County District Attorney's office. In approximately eighty-percent of cases involving a white defendant with at least one prior felony conviction, the district attorney did not seek the death penalty. By contrast, in approximately eighty-percent of cases involving a black defendant without prior felony convictions, the district attorney did seek the death penalty. The district court held an evidentiary hearing and after considering the defendant's statistical data, ruled against Lane based on the United States Supreme Court case of McClesky v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 107 S.Ct. 1756, 95 L.Ed.2d 262 (1986), which requires that a criminal defendant who seeks to assert a Federal Equal Protection clause violation must prove that the prosecuting authorities acted with discriminatory purpose in that particular case. Even assuming the district court's ruling to be correct under federal law, I remain very much concerned that the Washoe County District Attorney's office seeks the death penalty for only one out of five white murderers with past felonies and seeks the death penalty for four out of five black murderers without prior felonies. McClesky may or may not foreclose any avenue of federal relief for Lane; nevertheless, I do not see how this court can ignore the raw data that four out of five black non-felons face the death penalty and four out of five white felons do not. [3] If these facts can be explained, well enough; however, they ought not simply be brushed aside. Naturally, I understand that prosecutors consider other damning factors than past felonies in making the decision to seek the death penalty; still, on its face, it does not seem right or even statistically feasible that four times as many black defendants without felony records would be deserving of the death penalty. [4] In State Farm v. All Electric, Inc., 99 Nev. 222, 224-225, 660 P.2d 995, 997 (1983), this court declared that [w]e have previously held that the standard for testing the validity of legislation under the equal protection clause of the state constitution is the same as the federal standard. The court relied upon Laakonen v. District Court, 91 Nev. 506, 538 P.2d 574 (1975) for this proposition. Laakonen, in fact, contained no express statement of this rule, but merely applied the two clauses in an identical fashion. Although I dissented in the State Farm case, I agreed with this analysis of our state equal protection clause because I saw no reason to depart from that view in the immediate case.  State Farm, 99 Nev. at 231, 660 P.2d at 1002 (Springer, J., dissenting) (emphasis added). I now see such a reason. Nevada's so-called equal protection clause, article 4, section 21, of the Nevada Constitution, reads quite differently from its federal counterpart: In all cases enumerated in the preceding section, and in all other cases where a general law can be made applicable, all laws shall be general and of uniform operation throughout the State. The Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection clause provides: No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. U.S. Const., Fourteenth Amendment. Given the plain and significant differences in the language utilized in these respective clauses, it is reasonable to conclude that the framers of the Nevada Constitution did not intend to mirror the Federal Constitution. Significantly, the voters of the Territory of Nevada approved the Nevada constitution in September 1864, some two years before the Fourteenth Amendment was even proposed. See generally Official Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Constitutional Convention of the State of Nevada (Andrew J. March, ed. 1886). Furthermore, in the long history of this State, the judicial practice of reading article 4, section 21 in lock-step with the Federal Constitution is a relatively recent phenomenon. Compare State ex re. Ash v. Parkinson, 5 Nev. 15 (1869), and State ex rel. Clarke v. Irwin, 5 Nev. 111 (1869), with State Farm Fire and Cas. Co. v. All Elec., Inc., 99 Nev. 222, 660 P.2d 995 (1983). Although this court has never before determined the question of whether, like its federal counterpart, article 4, section 21 requires that a defendant in a criminal case show a discriminatory purpose on the part of the State, the strong possibility that Lane was treated in a discriminatory way is too important to brush aside on the authority of the State Farm case. [5] The question that I believe should be addressed is: what does Nevada's constitution require in terms of equality for its citizens? Under the State Constitution the legislature does not have the power to pass laws which invidiously discriminate on their face. In its earliest days, this court held that article 4, section 21 was intended to prevent special parochial laws, designed to benefit only local interests. See, e.g., Evans v. Job, 8 Nev. 322 (1873). The court did, upon occasion, define the constitutional mandate in broader, more elastic terms. See Ex Parte Spinney, 10 Nev. 323, 330 (1875) (the object of [article 4, section 21] was the prevention of unfair discrimination between citizens, and to secure to every one the enjoyment of the same privileges which are enjoyed by others similarly circumstanced). But, nonetheless, the vast bulk of our early cases, like Evans v. Job , address only the question of whether a particular statute is de jure unequal or not uniform. See State v. Consolidated Va. Mining Co., 16 Nev. 432 (1882); Quilici v. Strosnider, 34 Nev. 9, 115 P. 177 (1911). The more pernicious problem of facially neutral statutes with discriminatory effects has been, for the most part, ignored. Spinney, 10 Nev. at 334 (the form of the law, and not its object or purpose, [is] the test of constitutionality). The more recent cases involving article 4, section 21, of the Nevada Constitution have shown this court's willingness to look beyond the facial neutrality of a law to its discriminatory effect as applied. For example, in Turner v. Staggs, 89 Nev. 230, 235, 510 P.2d 879, 882 (1973), this court overturned on constitutional grounds a statute whose stated object was neutral, but which had the effect of arbitrarily dividing all tort-feasors into classes of tort-feasors.... This should not be a surprising development since the plain language of our constitution invites this very inquiry through the phrase, uniform in operation. No one has, as yet, had occasion to consider whether Nevada's constitution requires proof of discriminatory purpose before the court will act to remedy a discriminatory effect, or whether such a purpose can only be shown by proof that a state actor chose a particular action because of its discriminatory effects rather than in spite of them. [6] I am not convinced that, under the Nevada Constitution, a criminal defendant cannot claim that he is being discriminated against unless he can prove that state agents were acting with a formed intent to discriminate against him or her. As Justice Blackmun recently observed, it is weighty work to tinker with the machinery of death  work that should give one pause before choosing to discard the kind of statistical evidence that Lane has put before the district court. Callins v. Collins, ___ U.S. ___, ___, 114 S.Ct. 1127, 1130, 127 L.Ed.2d 435 (1994) (Blackmun, J., dissenting). Justice Blackmun further observed that [e]ven under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die. Callins, ___ U.S. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 1135. It appears to me that race may play a major role in Washoe County when the district attorney makes the decision as to who shall live and who shall die. I would reverse the case and remand it to the trial court for further examination of whether, irrespective of the prosecutor's subjective motive or intent, the death penalty is being sought by Washoe County prosecutors on a racially disproportionate basis in violation of article 4, section 21 of the Nevada Constitution.