Opinion ID: 1781771
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Heading: Right to Humane Treatment

Text: Louisiana's constitutional right to humane treatment is embodied in LSA-Const. Art. 1, § 20, which declares that no law shall subject any person to cruel, excessive or unusual punishment. A source of this right is the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment of the federal constitution. The Eighth Amendment requires increased reliability of the process by which capital punishment may be imposed. Herrera v. Collins, supra, ___ U.S. at ___, 113 S.Ct. at 863. It exacts that capital sentencing procedure must facilitate the responsible and reliable exercise of sentencing discretion. Caldwell v. Mississippi, 472 U.S. 320, 329, 105 S.Ct. 2633, 2639, 86 L.Ed.2d 231 (1985). The more significant function of the Clause, however, is to protect against the danger of arbitrary infliction of an unusually severe punishment. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. at 277, 92 S.Ct. at 2746 (Brennan, J., concurring). It forbids the judicial imposition of a cruel and unusual punishment. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. at 241, 92 S.Ct. at 2728 (Douglas, J., concurring). It entitles a defendant to a jury capable of a reasoned moral judgment about whether death, rather than some lesser sentence, ought to be imposed. Simmons v. South Carolina, ___ U.S. ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2198 (Souter, J., concurring). Our state constitutional right to humane treatment embodies these Eighth Amendment principles. Moreover, the inclusion in our constitution of the prohibition against excessive punishment adds a protection which surpasses those provided by the federal constitution. See State v. Perry, 610 So.2d at 762. The cruel and unusual punishment prohibition condemns the arbitrary infliction of severe punishment. State v. Perry, 610 So.2d at 763. The prohibition against excessiveness proscribes punishment which does not make any measurable contribution to the goals the punishment is intended to achieve, or is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime. State v. Perry, 610 So.2d at 764; State v. Labato, 603 So.2d 739, 751 (La.1992); State v. Bonanno, 384 So.2d 355 (La.1980). A punishment that is disproportionate to the offense and the offender is unnecessarily severe and, therefore, excessive per se. Thus, under LSA-Const. Art. 1, § 20, in addition to entitlement to heightened reliability of the capital sentencing process, the provision protects all defendants not only from punishments that are cruel, excessive or unusual per se or as applied to particular categories of crimes or classes of offenders, but also from any excessive feature of a particular sentence produced by an abuse of the sentencer's discretion, even though the sentence is otherwise within constitutional limits. State v. Perry, 610 So.2d at 764; State v. Telsee, 425 So.2d 1251 (La.1983). A sentence of death imposed for any reason other than the penalty is particularized to the circumstances of the crime and the character and propensities of the defendant, is arbitrarily severe, unnecessarily cruel, and disproportionate to the offense. Hence, if a jury instruction creates speculation and fear sufficient to overcome the jury's feelings of compassion or mercy, or predisposes it to recommend an unnecessarily severe punishment and, as a consequence, the jury recommends the sentence of death when it otherwise would not, the punishment of death is disproportionate to the severity of the crime and unconstitutionally excessive. The punishment of death would then violate the defendant's right to humane treatment as it is not the punishment defendant deserves. Like the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, LSA-Const. Art. 1, § 20 imposes a heightened standard for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case and it invalidates procedural rules which tend to diminish reliability of the sentencing determination. Simmons v. South Carolina, ___ U.S. at ___, 114 S.Ct. at 2198 (Souter, J., concurring), citing Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 305, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 2991-92, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976) (opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.) and Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625, 638, 100 S.Ct. 2382, 2390, 65 L.Ed.2d 392 (1980). Without belaboring the reasons made in the previous section supporting the conclusion that the clemency power instruction misguides the jury's deliberations by deterring its focus from the circumstances of the offense and the character and propensities of the offender through the injection of an arbitrary factor thereby creating a substantial risk that the penalty of death will be inflicted for an arbitrary and capricious reason, we hold LSA-C.Cr.P. art. 905.2(B) is unconstitutional in violation of the right to humane treatment. LSA-Const. Art. 1, § 20 is a constitutional check on the legislature's latitude to pass capital sentencing guidelines. See Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. at 257-306, 92 S.Ct. at 2736-2760 (Brennan, J., concurring). The clemency power jury instruction creates the impermissible risk that the death penalty will be recommended when the penalty is not the one defendant deserves and when it is disproportionate to the severity of the crime. Because the instruction undercuts the soundness of the capital jury's decision making process and undermines the reliability of any resultant recommendation of death, LSA-C.Cr.P. art. 905.2(B) cannot stand.