Opinion ID: 2094180
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Death Penalty Sentencing Hearing

Text: Defendant's first challenge to the conduct of the death penalty sentencing hearing is that because the trial judge incorrectly explained the procedure used when a jury decides whether a death sentence should be imposed, he did not knowingly and intelligently waive his right to have a jury at the sentencing hearing. Although [t]he right to a sentencing jury in a capital case is a statutory, not a constitutional, right ( People v. Erickson (1987), 117 Ill.2d 271, 289, 111 Ill.Dec. 924, 513 N.E.2d 367), a defendant's waiver of this right has to be knowing and intelligent ( People v. Albanese (1984), 104 Ill.2d 504, 535, 85 Ill.Dec. 441, 473 N.E.2d 1246). The error the trial judge made was to tell defendant that, regardless of whether he (the judge) or a jury sentenced defendant, he would make the initial decision on defendant's eligibility for the death penalty, instead of correctly telling defendant that, if defendant elected to have a jury sentence him, it would be the jury that would have to find, unanimously, that defendant was eligible for the death penalty (Ill.Rev.Stat. 1985, ch. 38, par. 9-1(g)). Defendant is correct that the trial judge misstated the law when he told defendant, before trial, that, if defendant chose to be sentenced by a jury, the following would occur: If you are found guilty there first has to be a hearing to determine whether or not you are eligible for the Death Penalty. There is [ sic ] a number of factors that enter into that and it is a decision I make as the Judge. Assuming that you were eligible for the Death Penalty then there has to be a hearing by the same Jury who decided guilt or innocence as to whether or not that penalty is appropriate for you as an individual pertaining to this crime and the other factors that I'm sure you have gone over with your lawyer. The trial judge further informed defendant he had a right to be sentenced by a jury; if he waived this right the jury would decide only his guilt or innocence and the judge would decide whether he should be sentenced to death. In response to the judge's questions, defendant confirmed a number of times that, after talking with his attorney, he wished to waive his right to be sentenced by a jury; he also signed a written waiver. Despite the trial judge's misstatement, we find defendant's waiver to have been knowing and intelligent. Defendant's attorney told the judge that he had previously discussed the issue of a sentencing jury with his client (and, just minutes before defendant voiced the waiver, he and his attorney again discussed it); he also told the judge that defendant had decided to waive a sentencing jury, and he affirmatively answered the judge's question, [D]o you feel that your client understands sufficiently to make this decision with you? We have previously held that a waiver of a sentencing jury is knowing and intelligent, even when a trial judge does not inform a defendant of all aspects of having a jury decide the sentence and is alleged to have misstated the law, if the record shows the defendant consulted with his attorney, the defendant said he understood the consequences of waiver, and the defendant's attorney said he thought the defendant's decision was made knowingly and intelligently. ( People v. Guest (1986), 115 Ill.2d 72, 107, 104 Ill.Dec. 698, 503 N.E.2d 255; People v. Morgan (1986), 112 Ill.2d 111, 140-41, 97 Ill.Dec. 430, 492 N.E.2d 1303.) Defendant argues that those cases are inapposite because they involved the effect of a judge's failure to inform a defendant that a jury's sentencing decision would have to be unanimous, not an affirmative misstatement of the law, as is involved here. In our opinion this distinction is irrelevant. The record shows that defendant made the waiver decision after talking with his attorney (there is no doubt in our minds that defendant's attorney was at least competent, and defendant does not claim his attorney misinformed him of the effect of a waiver) and before talking to the judge; so defendant's waiver decision was not based, even in part, on the judge's misstatement of law. Additionally, defendant argues that his waiver was not knowing and intelligent because the trial judge did not tell him that a jury's decision to sentence him to death would have to be unanimous, but defendant has not presented any reasons warranting a reconsideration of our prior holdings that it is not error to fail to so inform a defendant. E.g., Albanese, 104 Ill.2d 504, 85 Ill.Dec. 441, 473 N.E.2d 1246. Next, defendant earnestly argues that the trial judge wrongly judged the significance of evidence of defendant's traumatic childhood and turbulent family history and how to a substantial extent, he is the involuntary product of an extremely violent and dysfunctional family environment, involuntary because he did not choose his relatives and his upbringing. At the sentencing hearing, defendant introduced the testimony of a social worker, Ms. Dinguss, and a psychosocial evaluation of defendant she had prepared. In brief, this evidence revealed: Defendant, an only child, was raised by his mother, his father having been shot and killed by his mother's uncle before defendant reached his first birthday; this same uncle was shot and killed by his own wife; defendant's grandfather committed suicide; defendant's mother was sexually promiscuous throughout his childhood, a situation he resented, and defendant had been abused by men; his mother had also been molested to some degree by her father and uncle; defendant said his female cousins had molested him; as for defendant's past behavior, he had been involved in gangs, had hit women with his hands and hit the mother of one of his many children with a wrench, and had shot at a woman on a public street. Although defendant had never been physically abused, in Ms. Dinguss' opinion he had been emotionally abused by his mother's conduct and criticism of him, and had suffered some psychological trauma from his upbringing in a family situation that was, as a whole, severely dysfunctional. Ms. Dinguss also stated that, owing to limited information, she was not able to determine the extent of this psychological trauma; yet she concluded that defendant's violent impulses would escalate unless he received long-term intensive psychotherapeutic intervention. Before sentencing defendant, the trial judge stated those facts he had considered and the conclusions he had made about defendant's character as a whole and about defendant's demeanor and motivations on the night of July 12-13, 1986. At this time, the trial judge commented on the evidence defendant submitted about his upbringing and its effect on the type of person he was: [T]here has been testimony from Miss Dinguss relative to the fact that she believes that it was inevitable in the Defendant's life that this act of outrageous violence would occur because of the Defendant's upbringing. A mitigating factor is not that it is inevitable that the Defendant act out his aggressions against people and society, the mitigating factor is that there is some way to rehabilitate and change that and make sure that it will never happen again. There has been no testimony to that, in fact to the contrary, the testimony has been that the Defendant acts out his violence towards women, the young, the unprotected, he acts out toward them because of the relationship with the family. Whether that is true or whether it is not true it is not a mitigating factor to be determined that the Defendant can be released into society to perform good works, rather it shows me that    based on the acts    in this case, that the Defendant will act out his aggression violently and outrageously just as was done here. Defendant argues that these remarks show that the trial judge did not understand that mitigating evidence can include evidence that a defendant was not fully culpable and responsible for his acts owing to his upbringing and does not encompass only evidence showing a defendant to be a good person who will do good works in the future. Because the evidence of his upbringing lessened his culpability for the horrendous crimes he committed, defendant contends the judge deprived him of a fair and reliable capital sentencing hearing under the eighth amendment (U.S. Const., amend. VIII) when the judge refused to see that this evidence was mitigating in any way, and instead considered it as aggravating solely, reasoning that it showed defendant had a violent nature and failed to show he could ever be rehabilitated so as not to pose a danger to society. As support, defendant contends that the Supreme Court has held that when a sentencer is deciding whether to sentence a defendant to death and is presented with evidence of the defendant's traumatic childhood, the sentencer has to consider it as mitigating. Defendant, not content merely to argue that this judge erred in finding evidence of his upbringing to be aggravating and not mitigating, further asserts that evidence of a defendant's traumatic childhood, during which he suffered emotional abuse, is comparable to evidence of mental illness and, thus, is inherently mitigating and can never be considered aggravating. Defendant believes [i]f these conditions also make it likely that the defendant may act violently, that is simply not his fault and can't be considered a reason to impose the death penalty upon him. Despite defendant's attempts to find support for the rule he proposes, he fails to prove that the Court has ever held that a sentencer invariably has to give mitigating weight to evidence of a defendant's troubled childhood and can never assign it aggravating weight. It is true that, in general, `punishment should be directly related to the personal culpability of the criminal defendant.' ( Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), 487 U.S. 815, 834, 108 S.Ct. 2687, 2698, 101 L.Ed.2d 702, 717, quoting California v. Brown (1987), 479 U.S. 538, 545, 107 S.Ct. 837, 841, 93 L.Ed.2d 934, 942.) But the Court's pronouncements about the significance of mitigating evidence introduced by a defendant have declared merely that, when such evidence is relevant, a sentencer can neither refuse to consider it ( Eddings v. Oklahoma (1982), 455 U.S. 104, 102 S.Ct. 869, 71 L.Ed.2d 1) nor be precluded from considering it (as occurs when a judge instructs a sentencing jury that it can consider only evidence satisfying a limited list of mitigating factors) ( Hitchcock v. Dugger (1987), 481 U.S. 393, 107 S.Ct. 1821, 95 L.Ed.2d 347). Defendant endeavors to persuade us that, because the Court has said a sentencer cannot refuse to consider relevant mitigating evidence presented by a defendant, it has held that a sentencer must give it some mitigating weight. We disagree with the conclusion. The Court has held only that when the sentencer is a judge, the sentencer cannot refuse to hear evidence introduced as mitigating, and cannot refuse to consider whether that evidence is in fact mitigating on the basis that the sentencing judge believes the evidence is barred by law from being considered as mitigating. This was the case in Eddings : The sentencing judge believed that he could not consider evidence of defendant's troubled youth, during which he had little parental supervision and was severely beaten by his father, causing defendant to become emotionally disturbed, slightly retarded, and sociopathic, because it did not fall under any of the mitigating factors listed in the statute. The Court elucidated the sentencing judge's error: [I]t is clear that the trial judge did not evaluate the evidence in mitigation and find it wanting as a matter of fact; rather he found that as a matter of law he was unable even to consider the evidence. (Emphasis in original.) Eddings, 455 U.S. at 113, 102 S.Ct. at 876, 71 L.Ed.2d at 10. Contrary to defendant's argument, the Court has indicated that evidence of an upbringing which has caused a defendant to become violent and aggressive can be considered in aggravation, for one duty a sentencer has is to predict a defendant's future behavior based on his past behavior. ( Skipper v. South Carolina (1986), 476 U.S. 1, 5, 106 S.Ct. 1669, 1671, 90 L.Ed.2d 1, 7.) In Burger v. Kemp (1987), 483 U.S. 776, 793-94, 107 S.Ct. 3114, 3125-26, 97 L.Ed.2d 638, 656-57, the Court held that defense counsel had not acted ineffectively by failing to introduce evidence of the defendant's troubled background at the sentencing hearing; while the sentencing jury might have been sympathetic, it also might have thought the defendant was nonetheless responsible for the criminal conduct engendered by his violent nature and that his violent nature made him a danger to society`mitigation   , after all, [m]ay be in the eye of the beholder [citations].` Defendant is also mistaken about the holding in Penry v. Lynaugh (1989), 492 U.S. 302, 109 S.Ct. 2934, 106 L.Ed.2d 256. Penry did not hold that a sentencer has to consider evidence of a troubled childhood in mitigation because it always reduces a defendant's culpability, and that it is improper to consider such evidence's aggravating implication that a defendant may be dangerous in the future. In Penry, there was evidence that the defendant was moderately retarded and unable to learn from his mistakes, and, as a child, had been beaten about the head by his mother. Although the trial judge admitted this evidence, the judge did not instruct the sentencing jury that it might be considered as mitigating. Rather, the jury was instructed that, before deciding whether to sentence the defendant to death, it had to answer three questions affirmatively, as required by the Texas death penalty statute; while no question asked about mitigation, in arriving at an affirmative answer to one question, whether the defendant would be a continuing threat to society, the jury might have actually assigned a negative value to the evidence of defendant's retardation and upbringing. The Court held that the trial judge had erred by failing to instruct the jury that, besides answering these three questions, it could give effect to any mitigating value possessed by the evidence of defendant's background. Even so, in characterizing this evidence the court recognized that Penry's mental retardation and history of abuse is thus a two-edged sword: it may diminish his blameworthiness for his crime even as it indicates that there is a probability that he will be dangerous in the future. ( Penry, 492 U.S. at 307-311, 319-20, 324, 329, 109 S.Ct. at 2941-42, 2947, 2949, 2952, 106 L.Ed.2d at 271-72, 279, 281-82, 284.) The Court did not state either that this evidence was inherently mitigating and the sentencer was required to consider it as such, or that it would be improper to consider this evidence in aggravation as it indicated the defendant had an unrehabilitable violent nature. Rather, the error was that the jury instructions allowed the jury to consider only one edge of this two-edged sword. Analyzing the quoted comments of the trial judge in the present case, along with other comments he made before sentencing defendant, we conclude that the judge acted within his discretion in finding that the evidence of defendant's family history was not such that it mitigated his conduct in raping and murdering Boyd. (See People v. Christiansen (1987), 116 Ill.2d 96, 122, 107 Ill.Dec. 198, 506 N.E.2d 1253 (supreme court will not lightly overturn trial court's findings made during aggravation and mitigation phase of death penalty hearing).) As a whole, the trial judge's comments reveal that he saw defendant as a young man who had coldly, and over the course of several hours, committed these horrendous acts, which were typical of his violent nature toward young women, and who could not be rehabilitated and so would remain a dangerous and violent person. The trial judge believed defendant deserved to be sentenced to death. The quoted comments do not show that the trial judge believed he was somehow precluded from viewing the evidence of defendant's background as mitigating; rather, the trial judge admitted this evidence, considered what it revealed about defendant, and concluded that it simply had no mitigating value but was actually aggravating. As we explained, the Court has never held that a sentencer is required to give mitigating weight to such evidence, and we find that the trial judge did not err in his evaluation of this evidence. Nor do we find that our death penalty statute causes the death penalty to be imposed in an arbitrary and capricious manner because it gives the sentencer discretion to decide whether a factor such as a defendant's upbringing, which is not statutorily designated as aggravating or mitigating, militates for or against imposing death. Our procedure contains adequate guidelines to ensure that the penalty of death is imposed on only a narrow class of murderers while still allowing for consideration of an individual defendant and his criminal conduct. See Proffitt v. Florida (1976), 428 U.S. 242, 96 S.Ct. 2960, 49 L.Ed.2d 913. In addition to challenging the sentencing judge's assessment of the evidence of defendant's upbringing and family environment, defendant challenges his trial counsel's failure to request the court to appoint a psychiatrist to further evaluate defendant. According to defendant, the information in the psychosocial evaluation prepared by Ms. Dinguss, who was only a social worker with a master's degree in social work and not a psychiatrist or psychologist, was such that his trial counsel should have sought a full psychiatric workup; by failing to do so his trial counsel was ineffective and deprived defendant of his sixth amendment right to effective counsel ( Strickland v. Washington (1984), 466 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674). As well as being based upon Ms. Dinguss' professional status, this claim is also based upon the statements in Ms. Dinguss' report that, while defendant's relationship with his mother seems to have been the catalyst which escalated the defendant's anger toward women in general but specifically his mother, a thorough psychiatric work-up would need to be conducted before any definitive statements could be made in this regard, and Ms. Dinguss found it impossible to determine precisely with this limited amount of information the extent of the psychological trauma defendant suffered as a result of his upbringing. Defendant's appellate counsel argued this claim of ineffective trial counsel to the trial judge, and also moved post-trial for the appointment of a psychiatrist; as support, counsel presented a letter from a psychiatrist expressing surprise that certain tests and investigations had not been performed before defendant was sentenced. But, in deciding whether trial counsel acted ineffectively in failing to request appointment of a psychiatrist, the only relevant information is that which was available to trial counsel; therefore, we look only at Ms. Dinguss' psychosocial evaluation and testimony, not the subsequent letter of a psychiatrist who was never qualified as an expert. In Strickland, the Supreme Court stated that in analyzing a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel a court must indulge a strong presumption that counsel's conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance, a presumption that a defendant has to overcome. ( Strickland, 466 U.S. at 689, 104 S.Ct. at 2065, 80 L.Ed.2d at 694.) Further, [t]he proper measure of attorney performance remains simply reasonableness under prevailing professional norms. ( Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. at 2065, 80 L.Ed.2d at 694.) In the present case, defendant's trial counsel acted reasonably and effectively in requesting a psychosocial evaluation from the social services department and relying on that report alone, because counsel was merely developing mitigating evidence of defendant's troubled upbringing and family life and their effect on his outlook and attitudes in order to provide at least a partial explanation for why he had committed these horrendous crimes; this report adequately documented defendant's upbringing and its possible effect on him given the inexactitude of psychiatry. Trial counsel was not attempting to establish that defendant suffered from mental illness or insanity at the time of the offense or the trial, or that defendant had some other legal excuse; and there was no evidence during the guilt-innocence or the sentencing phase of the trial that defendant had shown signs of mental illness or psychiatric instability at any time during his life. Given the parameters of counsel's objective in securing the social services report, it was completely reasonable that counsel did not seek appointment of a psychiatrist in order to precisely determine the extent of the psychological trauma defendant had suffered while growing up (assuming precision is attainable in the field of psychiatry). The two cases cited by defendant to support his claim only confirm our conclusion. In Ake v. Oklahoma (1985), 470 U.S. 68, 105 S.Ct. 1087, 84 L.Ed.2d 53, the Court held that an indigent defendant who shows that his sanity at the time of the offense is likely to be a significant issue at trial has a constitutional right to the assistance of a competent psychiatrist; psychiatric assistance is not constitutionally mandated in every case. Any significance Ake may have to the current issue, whether defense counsel is ineffective for failing to request appointment of a psychiatrist to further develop mitigating evidence of an indigent defendant's troubled upbringing, is clearly unfavorable to defendant's position for he makes no claim that he was mentally ill or insane at any time. Nor is defendant's argument strengthened by this court's decision in People v. Stewart (1984), 101 Ill.2d 470, 79 Ill.Dec. 123, 463 N.E.2d 677. In Stewart, this court acknowledged that there are valid reasons for mental examinations in some cases, such as showing that a defendant acted under extreme mental disturbance, that there are mitigating aspects of a defendant's character or personality, and that a defendant has rehabilitative potential. But while these are valid reasons to conduct a mental examination, there must be, in the discretion of the judge, some indication that evidence of these mitigating factors and rehabilitative potential might be present before an examination will be ordered. ( Stewart, 101 Ill.2d at 490, 79 Ill.Dec. 123, 463 N.E.2d 677.) Because the defendant in Stewart had not put his mental condition in issue, and even his own witnesses had not indicated that he had ever had any mental problems, this court held that the trial court did not err in denying his request for a mental examination. As in Stewart, in our case defendant has not claimed or presented any evidence to demonstrate that his mental condition was abnormal at any time. ( Stewart, 101 Ill.2d at 490, 79 Ill.Dec. 123, 463 N.E.2d 677). In Stewart, we also distinguished two other cases relied upon by defendant here; in People v. Gleckler (1980), 82 Ill.2d 145, 44 Ill.Dec. 483, 411 N.E.2d 849, a defense of compulsion was raised, and in People v. Carlson (1980), 79 Ill.2d 564, 38 Ill.Dec. 809, 404 N.E.2d 233, a defense of insanity was raised. In those cases psychiatric evidence had great value because the mental condition of the defendants was directly at issue. The value psychiatric evidence would have had in the present case is comparatively low: defendant never put his mental condition in issue and merely contends that if there had been an expert psychiatric examination, in addition to the social services evaluation, it might have produced additional mitigating evidence by developing a clearer picture of the effect his upbringing had on his character and his capacity to commit these crimes. We refuse to conclude that defendant's trial counsel was ineffective because he failed to request this additional examination at the sentencing stage of the trial when defendant's mental condition was not at issue and when we can only speculate that such an examination would have developed evidence of any mitigating value beyond that which had already been developed in Ms. Dinguss' report, much less of such significant value as to have affected the judge's sentencing decision.