Opinion ID: 2974187
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Comparative proportionality

Text: Although the rule of consistency is not a principle rooted in the Eighth Amendment, the majority elsewhere in its opinion reveals that its true concern is that Getsy’s death sentence is “disproportionate” to the sentence imposed upon the “mastermind” of the conspiracy to murder the Serafinos—namely, Santine. Maj. Op. at 8. But the Supreme Court’s proportionality jurisprudence, contrary to the majority’s view, focuses on whether the punishment of death is appropriate for specific types of criminal conduct, not on whether one defendant’s death sentence is morally justifiable with respect to that of another participant in the same crime. Proportionality, as the Supreme Court has explained, refers “to an abstract evaluation of the appropriateness of a sentence for a particular crime.” Pulley v. Harris, 465 U.S. 37, 42-43 (1984). Evaluating the nature of the offense and the penalty, as well as sentencing practices in various jurisdictions, the “Court has occasionally struck down punishments as inherently disproportionate, and therefore cruel and unusual, when imposed for a particular crime or category of crime.” Id. at 43. Examples of “inherently disproportionate punishments” that are set forth in Pulley include a death sentence for the rape of an adult woman that does not result in death, and a death sentence for a defendant who aids and abets the commission of a felony but does not take life, attempt to take life, or intend to take life. Id. (citing Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982), and Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977) (plurality opinion)). These are the very examples seized on by Getsy, who argues in his brief that his sentence “is disproportionately severe in comparison to the sentences imposed on all of the other participants as well as others similarly situated.” But the Court in Pulley expressly rejected the argument that Getsy is making (and that the majority appears to accept)—namely, that the Constitution requires “comparative proportionality review.” See 465 U.S. at 51. This type of review, the Court observed, “purports to inquire . . . whether the penalty is . . . unacceptable in a particular case because [it is] disproportionate to the punishment imposed on others convicted of the same crime.” Id. at 43. Even though a comparative proportionality review is not constitutionally required, the Ohio Supreme Court conducts such reviews. This court has repeatedly upheld the Ohio Supreme Court’s review procedures as falling “within the wide latitude allowed” states in defining the type of cases used for comparison. See Wickline v. Mitchell, 319 F.3d 813, 824 (6th Cir. 2003) (rejecting the habeas petitioner’s “claim that the Ohio Supreme Court failed to grant him meaningful proportionality review of his death sentence”); Buell v. Mitchell, 274 F.3d 337, 368-69 (6th Cir. 2001) (rejecting the habeas petitioner’s “contentions regarding inadequate appellate review of the proportionality of death sentences under the Ohio statute . . . because no proportionality review is constitutionally required”). Getsy’s proportionality argument is thus foreclosed by both our own precedents and those of the Supreme Court. Nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision in Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982), is to the contrary. The defendant in Enmund was the getaway driver for two others who had robbed and murdered an elderly couple. Id. at 784. He was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of robbery, and was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide “the question whether death is a valid penalty . . . for one who neither took life, attempted to take life, nor intended to take life.” Id. at 787. In answering that question, the Court reaffirmed that it was not deciding “the disproportionality of death as a penalty for murder, but rather the validity of capital punishment for Enmund’s own conduct.” Id. at 798. Continuing its analysis, the Court reiterated that “[t]he focus must be on his culpability, not on that of those who committed the robbery and shot the victims, for we insist on individualized consideration as a constitutional requirement in imposing the death sentence[.]” Id. (citation and quotation marks omitted) (emphasis in original). No. 03-3200 Getsy v. Mitchell Page 26 The Supreme Court then held that, because “Enmund did not kill or intend to kill,” his culpability was insufficient to support a sentence of death under the Eighth Amendment. Id. In other words, death is a disproportionate penalty for defendants who do not take life, attempt to take life, or intend to take life. See id. at 787, 801. At no point in its opinion did the Court say that the Eighth Amendment requires state and federal courts to compare the conduct of one defendant to that of a codefendant involved in the same crime. Indeed, the Court’s lone reference to the conduct of Enmund’s codefendants was in the context of differentiating between criminals who do take life (or intend to take life) and those, like Enmund, who do not. See Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137, 149 (1987) (reading Enmund as resting on the fact that Enmund’s “own participation in the felony murder was so attenuated” and that “there was no proof that Enmund had any culpable mental state,” and so limiting the Enmund holding). Enmund, in sum, held nothing more and nothing less than that states may not impose the death penalty on defendants who do not kill, attempt to kill, or intend to kill a human being—the precise question on which the Court granted review. The majority’s reading of Enmund turns that case on its head. First, the narrow holding of Enmund cuts decisively against Getsy, since he took Ann Serafino’s life and thus falls squarely within the class of offenders for whom death is a permissible punishment. More importantly, the Supreme Court stated in Edmund what it would go on to reaffirm in Pulley—that what the Constitution requires is “individualized consideration” of a defendant’s culpability, “which means that [courts] must focus on relevant facets of the character and record of the individual offender.” Id. at 798 (citations and quotation marks omitted). The focus in Edmund was “on his culpability, not on that of those who committed the robbery and shot the victims[.]” Id. (emphasis in original). Similarly, the focus in the present case must be on Getsy, not on Santine or any of the others who participated in the conspiracy to murder the Serafinos. Rather than supporting the majority’s creation of a comparative-proportionality requirement, therefore, the decision in Enmund reinforces the proposition at the heart of Pulley—that the Eighth Amendment assures that the punishment will fit the crime, but does not bar one defendant in a murder conspiracy from receiving a death sentence simply because another of the coconspirators received a life sentence. Just as mystifying to me is the majority’s reliance on the writings of Aristotle, a law review article that also cites Aristotle, and three state-court decisions discussing proportionality as a matter of state constitutional law. Maj. Op. at 9-10. These authorities, needless to say, stray far from the only source of law that permits us to invalidate a state-court ruling and grant habeas relief—the decisions of the United States Supreme Court. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). Moreover, the state-court cases cited by the majority, even if they were valid sources of law for a federal habeas court to consider, provide little support for the majority’s holding. In one of those cases, People v. Kliner, 705 N.E.2d 850, 897-98 (Ill. 1998), the state court affirmed the death sentence of a hired killer, even though the person who had hired him had pled guilty and received a 60-year term of imprisonment. The Florida Supreme Court in Larzelere v. State, 676 So. 2d 394, 406 (Fla. 1996), likewise affirmed the death sentence in the converse situation—one where a mother who hired her son to kill her husband was convicted of capital murder, but the son was acquitted of the murder charge in a subsequent trial. Finally, the one case of the three in which a state court actually overturned a sentence as disproportionate under state law predated the Supreme Court’s decision in Enmund and explicitly reaffirmed the validity of its prior decisions upholding death sentences imposed on one “but not necessarily all of the participants in a criminal transaction.” Hall v. State, 244 S.E.2d 833, 839 (Ga. 1978). These decisions demonstrate that even those state courts that conduct a comparative proportionality review of the type endorsed by the majority have upheld death sentences despite apparently inconsistent verdicts rendered in separate trials. Furthermore, I read the Supreme Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 281 (1987), as resolving any remaining doubt as to the viability of comparative-proportionality challenges. The defendant in McCleskey was a black man convicted of killing a white police officer. No. 03-3200 Getsy v. Mitchell Page 27 After he was sentenced to death, McCleskey argued that his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment. McCleskey relied on statistical evidence of “a disparity in the imposition of the death sentence in Georgia based on the race of the murder victim and, to a lesser extent, the race of the defendant.” Id. at 286. He also maintained “that the sentence in his case is disproportionate to the sentences in other murder cases.” Id. at 306. Citing Pulley, the Supreme Court rejected McCleskey’s challenge and upheld his death sentence. McCleskey, the Court explained, could not “prove a constitutional violation by demonstrating that other defendants who may be similarly situated did not receive the death penalty.” Id. at 306-07 (emphasis in original). The Court reasoned that the possibility that juries in other cases may have acted out of “discretionary leniency” and declined to impose the death penalty did not render death sentences that were imposed “arbitrary and capricious.” Id. at 307. In rejecting McCleskey’s comparative proportionality argument, the Supreme Court appended a lengthy footnote to explain why “[t]he Constitution is not offended by inconsistency in results based on the objective circumstances of the crime.” Id. at 307 n.28. The Court elaborated: Numerous legitimate factors may influence the outcome of a trial and a defendant’s ultimate sentence, even though they may be irrelevant to his actual guilt. If sufficient evidence to link a suspect to a crime cannot be found, he will not be charged. The capability of the responsible law enforcement agency can vary widely. Also, the strength of the available evidence remains a variable throughout the criminal justice process and may influence a prosecutor’s decision to offer a plea bargain or to go to trial. Witness availability, credibility, and memory also influence the results of prosecutions. Finally, sentencing in state courts is generally discretionary, so a defendant’s ultimate sentence necessarily will vary according to the judgment of the sentencing authority. The foregoing factors necessarily exist in varying degrees throughout our criminal justice system. Id. These practical difficulties inherent in reviewing discretionary sentencing decisions mirror the concerns expressed by the Court when it rebuffed a challenge to seemingly inconsistent jury verdicts in Powell. See 469 U.S. at 64-67. As the Court noted in both Powell and McCleskey, the power of the jury to express “the collective judgment of the community” through a compromise verdict or the exercise of mercy may lead to imperfect outcomes, but they are outcomes that are just as likely to benefit criminal defendants as to prejudice them. See id. at 67; McCleskey, 481 U.S. at 307. The majority’s proportionality holding, as applied in this case, leads to exactly the type of “imprudent and unworkable” results that the Supreme Court warned against in Powell. See 469 U.S. at 66. Without intending a parade of horribles, I offer two examples that I believe demonstrate the illogical consequences to which the majority’s rule leads. Assume that, unlike in the present case, the jury did not find the murder-for-hire specification and recommended that Getsy be sentenced to life in prison. The majority’s rule would appear to prevent the state, at the subsequent trial of Santine, from seeking the death penalty on the basis of murder for hire, since Santine could point to the jury verdict in Getsy’s case and allege inconsistency. Alternatively, what if Santine had fled the jurisdiction and was not located and brought to trial until well after Getsy’s conviction or, worse still, until after Getsy was executed? If the jury at his much-later trial failed to find the murder-forhire specification, would Getsy’s death sentence become unconstitutional years after the fact? These examples, which are just two of many that one could posit, expose as “imprudent and unworkable” a rule that makes the validity of one person’s conviction and sentence contingent upon the verdict of another jury at the later trial of his or her “partner in crime.” Beyond these practical concerns, caselaw from our sister circuits provides a strong indication that the majority’s proportionality theory runs directly counter to the Supreme Court’s holdings in McCleskey and Pulley. The Tenth Circuit, for example, has rejected under similar factual No. 03-3200 Getsy v. Mitchell Page 28 circumstances the same comparative proportionality argument advanced by Getsy and endorsed by the majority. See Hatch v. Oklahoma, 58 F.3d 1447, 1466 (10th Cir. 1995). In Hatch, the defendant’s accomplice, Glen Burton Ake, entered the home of Richard and Marilyn Douglass by pretending that he was lost and requesting directions from the Douglasses. Id. at 1451. Ake then retrieved a firearm from the car, and he and Steven Hatch reentered the home, both armed. Id. The duo bound and gagged Richard and Marilyn, as well as their son Brooks, and attempted to rape the Douglasses’ 12-year-old daughter. Id. Ake then told Hatch to return to the car, to prepare it for their departure, and to “wait for the sound.” Id. After Hatch left the house, Ake shot each of the Douglasses, killing the parents and wounding both children. The two defendants were tried separately. Hatch waived his right to a jury trial, while Ake availed himself of that right. After various appeals, Hatch was sentenced to death, and the Oklahoma state courts affirmed. Id. at 1452. Ake’s case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which reversed his conviction and remanded for a new trial. Ake v. Oklahoma, 470 U.S. 68, 74 (1985). The jury at the second trial convicted Ake of first-degree murder and shooting with intent to kill, but recommended a life sentence, which the trial judge imposed. See Ake v. State, 778 P.2d 460, 461-62 (Okla. Crim. App. 1989). Before the Tenth Circuit, Hatch argued “that the Constitution require[d] that he receive a sentence proportional to others who have committed the same offense.” Hatch, 58 F.3d at 1466. Hatch maintained that, because Ake was “more culpable for the murders,” Hatch’s “sentence should be no more severe than his codefendant,” who received life imprisonment. Id. at 1466 & n.14. The Tenth Circuit acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s decision in Pulley had directly dealt with “appellate court review for proportionality in relation to all defendants.” Id. at 1466 (emphasis in original). What Hatch sought was slightly different—“a proportionality review of his sentence relative only to his codefendant.” Id. The Tenth Circuit found this distinction irrelevant for constitutional purposes, concluding that Pulley foreclosed Hatch’s challenge. Hatch, the court held, “was constitutionally entitled to a determination of his individual culpability, and he received that individualized consideration. The Constitution does not demand that he receive a review of his comparative responsibility as well.” Id. (citation omitted); see also Bush v. Singletary, 99 F.3d 373, 375 (11th Cir. 1996) (per curiam) (holding that a successive habeas petitioner did not raise a federal constitutional claim by arguing that his death sentence was disproportionate to that of his codefendant, whose death sentence had been vacated on appeal); Russell v. Collins, 998 F.2d 1287, 1294 (5th Cir. 1993) (denying relief to a habeas petitioner who argued that his death sentence was disproportionate to that of a codefendant who had pled guilty and had been sentenced to 60 years in jail). Similarly, both the jury and the Ohio courts on appellate review have provided Getsy with “a determination of his individual culpability.” Hatch, 58 F.3d at 1466. They have concluded that Getsy shot and killed Ann Serafino, that the evidence supports the finding of three specifications (murder for hire, felony murder, and attempting to kill two or more persons), and that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating ones. The Ohio Supreme Court, employing a type of proportionality review that this court has upheld, see Buell, 274 F.3d at 368-69, also found that Getsy’s sentence was not disproportionate to those imposed on others convicted of similar crimes and sentenced to death. See State v. Getsy, 702 N.E.2d 866, 892 (Ohio 1998). Nothing more is required by the Constitution. See McCleskey, 481 U.S. at 306 (reaffirming Pulley’s holding that comparative “proportionality review is not constitutionally required”); see also Hatch, 58 F.3d at 1466 (citing cases from the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth circuits agreeing that comparative proportionality review is not constitutionally mandated). Because comparative proportionality review is not constitutionally required, and because the Supreme Court and our sister circuits have rejected a proportionality argument substantially similar to the one advanced by Getsy, I believe that the majority has erred in adopting a contrary position. No. 03-3200 Getsy v. Mitchell Page 29 The majority has responded to my discussion of proportionality by arguing that this court’s precedents upholding the Ohio Supreme Court’s system of proportionality review against constitutional challenges do not control in the present case because Getsy “does not challenge Ohio’s system of proportionality review.” Maj. Op. at 10 n.2. Rather, the majority says, Getsy is challenging only the application of that system to his case. Id. I find this response unconvincing for two reasons. First, the majority is wrong as a matter of fact. Getsy spends approximately five pages in his appellate brief attacking the validity of Ohio’s system of proportionality review. (Appellant’s Br. at 120-125) Second, even if Getsy is challenging only the application of the proportionality review scheme to his case (as opposed to the constitutionality of the system as a whole), the majority has misconceived the import of this court’s precedents. The cases of Williams, Wickline, Smith, and Buell all uphold a particular type of proportionality review conducted by the Ohio Supreme Court, which compares the individual death sentence at issue with “previous cases in which the death penalty has been imposed.” Wickline, 319 F.3d at 824-25. That is to say, the Ohio Supreme Court specifically excludes from the precedents used for comparison those cases in which defendants, like Santine, received a sentence of life imprisonment. But what the majority holds, in essence, is that the Ohio Supreme Court unreasonably applied clearly established federal law by refusing to conclude that Getsy’s sentence is disproportionate to the one received by Santine, even though this court has consistently held that the Ohio Supreme Court is not obligated to consider the life sentence of a coconspirator at all. I cannot accept the notion that a state court’s failure to consider something that this court has repeatedly said that it need not consider can constitute reversible constitutional error and serve as the basis for habeas corpus relief. To sum up, I believe that the rule announced by the majority is a new rule of constitutional law that conflicts with Supreme Court precedents rejecting substantially similar arguments. Caselaw from both this court and our sister circuits confirms that the only type of proportionality review mandated by the Constitution is an evaluation of “the appropriateness of a sentence for a particular crime,” not the appropriateness of a sentence relative to the one received by other participants in the crime. See Pulley, 465 U.S. at 42-43. Nothing cited by the majority persuades me otherwise. I thus believe that the decision that is contrary to clearly established federal law is not the one rendered by the Ohio Supreme Court, but that of the majority today. 3. Inconsistent verdicts at separate trials do not implicate Furman The majority further asserts, without support, that the common-law rule of consistency informs the inquiry into whether a death sentence is unconstitutionally arbitrary under Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Maj. Op. at 6, 15. Furman was a fractured 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court that effectively created a temporary moratorium on capital punishment in the United States. No single rationale united the five justices who found the death penalty as then administered “cruel and unusual” within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment, and subsequent decisions of the Court demonstrate that the majority’s reliance on Furman is unavailing as a basis to set aside Getsy’s sentence. One way in which I believe that the majority misconceives the significance of Furman is by failing to acknowledge the manner in which the Supreme Court has subsequently interpreted its decision in that case. In Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), for example, the Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s death penalty system—a modified version of the system that it had declared unconstitutional in Furman. The petitioner in Gregg challenged, on the strength of Furman, the continued chance that the discretionary nature of the Georgia system would result in the arbitrary imposition of the death penalty in murder cases. But the Court rejected this argument, describing Furman as holding “only that, in order to minimize the risk that the death penalty would be imposed on a capriciously selected group of offenders, the decision to impose it had to be guided No. 03-3200 Getsy v. Mitchell Page 30 by standards so that the sentencing authority would focus on the particularized circumstances of the crime and the defendant.” Id. at 199 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.); see also Blystone v. Pennsylvania, 494 U.S. 299, 314 (1990) (“In Furman, the Court held that vesting the sentencer with unbridled discretion to determine whether or not to impose the death penalty resulted in a system in which there was no objective way to distinguish between defendants who received the death penalty and those who did not.”). The jury at the sentencing phase of Getsy’s trial “focus[ed] on the particularized circumstances of the crime and the defendant,” Gregg, 428 U.S. at 199 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.), and the majority does not contend otherwise. Nor does the majority claim that Ohio’s capital punishment system “vest[ed] the sentencer with unbridled discretion to determine whether or not to impose the death penalty” in his case. Blystone, 494 U.S. at 314. Such claims would in any event be contrary to both law and fact because Ohio’s sentencing regime requires the jury to find statutory aggravating factors before it can impose the death penalty, and to weigh those factors against any mitigating circumstances, which is exactly what the jury did in the present case. I also believe that the majority misconceives the applicability of Furman in two other ways. One is its failure to recognize that Furman focused not on the unfairness or arbitrariness of individual death sentences, but on the arbitrariness of state capital-punishment regimes as a whole. See Gregg, 428 U.S. at 200 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.) (“[T]he petitioner looks to the sentencing system as a whole (as the Court did in Furman and we do today) and argues that it fails to reduce sufficiently the risk of arbitrary infliction of death sentences.”). Even the justices most ardently opposed to the death penalty believed that what rendered the regime unconstitutional was its systematic irrationality, not the unjust outcome in a particular case. See, e.g., McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 323 (1987) (Brennan, J., joined by Marshall, Blackmun, and Stevens, JJ., dissenting) (stating that “concern for arbitrariness focuses on the rationality of the system as a whole”). Because the Court’s decision in Furman rested primarily on concerns about the irrationality of state capital-sentencing regimes “as a whole,” I disagree with the majority’s characterization of that case as focusing on inconsistent results in individual cases. Maj. Op. at 7-8. The other way in which I believe the majority misinterprets Furman is by incorporating the rule of consistency, as well as the Supreme Court’s decisions in Morrison and Hartzel, into Furman’s Eighth Amendment principles. Maj. Op. at 13-15. According to the majority, the rule of consistency and Morrison/Hartzel “add[] clarity, detail, and content to the more generalized ‘arbitrariness’ language of Furman.” Maj. Op. at 13. I fail to see, however, how cases decided 28 and 38 years prior to Furman can be used to clarify the Court’s later decision. Instead, I would look to the Court’s more recent interpretations of the Eighth Amendment, all of which, as I have shown above, substantially limit the reach of Furman. I therefore believe that the majority errs in giving an expansive reading to Furman, and that it has created a new rule of constitutional law in doing so. 4. The majority’s rule does not fall within the exceptions to Teague Because none of the Supreme Court cases cited by the majority “compel” the constitutional rule that it adopts today, that rule is a “new” one that cannot benefit Getsy in his collateral attack on his state conviction and sentence unless “it falls under one of Teague’s exceptions.” See Beard v. Banks, 542 U.S. 406, 411, 416 (2004). Those narrow exceptions are for (1) “rules forbidding punishment of certain primary conduct [or] rules prohibiting a certain category of punishment for a class of defendants because of their status or offense,” and (2) “watershed rules of criminal procedure implicating the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding.” Id. at 416-17 (citations and quotation marks omitted). Neither Getsy’s “status” nor the nature of his criminal offense form the basis for the majority’s rule, so the first exception does not apply. See id. As for the second exception, the Court No. 03-3200 Getsy v. Mitchell Page 31 in Beard “emphasized the limited scope” of the exception, noting that it had “yet to find a new rule that falls under the second Teague exception,” id. at 417, which includes only those procedural protections as fundamental to the system of criminal justice as the right to counsel. The rule announced by the majority, unlike the right to counsel, is not one that transforms the courts’ “understanding of the bedrock procedural elements essential to the fairness of a proceeding,” id. at 418 (citation omitted) (emphasis in original). Teague’s limited second exception, therefore, is similarly inapplicable. That the majority’s rule aims to avoid “potentially arbitrary impositions of the death sentence” does not alter either the analysis or the outcome. Id. at 419. Indeed, the Beard Court specifically rejected the argument that rules with such an objective automatically fall under the second Teague exception. The Court explained that all of its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the capital-punishment context “is directed toward the enhancement of reliability and accuracy in some sense,” but nonetheless held that “the fact that a new rule removes some remote possibility of arbitrary infliction of the death sentence does not suffice to bring it within Teague’s second exception.” Beard, 542 U.S. at 419-20 (citation and quotation marks omitted). Because I believe that the majority’s holding constitutes a new rule of constitutional law, and because that rule does not fall within either of the narrow exceptions to Teague’s principle of nonretroactivity, I would deny Getsy any relief on the basis of that rule.