Opinion ID: 6536853
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Gregory and Race-Based Imposition of Capital Punishment

Text: {153} The Majority states that we are here faced with similar concerns regarding proportionality  review that prompted the Washington Supreme Court in State v. Gregory , 192 Wash.2d 1 , 427 P.3d 621 (Wash. 2018), to declare that its capital punishment statute violates Washington's state constitution. Maj. Op. ¶ 41. In Gregory , the evidence indicated that black defendants were four-and-a-half times more likely than white defendants to be sentenced to death in the state of Washington. 427 P.3d at 630 . The Washington Supreme Court was satisfied that the association between race and the death penalty could not be attributed to random chance and concluded that Washington's capital-punishment system is constitutionally intolerable as it is racially biased. Id. at 635-36 . The court addressed comparative proportionality review only insofar as the court was unpersuaded that it was a tool capable of ameliorating the broad and fundamental discrimination worked by Washington's capital-punishment statute. Id. at 637 . Comparative proportionality review, the court explained, was simply too subjective and too case-specific to adequately fix the constitutional deficiencies confronted. Id. The concerns underlying Gregory are not at all present here. {154} To the best of my knowledge, only one author has been willing to suggest that, in New Mexico, race and ethnicity play[ ] a role in determining who w[ill] live and who w[ill] die. Marcia J. Wilson, The Application of the Death Penalty in New Mexico, July 1979 Through December 2007: An Empirical Analysis , 38 N.M. L. Rev. 255 , 283 (2008). That author made clear, however, that her observations were not the result of professional, statistical inquiry and she conceded that the data she reviewed and the methodologies she employed to review it do[ ] not 'statistically prove' anything. Id. at 259-60 . The State Bar of New Mexico, Task Force to Study the Administration of the Death Penalty in New Mexico, Final Report, 18 (Jan. 23, 2004), discusses evidence that race plays some role in the imposition of the death penalty nationally, see id. at 13, but the report does not claim that race plays a factor in death sentencing in New Mexico. See id. at 14-15. {155} There is no evidence that Fry's and Allen's death sentences were imposed as a consequence of Fry and Allen's race or the race of their victims. Fry and Allen are both white, non-Hispanic; Fry's victim was a woman of mixed ethnicity and was part Navajo, and Allen's victim was white, with no evidence that she was an ethnic minority. We are not presented here with circumstances equivalent to those the Supreme Court of Washington confronted in Gregory . This case is different.