Opinion ID: 1282788
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: selective suspension of constitutional standards

Text: From the beginning of statehood in 1859, two principles of humane penal laws have been enshrined in Oregon's constitution, presumably to place them beyond the reach of legislators and transitory majorities. One principle, guaranteed in Article I, section 15, is that [l]aws for the punishment of crime shall be founded on the principles of reformation, and not of vindictive justice. The other, in Article I, section 16, provides that [c]ruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted, but all penalties shall be proportioned to the offense. In 1984, Ballot Measure 6 enacted Article I, section 40, of the Oregon Constitution, which provides that the penalty for aggravated murder, as defined by law, shall be death [n]otwithstanding sections 15 and 16 of this Article. If section 40 is valid, its effect is to create two opposing principles of punishment in Oregon's criminal law. The principle of punishment for practically all crimes must be reformation, not vindictive justice. Vindictiveness  revenge, hatred, revulsion  may not motivate the punishment for rape, for arson, for robbery, for the most brutal cruelty to women or children. Vindictiveness may not motivate the punishment for killing another person, not even for most murders. But when a murder fits one of the complex definitions of aggravated murder, described in part II of this opinion, the civilizing restraints of sections 15 and 16 are excluded. After 130 years, emotions of vindictiveness and revenge now are declared to be a respectable basis for public administration of Oregon law in some cases but not in others. So are cruel and unusual punishments, but for the safety net provided by the federal Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Vindictive and cruel, unusual, or disproportionate punishments are forbidden (absent other aggravating circumstances) when a woman murders her husband or her child, her father or her mother, but such penalties are allowed when she murders both, or when the victim is one of a list of officials, or if the defendant was in custody at the time. The state now may exact cruel or disproportionate vengeance when the victim is any judge or court employee, or an officer of the police and corrections system or a fellow inmate, but not if the defendant instead kills an officer's wife or child, a legislator, an agency official, or a prison employee not charged with the supervision or control of inmates. See ORS 163.095, supra. The majority says that this radical difference in the Constitution's penal principles created by the partial suspension of Article I, sections 15 and 16, needs only to be rational in order to satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment's mandate of equal protection of the laws, because the majority does not perceive a fundamental interest at stake in the difference, though a defendant's life or death may depend on it. Because, in my opinion, other reasons invalidate the death sentence in the case before us, I do not pursue the equal protection issue at length; but the majority's treatment of the Supreme Court's equal protection jurisprudence is quite inadequate. The majority would have us believe that the Supreme Court would treat a distinction between some offenders that may be subjected to vindictive, cruel, unusual or disproportionate punishments and the majority of offenders who may not be so punished as it would treat a distinction between plastic and paper milk containers. See Minnesota v. Clover Leaf Creamery Co., 449 U.S. 456, 101 S.Ct. 715, 66 L.Ed.2d 659 (1981). To use a seemingly farfetched example, a state might make sterilization an available punishment for aggressive robbers and not for cautious nonaggressive burglars, or for burglars of residences and not for robbers of banks, and defend each scheme on some rational hypothesis that either group poses a greater threat of forced pregnancy to women than the other. Yet this example resembles the statute struck down in Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 62 S.Ct. 1110, 86 L.Ed. 1655 (1942), which found a denial of equal protection in a law that provided for the sterilization of persons repeatedly convicted of most felonies involving moral turpitude, such as larceny, but excluded others, such as embezzlement. Skinner appears in the majority's opinion only in a footnote to an unrelated citation. The majority is satisfied not to look far either for support or for refutation of the equal protection claim. Beyond the challenge to the distinctions made by Oregon's scheme on its face, other issues can be expected to arise whether the scheme is applied equally, or upon the same terms, Oregon Constitution, Article I, section 20. [6] See State v. Freeland, 295 Or. 367, 667 P.2d 509 (1983) (discretionary decisions in criminal prosecutions must apply defensible criteria). Issues of equal treatment of similar offenders, of course, are hard to brief persuasively in the first death penalty case under the 1984 law. By the time unequal selection of capital cases can be demonstrated, it presumably will be too late for this and several other defendants, whose lives will have been taken in the course of the current experiment with the death penalty. [7] Other issues also remain unexamined. [8]