Opinion ID: 4465387
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Brookover

Text: Our colleagues do not want to confront the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision in Brookover. Both arguments just reviewed are designed to persuade the reader that decisions of the Arizona Supreme Court in capital cases, and Brookover in particular, are irrelevant to the Strickland prejudice question. Our colleagues would prefer to regard as the controlling case a habeas challenge to a decision by the California Supreme Court. Dissent at 54–56. 22 KAYER V. RYAN Our colleagues discuss Brookover only briefly, and only at the very end of their long dissent. They try to avoid the effect of Brookover in two ways. First, our colleagues point out that Brookover’s mental impairment came from an “organic brain injury.” Id. at 53. They compare Brookover’s impairment to what they characterize as Kayer’s “self-administered ‘untreated alcoholism and untreated pathological gambling.’” Id. In thus referring to Kayer’s mental state, they ignore his “severe” “mental impairment” when he was discharged from the Navy as a very young man; his two stays in VA hospitals, resulting in a bipolar diagnosis and lithium prescription; his hearing voices, as described by his aunt; his delusional beliefs, including the belief that he came from another planet; and the extensive mental illness in his family. More important, the Arizona Supreme Court concluded that Brookover’s “mental impairment” was a statutory mitigator because his “mental condition was . . . a major and contributing cause of his conduct . . . .” Brookover, 601 P.2d at 1326. There is nothing in the Court’s opinion specifying that the cause of the impairment is relevant. The relevant fact is the impairment itself. Second, our colleagues dismiss Brookover as a case decided “forty years ago.” Dissent at 44–45. When Kayer’s case was decided on direct appeal by the Arizona Supreme Court, Brookover was twenty (not forty) years old. We wrote in our opinion: The Arizona Supreme Court in capital cases routinely cites and treats as binding precedent its own decisions from twenty years (and more) before. See, e.g., State v. Hedlund, 245 KAYER V. RYAN 23 Ariz. 467, 431 P.3d 181, 190 (2018) (discussing and distinguishing State v. Graham, 135 Ariz. 209, 660 P.2d 460 (1983); State v. Trostle, 191 Ariz. 4, 951 P.2d 869, 885 (1997) (discussing and relying on State v. Richmond, 114 Ariz. 186, 560 P.2d 41, 52–53 (1976))). See also State v. Stuard, 176 Ariz. 589, 863 P.2d 881, 902 (1993) (citing, inter alia, State v. Doss, 116 Ariz. 156, 568 P.2d 1054, 1060 (1977), and writing, “Leniency is therefore required.”). Nothing in the practice of the Arizona Supreme Court suggests that when it sentenced Kayer de novo in 1999, it would have treated as less-than-binding a twenty-year-old precedent. In that precedent—Brookover—the Arizona Supreme Court had held, on facts less favorable to the defendant than those in Kayer’s case, that a non-capital sentence was “mandated.” Kayer, 923 F.3d at 725.