Opinion ID: 757051
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Eighth Amendment Arbitrariness

Text: 89 Hall contends that the victim impact statements injected emotional considerations that had no relevant purpose in the proceedings and thereby violated the Eighth Amendment. We disagree. 90 In Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 111 S.Ct. 2597, 115 L.Ed.2d 720 (1991), the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment erects no per se barrier to the admission of victim impact evidence during the sentencing phase of a capital trial. See id. at 827, 111 S.Ct. 2597. In so doing, the Court observed that a State may properly conclude that for the jury to assess meaningfully the defendant's moral culpability and blameworthiness, it should have before it at the sentencing phase evidence of the specific harm caused by the defendant. Id. at 825. The Court went on to observe that [t]he State has a legitimate interest in counteracting the mitigating evidence which the defendant is entitled to put in, by reminding the sentencer that just as the murderer should be considered as an individual, so too the victim is an individual whose death represents a unique loss to society and in particular to his family. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court thus concluded that [t]here is no reason to treat [victim impact] evidence differently than other relevant evidence is treated. Id. at 827, 111 S.Ct. 2597. Victim impact evidence and argument based upon it therefore does not, by virtue of its substance, abridge a defendant's constitutional rights unless it is so unduly prejudicial that it renders the trial fundamentally unfair. Id. at 825; see also Castillo v. Johnson, 141 F.3d 218, 224 (5th Cir.1998). 91 The victim impact statements admitted here were not so unduly prejudicial that they rendered the trial fundamentally unfair. By and large, the statements did nothing more than generally describe Lisa Rene's character and her aspirations of becoming a doctor as well as the pain that her family members felt as a result of her senseless death. Hall specifically complains of the following statement in the victim impact statement of Nicholson Rene, Lisa Rene's father: 92 I feel I have nothing to look forward to[ ].... If I was going to live twenty more years it will proba[b]ly be ten years. The loss of my daughter is killing me slowly inside. Since after the death of my daughter, I became a strong drinker. 93 We are confident that this brief statement did not inflame [the jury's] passions more than did the facts of the crime. Payne, 501 U.S. at 832, 111 S.Ct. 2597 (O'Connor, J., concurring). As such, the contents of the victim impact statements did not render Hall's trial fundamentally unfair.