Court Opinion

ID: 9715920
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:20:14.104244+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:54:50.154945
License: Public Domain

Rosenblatt, J. (concurring).
Declaring a statute unconstitutional is not a celebratory event, but from time to time a necessary part of the judicial function and a pillar of our system of checks and balances. With that in mind, I write separately to emphasize why I fully concur with the Court.
While cogent, the dissent goes too far in asserting repeatedly that the Court is substituting its own preferences for the Legislature’s. Many trial judges in the United States and in New York (myself included) have not shrunk from imposing death sentences on defendants even though, as judges, we might have qualms about it. The dissent makes this point, stating that it recognizes the Court’s “obvious discomfort with the death penalty—indeed we [the dissenters] may share that discomfort.” (Dissenting op at 149.) I take this as my colleagues’ reminder—an apt and timely one—that judges should subordinate their personal predilections to the legislative will.
But there is another side of the coin, no less compelling. Just as judges should not shrink from carrying out the legislative will, so too should they not shrink from declaring statutes unconstitutional in proper cases, however distasteful that may be. In both instances, criticism (and occasionally, cynicism) is inevitable (e.g., “the court did not have the stomach to declare the death penalty law unconstitutional” or, from the other side, “the court did not have the stomach to carry out the death penalty”).
My assessment is that most often, and surely in the case before us, judges are ruled not by their stomachs but by their minds, their judicial experience, and their constitutional training and analysis. Without doubt, that is true of the Court’s decision today. The same, I am prepared to say, is true of the dissent. Although I disagree with it, I ascribe to it no personal or ideological bias any more than I do to the Court’s writing. The case before us involves a difference of opinion on a point of constitutional law, and I side firmly with the Court.
The deadlock instruction at hand is coercive. Granted, it can coerce both ways. Death-prone jurors may well come over to life without parole so as to be assured that the defendant will never be released. But it is no less likely that the life without parole jurors will vote for death because it is the only way to guarantee that the defendant will always remain behind bars.
*133In terms of symmetry, this is nicely balanced, but as a constitutional matter it does not add up. If 5 of 10 defendants are executed based on coercion, there is little comfort knowing that the other five will be spared the death penalty. Sparing five does not offset the improper execution of the other five. This is not a point of personal predilection. A calculation of that kind simply cannot withstand scrutiny under our State Constitution.
The deadlock instruction is a critical part of the capital case machinery, and in holding it unconstitutional, the Court is not acting on some trifling or arcane technicality. The trial judge gives the jury the deadlock instruction at an exquisitely crucial time. It is a signpost at the very crossroads of life and death. If the directions are omitted or coercive, it could wrongfully mean someone’s life. I stress this because no one should suppose that the Court is engaging in a didactic exercise involving angels dancing on the heads of pins. Contrary to the dissent’s assertion, it is not part of a design to devise creative obstructions to the death penalty. Deadlock instruction jurisprudence is, literally, a matter of life and death, and the Court is right to declare that an execution based on an unreliable sentencing verdict is constitutionally unacceptable and cannot be justified in the name of deference to the Legislature.
I cannot imagine that the Legislature intended to coerce jurors into unreliable verdicts when it determined that a deadlock instruction was required. But neither can I imagine that, since the founding of our Republic, lawmakers deliberately have set out to draft unconstitutional statutes in hundreds of cases in which American courts have declared those statutes unconstitutional.
No other jurisdiction has enacted a deadlock instruction like this one. While I surely sense nothing willful or pernicious in the Legislature’s motivation, it remains that the instruction is inexplicable and fatally defective.
Finally, for the reasons convincingly expanded upon by the Court, I agree that leaving the statute with no deadlock instruction at all is constitutionally untenable and that, as the Court has explained, it would be impermissible for us to rewrite or restructure the law. The dissent asserts that the Court’s result is astonishing. For my part, under constitutional analysis, the Court can come to no other result.