Court Opinion

ID: 9430693
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:21.352586+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:25.821468
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
with whom Justice Brennan and Justice Marshall join, dissenting.
Stanley Clark was deprived of two rights: the right guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to compel the State of Tennessee to prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of the crimes with which he was charged, and the right guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to have a jury of his peers determine whether the State had met that burden. Today, the Court focuses entirely on the former right and disregards totally the latter. A reviewing court’s conclusion that the record would support a conviction by a properly instructed jury has no bearing on the question whether a defendant was denied the right to have the jury that actually tried him make that determination. “To conform to due process of law, [defendants are] entitled to have the validity of their convictions appraised on consideration of the case ... as the issues were determined in the trial court.” Cole v. Arkansas, 333 U. S. 196, 202 (1948). A trial that was fundamentally unfair at the time it took place, because the jury was not compelled to perform its constitutionally required role, cannot be rendered fundamentally fair in retrospect by what amounts to nothing more than an appellate review of the sufficiency of the evidence. I therefore dissent from the Court’s holding that harmless-error analysis should be applied.
*591I
Stanley Clark was indicted on charges of the first-degree murder of Joy Faulk and Charles Browning. He pleaded not guilty to both charges. At trial, Clark contested every element of the crime. He argued that he had not committed the killings, that he could not recall, due to amnesia, any event connected with the killings, and, alternatively, that he was incapable of forming any culpable intent due to mental illness and intoxication. Defense counsel’s opening statement and the testimony of psychiatric experts and persons close to Clark put the question whether Clark possessed the requisite mental state directly before the jury.
At the close of trial, the court instructed the jury that malice, “an intent to do any injury to another,” was a necessary element of first- as well as second-degree murder. App. 186. The trial court then instructed the jury, which for three days had heard testimony raising doubts about Clark’s capacity to form the requisite intent, that “if the State has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that a killing has occurred, then it is presumed that the killing was done maliciously. But this presumption may be rebutted . . . .” Id., at 187.1 The trial court went on to instruct the jury that voluntary manslaughter is a killing without malice. Id., at 188.
The District Court found, and the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit agreed, that the jury instructions were constitutionally infirm under Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U. S. 510 (1979).2 App. to Pet. for Cert. A-l, A-7. The sole *592question before the Court is whether such error can ever be harmless. See ante, at 576. In Sandstrom, the Court held that burden-shifting jury instructions on the question of intent, like the instructions here, violate the due process requirement recognized in In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970), that a conviction is valid only if the State has proved beyond a reasonable doubt every element of the crime. 442 U. S., at 521. Thus, as the majority assumes, there was clear constitutional error in Clark’s trial, see ante, at 576, n. 5, and the question before the Court is only whether that error was harmless.
II
The harmless-error rule stems from this Court’s recognition that some trial errors are sufficiently tangential to the trial process that they fairly may be overlooked. Chapman v. California, 386 U. S. 18, 22 (1967). But the Court also has recognized the existence of a class of constitutional errors that “necessarily render a trial fundamentally unfair,” ante, at 577, and thus are not amenable to harmless-error analysis. “Harmless-error analysis,” according to the majority, “presupposes a trial, at which the defendant, represented by counsel, may present evidence and argument before an impartial judge and jury.” Ante, at 578. Thus, errors that deny a defendant “the basic trial process” can “never be harmless.” Ante, at 578, n. 6. The archetypal examples of such acts are denial of the right to counsel and trial before a biased judge. See ante, at 577-578; Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335 (1963); Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U. S. 510 (1927). The salient feature these examples share is that effective defense counsel and an impartial judge play central roles in the basic trial process. The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments clearly establish the jury as an equally central entity. Cf. ante, at 578. What the Court’s opinion today fails to *593comprehend is that the instruction in this case interfered so fundamentally with the jury’s performance of its constitutionally mandated role that the error involved is analytically indistinguishable from those errors the Court finds inappropriate for harmless-error analysis.
The Framers chose to protect defendants, not primarily by regulating the substance of the criminal law, but by establishing certain trial procedures to be followed in a criminal case. See Underwood, The Thumb on the Scale of Justice: Burdens of Persuasion in Criminal Cases, 86 Yale L. J. 1299, 1317-1318 (1977). The jury’s central obligation under the Due Process Clause is to determine whether the State has proved each element of the offense charged beyond a reasonable doubt. See Sandstrom v. Montana, supra; In re Winship, supra. The Constitution assigns this function “solely to the jury.” Sandstrom, 442 U. S., at 523. This duty cannot be interfered with, see Ulster County Court v. Allen, 442 U. S. 140, 169 (1979) (Powell, J., dissenting), nor delegated to another entity. “Findings made by a judge cannot cure deficiencies in the jury’s finding as to the guilt or innocence of a defendant resulting from the court’s failure to instruct it to find an element of the crime. See Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S. 73, 95, and n. 3 (1983) (Powell, J., dissenting).” Cabana v. Bullock, 474 U. S. 376, 384-385 (1986); see also Cole v. Arkansas, 333 U. S., at 202. The Constitution does not allow an appellate court to arrogate to itself a function that the defendant, under the Sixth Amendment, can demand be performed by a jury.
A jury that receives a constitutionally flawed, burden-shifting instruction on intent is, in effect, directed to return a verdict against the defendant. Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S., at 84 (plurality opinion). Because a jury is the primary finder of fact, “ ‘a trial judge is prohibited from entering a judgment of conviction or directing the jury to come forward with such a verdict. . . regardless of how overwhelmingly the evidence may point in that direction.’ ” Ibid., quot*594ing United States v. Martin Linen Supply Co., 430 U. S. 564, 572-573 (1977). The erroneous instruction invites the jury to abdicate its constitutional responsibility to decide for itself whether the State has proved every element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. It is likely that the jury will accept this invitation because “there is no reason to believe the jury would have deliberately undertaken the more difficult task” of evaluating the evidence of intent, when offered the opportunity simply to rely on a presumption, Sandstrom, 442 U. S., at 526, n. 13; Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S., at 85 (plurality opinion). When a defendant contests the issue of intent, a reviewing court will rarely be capable of deciding whether the error contributed to the verdict: it will have no way of knowing how the jury treated the question of intent. See Sandstrom, 442 U. S., at 526; Ulster County Court v. Allen, 442 U. S., at 175-176 (Powell, J., dissenting).3
The verdicts reached in this case aptly illustrate why harmless-error analysis is inappropriate in cases where a defendant contests the element of mens rea. Clark was charged with the first-degree murders of two people, who were together in a truck when they were killed. The State used the same evidence to prove that Clark killed Faulk as to prove that he killed Browning. Yet the jury found Clark guilty of the first-degree murder of Faulk and the second-degree murder of Browning. That the jury reached distinct verdicts shows that it focused closely on the question of Clark’s mental culpability, the precise issue on which the court gave the constitutionally defective charge. A reviewing court simply cannot determine whether this jury in fact relied on the flawed instruction. It certainly is possible that it did: perhaps the jury did not find sufficient intent to convict *595Clark of second-degree murder, and but for the presumption of malice would have convicted him of voluntary manslaughter, for which malice was not required. It is of no value to point to any evidence presented at trial of Clark’s intent; “[a]n erroneous presumption on a disputed element of the crime renders irrelevant the evidence on the issue because the jury may have relied upon the presumption rather than upon that evidence.” Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S., at 85 (plurality opinion). The ordinary view is that a jury adheres to the instructions, Parker v. Randolph, 442 U. S. 62, 73 (1979) (plurality opinion), and there is no reason to believe that the “lay jury will know enough to disregard the judge’s bad law if in fact he misguides them.” Bollenbach v. United States, 326 U. S. 607, 613-614 (1946).
It is true that “[w]hen a jury is instructed to presume malice from predicate facts, it still must find the existence of those facts beyond a reasonable doubt.” Ante, at 580. But that truism is beside the point here, where the only fact that the jury was required to find in order to trigger the presumption was that “a killing has occurred.” App. 187. The jury was instructed to presume criminal intent, the sine qua non of criminal responsibility, from the fact of a dead body. The jury may have found the fact that there was a body, but this jury has not met In re Winship’s requirement of finding, beyond a reasonable doubt, “every fact necessary to constitute the crime,” 397 U. S., at 364: this jury may never have found that Clark acted with malice, an essential element of the crimes of which he was convicted.
I — I HH HH
The Court recognized 40 years ago that the question a reviewing court must ask “is not whether guilt may be spelt out of a record, but whether guilt has been found by a jury according to the procedures and standards” required by the Constitution. Bollenbach v. United States, 326 U. S., at 614. When a jury has not been properly instructed concern*596ing an essential element of the offense that has been charged, the danger exists that the defendant has been deprived of his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to have the jury-determine whether the State has proved each element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. Faced with an incorrect instruction and a general verdict of guilty, a reviewing court simply lacks any adequate basis for deciding whether the jury has performed its constitutionally required function. Because I believe the Court today asks and answers the wrong question, I dissent.

 The trial court’s wording of the definition of malice and of the presumption of malice for first-degree murder differed slightly from that it gave for second-degree murder, presented in the text. Because these differences are immaterial, the courts below treated the instructions as if they were identical, see App. to Pet. for Cert. A-10, A-12, as does the majority.

 Under Sandstrom, both mandatory conclusive presumptions, which remove the presumed element from the case once the State has proved the predicate fact, and mandatory rebuttable presumptions, which require the jury to find the presumed element unless the defendant rebuts the pre*592sumption, are unconstitutional. See Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U. S. 510, 517-518 (1979); Francis v. Franklin, 471 U. S. 307, 314, n. 2 (1985). This case involves the latter type.

 Where, of course, a defendant has conceded intent, the use of an erroneous presumption as to intent may be superfluous, and a “reviewing court can be confident that a Sandstrom error did not play any role in the jury’s verdict.” See Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S., at 87 (plurality opinion).