Court Opinion

ID: 9429277
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:26:18.15793+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:18.533908
License: Public Domain

Justice White,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
In Claassen v. United States, 142 U. S. 140 (1891), the defendant in a criminal case was found guilty on 5 of 11 counts on which the jury was instructed. The verdict was a general one and one 6-year sentence was imposed. On writ of error, this Court affirmed the conviction and sentence, saying that the first “count and the verdict of guilty returned upon it being sufficient to support the judgment and sentence, the question of the sufficiency of the other counts need not be considered.” Id., at 146. Similarly, in Barenblatt v. United States, 360 U. S. 109 (1959), a defendant was convicted on each of five counts, and a general sentence was imposed. The Court said, id., at 115: “Since this sentence was less than the maximum punishment authorized by the statute for conviction under any one Count, the judgment below must be upheld if the conviction upon any of the Counts is sustainable” (footnote omitted). Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U. S. 640, 641, n. 1 (1946); Whitfield v. Ohio, 297 U. S. 431, 438 (1936); Abrams v. United States, 250 U. S. 616, 619 (1919); and Evans v. United States, 153 U. S. 584, 595 (1894), were similar holdings. It is therefore clear that in cases such as Claassen and Barenblatt, there is no Stromberg, Thomas, or Street problem.
*892Here, the jury imposing the sentence found three aggravating circumstances and based on all the evidence imposed the death sentence. One of the aggravating circumstances was found invalid on an intervening appeal in another case, and the claim is that under Stromberg, Thomas, and Street, the death sentence must be set aside. I agree with the Court that there is no such problem since the evidence supporting the invalid aggravating circumstance was properly before the jury. The Court, however, suggests that if the evidence had been inadmissible under the Federal Constitution, there might be a Stromberg, Thomas, or Street problem. The Court says, ante, at 883: “The jury’s imposition of the death sentence after finding more than one aggravating circumstance ... is also not precisely the same as the imposition of a single sentence of imprisonment after guilty verdicts on each of several separate counts in a multiple-count indictment, because the qualitatively different sentence of death is imposed only after a channeled sentencing procedure” (footnote omitted). The Court thus suggests that the Claassen-Barenblatt line of cases may not be applicable to sentencing proceedings in capital punishment cases. I fail to grasp the distinction, however, between those cases and the sentencing procedures involved here. In Claassen and Barenblatt, there was only one sentence on several counts and one could be no surer there than here that the sentence did or did not rest on any one of the counts. Those cases, however, would sustain the sentence if it was authorized under any of the valid counts. Stromberg, Thomas, and Street should no more invalidate the single sentence in this case.
Thus in my view there would be no Stromberg-Thomas-Street problem, as such, if the invalid count had rested on constitutionally inadmissible evidence. But since the jury is instructed to take into account all the evidence, there would remain the question whether the inadmissible evidence invalidates the sentence. Perhaps it would, but at least there *893would be room for the application of the harmless-error rule, which would not be the case, it seems to me, under the per se rule of Stromberg, Street, and Thomas.
Except for the foregoing, I join the Court’s opinion and its judgment as well.