Court Opinion

ID: 9482354
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:47:37.369079+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:55.910176
License: Public Domain

*1036PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit
Judge, dissenting:
The ultimate question in this case is whether the mitigating value of Graham’s youth and family circumstances — age seventeen at the time of the offense — is fully expressed by the jury in its answer to two questions: did Graham act deliberately and does Graham present a future danger. The majority opinion, after first concluding that any deficiency in the two questions must be substantial, holds that the answer is yes. I am unpersuaded that the jury’s assessment of Graham’s moral culpability is fully, or substantially as the majority has it, exhausted by concluding that he acted deliberately and presents a future danger. A jury's reasoned response could be that although Graham acted deliberately, and is likely to do so again, when Graham’s tender years and family circumstances are entered in the account of moral culpability, a death sentence is not warranted.
It was true before Penry that “[t]he state may not by statute preclude the sen-tencer from considering any ... relevant mitigating evidence.” 1 That did not necessarily mean, however, that the state could not limit the effects of mitigation. There was a powerful argument that, given Jú-rele, the Eighth Amendment allowed the state to limit the effects a sentencer might give to mitigating evidence. Justice Scalia made the argument in Penry, but his was the dissenting view.
I intend no criticism of the majority’s able struggle, but I am not persuaded that we have the freedom to define again the jury’s sentencing role in Texas. I say “again” because two decisions of the Supreme Court control this case. The first is that the state, without fettering effect, must give the jury the means for expressing its reasoned moral response.2 The second decides that Graham’s youth and family circumstances are relevant to the core decision for the jury — his moral culpability.3
The state may insist upon the jury’s “reasoned” moral decision, but the contribution of Graham’s youth to his moral culpability, beyond the issues of deliberateness and future dangerousness, has no intrinsic measure or objective weight. There is a point at which we must accept that the moral culpability of a particular person for a particular crime is what the jury says that it is. With all deference, this quintessential blackbox decision yields to no logical or explainable divison whether youth has some residual “mitigating force after the Texas questions have been answered.” It is not a “legal” question at all, but is rather like asking judges not to reason but to look to the sky, presumably, and react. Such discrete Rorschach-like inquiries do not produce or draw upon normative rules. That we are asked to perform such tasks is a powerful signal that something is wrong. The wrong is not difficult to locate. As Justice Harlan put it in McGautha:
Those who have come to grips with the hard task of actually attempting to draft means of channeling capital sentencing discretion have confirmed the lesson taught by the history recounted above. To identify before the fact those characteristics of criminal homicides and their perpetrators which call for the death penalty and to express these characteristics in language which can fairly be understood and applied by the sentencing authority, appear to be tasks which are beyond present human ability (emphasis supplied).4
Furman repudiated McGautha, but Justice Harlan’s wisdom is validated with each encounter of dead ends in the resulting conceptual puzzle. And a puzzle it is.
For example, the Supreme Court in Ca-*1037baña v. Bullock5 upheld the death sentence while observing that “the jury may well have sentenced Bullock to death despite concluding that he had neither killed nor intended to kill.”6 This despite the fact that in Enmund v. Florida7 the court held that the Eighth Amendment forbids the death penalty for “one ... who aids and abets a felony in the course of which a murder is committed by others but who does not himself kill, attempt to kill, or intend that a killing takes place, or that lethal force will be employed.”8 I would have supposed that whether an accused intended to kill lies at the heart of moral culpability; that the finding of intent to kill would be left with the sentencer. Stated another way, if a state’s procedures must allow a defendant’s mitigating evidence to find expression in its verdict it is puzzling to allow a state appellate court to supply the critical finding of intent to kill, a finding missing from the jury’s verdict. It is a long road from McGautha to Penry, but the resulting jurisprudence is perverse in that it insists on a reasoned moral response of the jury, an assignment we jurists have failed.
The solution must be left to the Supreme Court, at least in cases as this one where we are left no meaningful latitude. In any event, this case is already so postmarked by the predictable scattering of judges required to react, not reason.

. Eddings v. Oklahoma, 455 U.S. 104, 113-115, 102 S.Ct. 869, 876-877, 71 L.Ed.2d 1 (1982).

. Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302, 109 S.Ct. 2934, 106 L.Ed.2d 256 (1989).

. Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361, 109 S.Ct. 2969, 2978, 106 L.Ed.2d 306 (1989); see abo Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815, 108 S.Ct. 2687, 2698, 101 L.Ed.2d 702 (1988).

. McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 204, 91 S.Ct. 1454, 1466, 28 L.Ed.2d 711 (1971).

. 474 U.S. 376, 106 S.Ct. 689, 88 L.Ed.2d 704 (1986).

. 474 U.S. at 384, 106 S.Ct. at 696.

. 458 U.S. 782, 102 S.Ct. 3368, 73 L.Ed.2d 1140 (1982).

. 458 U.S. at 797, 102 S.Ct. at 3376.