Court Opinion

ID: 9766719
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:57:10.558107+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:25.180337
License: Public Domain

Justice RIVERA-SOTO,
dissenting.
I concur wholly in Justice LaVeechia’s thoughtful and clear dissent. I add only the following.
For the fifth time, this Court reviews the death sentence originally imposed on defendant Anthony DiFriseo in 1988 and then re-imposed on remand in 1992* 1 for the for-hire murder of an alleged informant: State v. DiFrisco (I), 118 N.J. 253, 571 A.2d 914 (1990) (affirming defendant’s conviction but reversing the imposition of the death sentence); State v. DiFrisco (II), 137 N.J. 434, 645 A.2d 734 (1994) (affirming defendant’s conviction and death sentence); State v. DiFrisco (III), 142 N.J. 148, 662 A.2d 442 (1995), cert. denied, 516 U.S. 1129, 116 S.Ct. 949, 133 L.Ed.2d 873 (1996) (affirming defendant’s death sentence on proportionality review); and State v. DiFrisco (IV), 174 N.J. 195, 804 A.2d 507 *186(2002) (affirming denial of defendant’s petition for post-conviction relief).
Pivoting off of this Court’s later consolidation of direct appeals and proportionality reviews in capital cases, In re Proportionality Review Project (I), 161 N.J. 71, 735 A.2d 528 (1999), the majority embraces a new theory to speculate that, had defendant’s direct appeal and proportionality review been consolidated, his death sentence would not have been affirmed. Emphasizing “[t]he unique situation in this appeal[,]” ante, 187 N.J. 175, 900 A.2d 831 (2006), the majority concludes that “because penalty review and proportionality review determine whether a death sentence has been properly imposed, the two reviews are not distinct[,]” and that, therefore, “the determination that a death sentence is proportionate to other death sentences is a necessary part of a Justice’s decision to affirm a death sentence in our penalty review.” Ante, 187 N.J. 175, 900 A.2d 831 (2006). According to the majority, “[o]ur prior practice of conducting our capital review in bifurcated proceedings was an artificial construct!)]” Ante, 187 N.J. 177, 900 A.2d 832 (2006) (emphasis supplied). No matter how it is presented, an inescapable fact remains: the majority’s conclusion is grounded in the aggregate of dissenting votes in State v. DiFrisco (II) and State v. DiFrisco (III) that, at best, total four votes to reverse, matching four votes to affirm. That conclusion, and its effect, is contrary to our settled law that appeals lie from judgments and not from the views of individual judges.
Placing aside the timeliness of defendant’s now second application for post-conviction relief,2 the majority, in order to reach the conclusion it desires, impeaches two earlier and admittedly correct *187decisions of this Court. Thus, under the new rule today announced by the majority—one the majority impliedly prays is applicable to only this case and no other—not only do two rights make a wrong, but litigants are now encouraged to engage in the entirely unseemly head-counting of individual justices in different appeals in a quest to cobble together an aggregate majority. That process is anathema to our system of jurisprudence and cannot be countenanced. Therefore, I dissent.
I.
The principal vice in the majority’s analysis lies in its jettisoning of two of its earlier valid judgments without a reasoned basis for so doing. We have twice considered, and affirmed, defendant’s death sentence. State v. DiFrisco (II), 137 N.J. 434, 645 A.2d 734 (1994); State v. DiFrisco (IV), 174 N.J. 195, 804 A.2d 507 (2002). Under bedrock principles of our jurisprudence, those decisions should not be subject to the majority’s unwarranted and novel attack. In both State v. DiFrisco (II) and State u DiFrisco (IV), this Court examined and rejected, first on direct appeal and yet again on post-conviction relief, defendant’s challenges to his death sentence. Compare, State v. DiFrisco (II), supra, with, State v. DiFrisco (IV), supra.
Disregarding that precedent, the majority now asserts that “[o]ur prior practice of conducting our capital review in bifurcated proceedings was an artificial construct----” Ante, 187 N.J. 177, 900 A.2d 832 (2006) (emphasis supplied). Having diminished this Court’s earlier precedent, the majority then declares, without the benefit of any authority and contradicted by the very case in which it seeks to declare a new rule of law, that “the determination that a death sentence is proportionate to other death sentences is part of a Justice’s decision to affirm a death sentence in our penalty review.” Ante, 187 N.J. 177, 900 A.2d 832 (2006). That conclusion is the unsustainable result of the majority’s new arithmetic jurisprudential rule that counts the votes of some of the *188Justices, while disregarding the contrary votes and prevailing votes of others. It is to that new rule that I now turn.
II.
In the pursuit of voiding a now eighteen-year-old death penalty, today the majority creates new and unprecedented law. The majority makes much of its numerical analysis contrasting defendant’s direct appeal with the proportionality review of his sentence. According to the majority,
In DiFrisco II, supra, during our then-separate direct appeal review, Justices Clifford, Stein, and Handler concluded that
[b]ecause the trial court failed to ascertain whether the jury had reached a final non-unanimous life verdict, and because this Court has no ability to divine which of several potential explanations of what happened is accurate, its conclusion that a non-unanimous verdict was not lost is pure speculation. Defendant’s death sentence cannot be based on guess-work and must be reversed.
[137 N.J. at 518 [645 A.2d 734] (Handler, J., dissenting) (emphasis added).]
As a remedy, the three Justices would have vacated the death sentence and remanded to the trial court for the imposition of a life sentence. Id. at 534 [645 A.2d 734] (Handler, J., dissenting).
Then, in this Court’s proportionality review in DiFrisco III, supra. Justice O’Hem argued that defendant’s death sentence should be reversed and a life sentence imposed, stating that “the sentence of death in this case is disproportionate because offenders such as defendant ... usually receive life sentences.” 142 N.J. at 246 [662 A.2d 442] (O’Hern, J., dissenting). Accordingly, four Justices— and thus a majority—found that defendant’s death sentence was improperly imposed and that he should receive a life sentence. Although those Justices reached their conclusions based on different reasoning, they agreed on the final result____As such, we must vacate defendant’s death sentence and, to effectuate the intent of the four Justices, remand to the trial court for imposition of a life sentence.
[Ante, 187 N.J. 178-79, 900 A.2d 833 (2006) (citations omitted).]
However, the error of engaging in the highly unusual head-counting embraced by the majority is highlighted upon close examination. The majority completely ignores that Justice Stein first voted to reverse defendant’s murder conviction but later held that the imposition of the death penalty was proportionate under the circumstances. Rather, the majority only considered that Justice O’Hern concluded the opposite. Entirely lost in the majority’s analysis is that, in the interim, Justice Coleman re*189placed Justice Clifford and voted that defendant’s sentence was proportionate. If the majority’s construct has any currency, at best, then, an aggregate of four Justices found fault with either defendant’s conviction or sentence, but four Justices sustained defendant’s conviction and sentence. Using basic arithmetic, that results in a 4-4 tie that would have affirmed defendant’s conviction and sentence. I do not embrace this arithmetic analysis, but present it solely to unveil the weakness at the core of the majority’s reasoning.
We cannot and should not give Justice O’Hern’s purported change of heart any greater weight than we give to Justice Stem’s divergent votes. The only principled basis for analysis here is that the determination of whether a death sentence is to be imposed is quite different from the determination whether, once imposed, that penalty is disproportionate. Justices O’Hern and Stein correctly recognized that difference then and Justice LaVecchia pointedly underscores it now. Yet, it is one the majority simply ignores.
There simply is nothing to indicate that, in this case, a different result would have obtained had the Court consolidated defendant’s direct appeal with his request for a proportionality review of his death sentence. What is inescapable is that, when it rejected defendant’s attacks on his death sentence, either as a matter of direct appellate review or in proportion to “similar cases in which a sentence of death has been imposed,” N.J.S.A. 2C:ll-3(e), this Court, by a majority vote of its members, affirmed defendant’s death sentence. We have been presented no principled reason to disturb those judgments.
At its core, then, I reject the majority’s analysis for the reasons eloquently and succinctly stated by Justice Blackmun:
Although personally I may rejoice at the Court’s result, I find it difficult to accept or to justify as a matter of history, of law, or of constitutional pronouncement. I fear the Court has overstepped. It has sought and has achieved an end.
[Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238, 414, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 2816, 33 L.Ed.2d 346, 450-51 (1972) (Blackmun, J., dissenting).]
*190Justice WALLACE joins in this opinion.
For reversal/vacation/remandment—Chief Justice PORITZ and Justices LONG, ZAZZALI and ALBIN—i.
For Dissent—Justices LaVECCHIA, WALLACE and RIVERA-SOTO—3

 Defendant pled guilty to capital murder and an underlying weapons offense; defendant waived a juiy for the penalty phase and the trial court imposed the death sentence. On remand, defendant sought to withdraw his plea; that request was denied. Defendant sought a juiy for his penalty phase and ultimately was sentenced to death by the juiy.

 The State asserts that defendant's second petition for post-conviction relief should be barred as untimely. The majority expends great effort in rejecting that view. Ante, 187 N.J. 164-66, 900 A.2d 824-25 (2006). Regardless of the State's view that this application is procedurally barred, it is the substance of the majority’s holding that is most deserving of condemnation. It is there that our focus must and does lie.