Court Opinion

ID: 9634068
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 12:20:25.365896+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:40:39.949288
License: Public Domain

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the denial of the petition for rehearing en banc, joined by Judge PAEZ:
There is no greater burden that falls on a member of the judiciary than to sit in judgment on whether an individual shall live or die, and no greater responsibility than to make certain that every capital defendant receives the full protection to which he is entitled under our Constitution and our laws. When judges consider a case such as this, that not only presents serious questions of constitutional law but that may result in the most serious of human consequences, it is their duty to consider and weigh each constitutional claim made by the defendant with the utmost care. The failure to do so would be a failure to fulfill an obligation not only to the defendant, but to the public and to our legal system itself. Equally, it is the responsibility of a judge who disagrees with the court’s decision to explain her disagreement fairly and objectively and to refrain from seeking to bias or mislead the reader with respect to the serious constitutional questions involved.
We write this brief concurring opinion to make one point clear.1 Judge Callahan opens her dissent from the denial of the petition for rehearing en banc with the statement that “[t]his is the third time that a panel of this court has set aside Bel-montes’s death sentence.” Dissent at 16811-12. Read in context, the implication, carefully phrased though it may be in its final iteration, is that we have flouted the will of the Supreme Court, and at*865tempted to set aside Belmontes’s death sentence on three separate occasions, or for three separate reasons. The sentence can serve only to bias the reader who reaches the merits of the constitutional question later in the dissent. Moreover, the sentence is accompanied by a footnote that makes it appear that the Supreme Court has twice reversed our prior decisions.
As Judge Callahan well knows, the panel which has considered Belmontes’s death sentence for well over six years has at all times diligently sought to implement the Constitution and to fulfill its function of ensuring that individuals are not executed without due process of law. In that time, the majority of the panel that issued what is now the opinion of the court has found two serious and prejudicial violations of Belmontes’s constitutional rights. A closely divided Supreme Court disagreed with one of those conclusions by a vote of 5-4. It has expressed no view on the second one — the violation that we consider here.
The single constitutional issue we resolved in Belmontes’s favor prior to the current decision was the validity of a highly questionable jury instruction, which California had already changed because of its ambiguity if not its unfairness.2 Unfortunately for Belmontes, the change came too late to help him. In the meantime, while our initial decision reversing the capital sentence based on the original instruction was pending, the Supreme Court upheld the instruction in a case governed by AEDPA, Brown v. Payton, 544 U.S. 133, 125 S.Ct. 1432, 161 L.Ed.2d 334 (2005). It did so, however, not on the merits, but on the ground that any error did not meet the AEDPA requirements — requirements that were not applicable to Belmontes’s case.3 Instead of reviewing our opinion invalidating the instruction in a pre-AEDPA case, the Court issued its customary GVR4 so that we could determine whether its decision affected our ruling. Brown v. Belmontes, 544 U.S. 945, 125 S.Ct. 1697, 161 L.Ed.2d 518 (2005). When we concluded that it did not, and that our pre-AEDPA ruling on the merits was not affected by the Court’s post-AEDPA ruling, the Court for the first time agreed to consider on the merits the question of the constitutionality of the jury instruction. As noted, it ultimately upheld the instruction by a 5-4 vote. Ayers v. Belmontes, 549 U.S. 7, 127 S.Ct. 469, 166 L.Ed.2d 334 (2006). As is apparent from a comparison of the majority opinion and the dissent, as well as from the nature of the division in the Court, it was an extremely close question.
*866At the time we decided the jury instruction issue, we were aware that a second, equally serious, constitutional question had been raised regarding ineffective assistance of counsel. We decided, without objection, to resolve only the former issue in our first decision, for what appeared to us to be compelling reasons. Where the resolution of one constitutional issue will dispose of a case, thus obviating the need to reach a second, it is the general jurisprudential practice not to decide both questions simply in order to provide an alternative basis for the court’s decision. Although it may be within our discretion to resolve more than one constitutional issue when it is unnecessary to do so, courts do not ordinarily act contrary to the well-established rule that we avoid deciding constitutional questions if we can arrive at the same result without reaching them.
In our present opinion, then, we are simply doing what the law requires of us— confronting an extremely serious, unquestionably legitimate constitutional issue that we found no reason to reach the first time the case was before us. That issue is whether defendant’s counsel provided ineffective assistance at the penalty phase. Upon exhaustive review of the law and the facts before us, we agreed with Belmontes and concluded that he had received and been prejudiced by constitutionally deficient representation.
Judge Callahan’s introduction subtly distorts what has transpired in the pertinent judicial proceedings and leaves the reader with a false impression of what this court has done in the past and what it is doing now. More important, it frames the ensuing discussion so as to prejudice the uninformed reader’s view of the merits of the constitutional case. Putting our fellow human beings to death is far too serious a business for a resort to such tactics — or for judges to allow themselves to be swayed by them. Here, our colleagues have rightly denied the petition to rehear the case en banc, and the vast majority of this court’s active judges have declined to sign their names to Judge Callahan’s dissent. With the assurance that we have faithfully upheld the Constitution, and that we have done nothing less than give the most deliberate consideration to each claim presented to us, we regretfully find it necessary to file this concurrence in the denial of the petition for rehearing en banc.

. Although we do not agree with the legal arguments advanced in Judge Callahan's dissent from the denial of the petition for rehearing en banc, they are proper subjects for fair debate among jurists. Our position, and the position of this court, as to those issues is set forth in the court’s opinion, Belmontes v. Ayers, 529 F.3d 834 (9th Cir.2008), and requires no further discussion here.

. In 1983, "[j]ust a year after respondent’s sentencing!!] the California Supreme Court evinced considerable discomfort with factor (k),” the instruction in question, and "inserted a critical footnote effectively amending factor (k) and expanding the evidence that a California jury could properly consider in deciding whether to impose a death sentence.” Ayers v. Belmontes, 549 U.S. 7, 127 S.Ct. 469, 482, 166 L.Ed.2d 334 (2006) (Stevens, J., dissenting). Subsequently, the California legislature also amended the jury instruction in question in such a way as to confirm that "the category of evidence that may provide the basis for a sentence other than death is much broader that the category described in factor Ok)." Id. at 482 n. 2, 127 S.Ct. 469.

. Justice Breyer, who gave the majority its fifth vote in Payton, explicitly stated in his concurrence that "this is a case in which Congress’ instruction to defer to the reasonable conclusions of state-court judges makes a critical difference. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). Were I a California state judge, I would likely hold that Payton's penalty-phase proceedings violated the Eighth Amendment.” Payton, 544 U.S. at 148, 125 S.Ct. 1432 (Breyer, J., concurring).

. Order granting, vacating, and remanding.