Court Opinion

ID: 9426715
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:46.015056+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.650684
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice White,
concurring in the judgment.
In Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U. S. 280 (1976), the Court addressed the question whether the mandatory death penalty imposed under the statute involved in that case was *363consistent with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. The plurality opinion stated:
“The issue, like that explored in Furman, involves the procedure employed by the State to select persons for the unique and irreversible penalty of death.” Id., at 287. (Emphasis added.)
In holding that the failure to conduct the sort of post-trial sentencing proceeding which Florida law requires, and which was conducted in this case, rendered North Carolina’s mandatory death penalty statute unconstitutional, the plurality said:
“[W]e believe that in capital cases the fundamental respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment, see Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. [86,] 100 (plurality opinion), requires consideration of the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense as a constitutionally indispensable part of the process of inflicting the penalty of death.
“This conclusion rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. Because of that qualitative difference, there is a corresponding difference in the need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.” Id., at 304-305. (Emphasis added.)
The issue in this case, like the issue in Woodson v. North Carolina, supra, “involves the procedure” employed by the State in selecting persons who will receive the death penalty. Here the sentencing judge indicated that he selected petitioner Gardner for the death penalty in part because of information contained in a presentence report which information was not *364disclosed to petitioner or to his counsel and to which petitioner had no opportunity to respond. A procedure for selecting people for the death penalty which permits consideration of such secret information relevant to the “character and record of the individual offender,” id., at 304, fails to meet the “need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment” which the Court indicated was required in Woodson, supra, at 305. This conclusion stems solely from the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments on which the Woodson decision expressly rested, and my conclusion is limited, as was Woodson, to cases in which the death penalty is imposed. I thus see no reason to address in this case the possible application to sentencing proceedings—in death or other cases—of the Due Process Clause, other than as the vehicle by which the strictures of the Eighth Amendment are triggered in this case. For these reasons, I do not join the plurality opinion but concur in the judgment.