Court Opinion

ID: 9430486
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:50.415245+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:12.408569
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
The Court’s judgment vacates petitioner’s sentence of death while refusing to disturb his conviction. Adhering to my view that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 227 (1976) (Brennan, J., dissenting), I agree that the death sentence in this case must be vacated. But even if I did not hold that view, I would still find that the sentence was unconstitutionally imposed in this case. In my view, the constitutional right of a defendant to have a trial judge ask the members *39of the venire questions concerning possible racial bias is triggered whenever a violent interracial crime has been committed. See Ross v. Massachusetts, 414 U. S. 1080 (1973) (Marshall, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). The reality of race relations in this country is such that we simply may not presume impartiality, and the risk of bias runs especially high when members of a community serving on a jury are to be confronted with disturbing evidence of criminal conduct that is often terrifying and abhorrent. In analyzing the question of when the Constitution requires trial judges to accommodate defendants’ requests for inquiries into racial prejudice, I, like the Court, am influenced by what the Court correctly describes as the “ease” with which the risk may be minimized. Ante, at 36.
In any event, I cannot fully join either the Court’s judgment or opinion. For in my view, the decision in this case, although clearly half right, is even more clearly half wrong. After recognizing that the constitutional guarantee of an impartial jury entitles a defendant in a capital case involving interracial violence to have prospective jurors questioned on the issue of racial bias — a holding which requires that this case be reversed and remanded for new sentencing — the Court disavows the logic of its own reasoning in denying petitioner Turner a new trial on the issue of his guilt. It accomplishes this by postulating a jury role at the sentencing phase of a capital trial fundamentally different from the jury function at the guilt phase and by concluding that the former gives rise to a significantly greater risk of a verdict tainted by racism. Because I believe that the Court’s analysis improperly intertwines the significance of the risk of bias with the consequences of bias, and because in my view the distinction between the jury’s role at a guilt trial and its role at a sentencing hearing is a distinction without substance in so far as juror bias is concerned, I join only that portion of the Court’s judgment granting petitioner a new sentencing pro*40ceeding, but dissent from that portion of the judgment refusing to vacate the conviction.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants an impartial jury. This is not mere exhortation for it has been noted that “the right to an impartial jury carries with it the concomitant right to take reasonable steps designed to insure that the jury is impartial.” Ham v. South Carolina, 409 U. S. 524, 532 (1973) (Marshall, J. concurring in part and dissenting in part). Among the most important of the means designed to insure an impartial jury is the right to strike those jurors who manifest an inability to try the case solely on the basis of the evidence. This right to exclude incompetent jurors cannot be exercised meaningfully or effectively unless counsel has sufficient information with which to evaluate members of the venire. As Justice White noted for the Court in Rosales-Lopez v. United States, 451 U. S. 182, 188 (1981), “lack of adequate voir dire impairs the defendant’s right to exercise peremptory challenges where provided by statute or rule, as it is in the federal courts” (footnote omitted).
Recognizing this fact, we held long ago that “essential demands of fairness” may require a judge to ask jurors whether they entertain any racial prejudice. Aldridge v. United States, 283 U. S. 308 (1931); see also Ham v. South Carolina. More recently, we attempted to refine the analysis, and declared that when there is a showing of a “likelihood” that racial or ethnic prejudice may affect the jurors, the Constitution requires a trial judge to honor a defendant’s request to examine the jurors’ ability to deal impartially with the evidence adduced at trial. Rosales-Lopez, supra at 190. Exercising our supervisory powers over the federal courts, we held in Rosales-Lopez that when a violent crime has been committed, and the victim and the accused are of different races, a per se inference of a “reasonable possibility” of prejudice is shown. In the present case, we deal with a criminal case from a state court involving an act of interracial vio*41lence, and are faced with the question of what factors and circumstances will elevate this presumptive “reasonable possibility” of prejudice into a constitutionally significant “likelihood” of prejudice.
The Court identifies three factors, the “conjunction” of which in its view entitled petitioner Turner as a matter of constitutional right to have the jury questioned on racial bias. These are (1) the fact that the crime committed involved interracial violence; (2) the broad discretion given the jury at the death penalty hearing; and (3) the “special seriousness of the risk of improper sentencing in a capital case.” Ante, at 37. I agree with the Court that when these three factors are present, as they were at petitioner’s sentencing hearing, the trial court commits constitutional error in refusing a defense request to ask the jurors if the race of either the victim or the accused will bear on their ability to render a decision based solely on the evidence. What I cannot accept is that the judge is released from this obligation to insure an impartial jury — or, to put it another way, that the defendant is stripped of this constitutional safeguard — when a capital jury is hearing evidence concerning a crime involving interracial violence but passing “only” on the issue of guilt/innocence, rather than on the appropriate sentence.
The Court’s argument is simply untenable on its face. As best I can understand it, the thesis is that since there is greater discretion entrusted to a capital jury in the sentencing phase than in the guilt phase, “there is [in the sentencing hearing] a unique opportunity for racial prejudice to operate but remain undetected.” Ante, at 35. However, the Court’s own discussion of the issues demonstrates that the opportunity for racial bias to taint the jury process is not “uniquely” present at a sentencing hearing, but is equally a factor at the guilt phase of a bifurcated capital trial.
According to the Court, a prejudiced juror sitting at a sentencing hearing might be influenced by his racial bias in deciding whether the crime committed involved aggravating *42factors specified under state law; the Court notes that racial prejudice might similarly cause that juror to be less favorably inclined toward an accused’s evidence of mitigating circumstances. Moreover, the Court informs us:
“More subtle, less consciously held racial attitudes could also influence a juror’s decision. . . . Fear of blacks, which could easily be stirred up by the violent facts of [a] crime, might incline a juror to favor the death penalty.” Ibid.
The flaw in this “analysis” is that there is simply no connection between the proposition advanced, the support proffered for that thesis, and the conclusion drawn. In other words, it is certainly true, as the Court maintains, that racial bias inclines one to disbelieve and disfavor the object of the prejudice, and it is similarly incontestable that subconscious, as well as express, racial fears and hatreds operate to deny fairness to the person despised; that is why we seek to insure that the right to an impartial jury is a meaningful right by providing the defense with the opportunity to ask prospective jurors questions designed to expose even hidden prejudices. But the Court never explains why these biases should be of less concern at the guilt phase than at the sentencing phase. The majority asserts that “a juror who believes that blacks are violence prone or morally inferior might well be influenced by that belief in deciding whether petitioner’s crime involved the aggravating factors specified under Virginia law.” Ibid. But might not that same juror be influenced by those same prejudices in deciding whether, for example, to credit or discredit white witnesses as opposed to black witnesses at the guilt phase? Might not those same racial fears that would incline a juror to favor death not also incline a juror to favor conviction?
A trial to determine guilt or innocence is, at bottom, nothing more than the sum total of a countless number of small discretionary decisions made by each individual who sits in the jury box. The difference between conviction and acquit*43tal turns on whether key testimony is believed or rejected; on whether an alibi sounds plausible or dubious; on whether a character witness appears trustworthy or unsavory; and on whether the jury concludes that the defendant had a motive, the inclination, or the means available to commit the crime charged. A racially biased juror sits with blurred vision and impaired sensibilities and is incapable of fairly making the myriad decisions that each juror is called upon to make in the course of a trial. To put it simply, he cannot judge because he has prejudged. This is equally true at the trial on guilt as at the hearing on sentencing.
To sentence an individual to death on the basis of a proceeding tainted by racial bias would violate the most basic values of our criminal justice system. This the Court understands. But what it seems not to comprehend is that to permit an individual to be convicted by a prejudiced jury violates those same values in precisely the same way. The incongruity of the Court’s split judgment is made apparent after it is appreciated that the opportunity for bias to poison decision-making operates at a guilt trial in the same way as it does at a sentencing hearing and after one returns to the context of the case before us. Implicit in the Court’s judgment is the acknowledgment that there was a likelihood that the jury that pronounced the death sentence acted, in part, on the basis of racial prejudice. But the exact same jury convicted Turner. Does the Court really mean to suggest that the constitutional entitlement to an impartial jury attaches only at the sentencing phase? Does the Court really believe that racial biases are turned on and off in the course of one criminal prosecution?
My sense is that the Court has confused the consequences of an unfair trial with the risk that a jury is acting on the basis of prejudice. In other words, I suspect that what is really animating the Court’s judgment is the sense of outrage it rightly experiences at the prospect of a man being sentenced to death on the basis of the color of his skin. Perhaps *44the Court is slightly less troubled by the prospect of a racially motivated conviction unaccompanied by the death penalty, and I suppose that if, for some unimaginable reason, I had to choose between the two cases, and could only rectify one, I would remedy the case where death had been imposed. But there is no need to choose between the two cases. To state what seems to me obvious, the constitutional right implicated is the right to be judged by an impartial jury, regardless of the sentence, and the constitutional focus thus belongs on whether there is a likelihood of bias, and not on what flows from that bias. In Ham v. South Carolina, 409 U. S. 524 (1973), we reversed the conviction of a young black man who was charged with and convicted of possession of marijuana; because the man was known in the community as a civil rights activist, and because we were persuaded that racial issues were inextricably bound up with the conduct of the trial, we concluded that it was likely that any prejudice that individual members of the jury might harbor would be intensified and held that under those circumstances the trial judge was required to oblige the defense request to inquire into the jury’s possible racial bias. We did not reject the petitioner’s claim in that case because he was sentenced only to 18 months’ imprisonment. Surely one has a right to an impartial jury whether one is subject to punishment for a day or a lifetime.
The Court may believe that it is being Solomonic in “splitting the difference” in this case and granting petitioner a new sentencing hearing while denying him the other “half” of the relief demanded. Starkly put, petitioner “wins” in that he gets to be resentenced, while the State “wins” in that it does not lose its conviction. But King Solomon did not, in fact, split the baby in two, and had he done so, I suspect that he would be remembered less for his wisdom than for his hardheartedness. Justice is not served by compromising principles in this way. I would reverse the conviction as well as the sentence in this case to insure compliance with the constitutional guarantee of an impartial jury.