Court Opinion

ID: 9573388
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:54:05.535312+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:40:48.191835
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The Ohio state prosecutor, the Ohio Supreme Court, and apparently our Court as well, all concede that the death penalty verdict against Jason Getsy based on a “murder for hire” scheme directly contradicts John Santine’s not guilty verdict of the same crime. The crime is indivisible. “Murder for hire” is a conspiracy-type crime requiring a criminal agreement and a confederation between two or more people. Getsy, a teenage boy, was convicted of receiving “murder for hire” money from Santine, and Santine was acquitted of paying the “murder for hire” money to Getsy. Thus the two verdicts are inconsistent and irrational, and the verdict against Getsy should not be allowed to result in his execution.
The Ohio Supreme Court said clearly that the “predominant” reason for imposing the death penalty on Getsy in this case “is the murder-for-hire specification,” 84 Ohio St.3d 180, 702 N.E.2d 866 at 892, but then observed that the death sentence in the case is “troubling” because John San-tine, the only alleged “hirer” and the instigator of the murder, was acquitted of murder for hire: “If not for John Santine, it is unlikely the Serafinos would have been shot.” Id. In the severed state trial seeking the death penalty against Santine based on the “murder for hire” theory— the trial that led to the Ohio Supreme Court opinion — the state prosecutor repeatedly emphasized to the jury that San-tine was by far the most blameworthy defendant. The prosecutor said then (contrary to his present position) that Santine “could control” Getsy because Santine was “about a decade and a half older” than Getsy, who was 19 years old. (App.7361) Getsy was an inexperienced, uneducated boy and “could be easily led, sort of a semi-military lifestyle.” Id. The prosecutor told the jurors that Santine “enticed” *327Getsy “into his web,” “provided marijuana,” “talked big,” “provided the motive,” and “was the only person here with a motive for the killing.” Id. Throughout the case the prosecutor repeated this theory of the case, comparing the relative culpability of the Getsy boy and Santine. Acquitting Santine, the jury rejected the State’s theory that Getsy and Santine formed a criminal agreement of murder for hire — the “predominant” aggravator, as acknowledged by the Ohio courts.
Getsy’s irrational, inconsistent death verdict should be set aside based on a clear, longstanding common law principle — a principle adopted by the Supreme Court as a matter of due process long ago, Morrison v. California, 291 U.S. 82, 54 S.Ct. 281, 78 L.Ed. 664 (1934), as explained below. As outlined in Section I below, in 1791 and for the two preceding centuries, the English Common Law followed the rule that inconsistent verdicts of guilt based on an alleged criminal agreement or conspiracy must be quashed. In addition, as explained in Section II, literally and textually speaking, the state killing of Getsy in contrast to the treatment of Santine is so grossly disproportionate and unequal as to be both “cruel and unusual” and, therefore, the type of “punishment” expressly forbidden by the Eighth Amendment.
In many cases decided over the last two centuries, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have found that English common law rules and principles in existence when the Founders wrote the Constitution serve as valuable tools in defining the meaning of the liberties established in the Bill of Rights, such as those requiring due process of law, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment, establishing the right to a jury trial, guaranteeing cross-examination of witnesses and other civil liberties. We learn of that long tradition of Anglo-American common law adjudication and how it influences our constitutional rights in the first year of law school. See, e.g., Morrison v. California, 291 U.S. 82, 54 S.Ct. 281, 78 L.Ed. 664 (1934) (adopting under the Due Process Clause the common law rule requiring at least two conspirators to uphold a verdict based on the formation of a criminal agreement, as discussed below); Deck v. Missouri, 544 U.S. 622, 631—32, 125 S.Ct. 2007, 161 L.Ed.2d 953 (2005) (holding that Eighth Amendment normally prohibits shackling a capital defendant at trial and sentencing, citing early English common law cases); id. at 637-38, 125 S.Ct. 2007 (Thomas, J., dissenting) (recognizing the same rule based on Blackstone and Coke’s treatises); United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 125 S.Ct. 738, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005) (following common law requirements for trial by jury in criminal sentencing); Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 42-50, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177 (2004) (basing the meaning of Confrontational Clause concerning cross-examination on Blackstone and case law from English courts and American colonies). See the recent scholarly discussion of the use of English common law in constitutional interpretation, Meyler, Towards a Common Law Originalism 59 Stan. L. Rev 551 (Dec.2006).
I. The Invalidity of Inconsistent Verdicts in Prosecutions Based on A Criminal Agreement
Since 1599 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when Sir Edward Coke was Attorney General and the young philosopher-scientist, Sir Francis Bacon, was Queen’s Counsel, the rule of Anglo-American law has been that “one cannot conspire alone,” or alone commit a contract crime like murder for hire. This exact language was first enunciated in Marsh v. Vaughn, *32878 Eng. Rep. 937 (Q.B.1599). The opinion of the Queen’s Bench states as follows:
The defendants pleaded not guilty, and the one was found guilty and the other not. And it was hereupon moved, that the bill should abate; for it ought to be against two, and the one cannot conspire alone: and the one being acquitted, the other sole cannot be attainted.
Id. (Emphasis added.) This is no judicial aberration. This is the way English law has dealt with such disproportionate punishment. This rule has been consistently followed in English law from that day to this. See, e.g., Harison v. Errington, 79 Eng. Rep. 1292 (K.B.1627) (riot); Rex v. Grimes, 87 Eng. Rep. 142 (K.B.1688) (two were charged with “confederationem ” and “though one was acquitted, yet the jury had found the other guilty” requiring the court to quash the guilty verdict); Rex v. Kinnersley, 93 Eng. Rep. 467 (K.B.1719) (same); Queen v. Thompson, 117 Eng. Rep. 1100(Q.B.1851) (same); Rex v. Plummer, 2 KB. 339, 345 (1902) (court invalidated a conspiracy conviction after a guilty plea when the defendant’s two alleged co-conspirators were acquitted). See also TV Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, ch. 10, ¶ 15, p. 136 (1765) (Legal Classics Library 1983) (requiring conviction of two to constitute a criminal agreement “for there must be at least two to form a conspiracy”). This ancient rule of consistency and proportionality in punishment was legislatively enacted by Parliament in 1977, Criminal Law Act, 1977, ch. 45 § 5(8), which provides that when other persons charged with a criminal agreement “have been acquitted of conspiracy by reference to that agreement (whether after being tried with the person convicted or separately) the conviction shall be quashed if under all the circumstances of the case his conviction is inconsistent with the acquittal of the other.” For more than four centuries, from 1599 until the present day, that has been the law. Since the time of Lord Coke, the English courts under this doctrine would never have let Getsy’s conviction of murder for hire stand.
In a supreme instance of legal legerdemain, the majority opinion in this case tries to spin the opinion of the Supreme Court in United States v. Powell, 469 U.S. 57, 105 S.Ct. 471, 83 L.Ed.2d 461 (1984), into a rejection of this ancient rule and the rule’s insistence on a measure of rationality, consistency and proportionality in punishment. That reliance is completely specious because Powell is not a multidefendant case in which a defendant’s conviction of a criminal agreement with another stands as the jury acquits his only alleged co-conspirator. Powell was simply a single defendant situation in which the jury convictions on separate counts were inconsistent under one reading of the charges made in the separate counts. There the Supreme Court, relying on language from an earlier opinion by Justice Holmes, held that the separate counts provided rough equity or fairness in holding that the Powell defendant must take the bad count with the good counts. See 469 U.S. at 62, 105 S.Ct. 471 (quoting and agreeing with Justice Holmes in Dunn v. United States, 284 U.S. 390, 393, 52 S.Ct. 189, 76 L.Ed. 356 (1932), in which Holmes relied on an English case from the Queen’s Bench, Latham v. The Queen, 122 Eng. Rep. 968 (Q.B.1864), for the proposition that “each Count in an indictment is regarded as if it was a separate indictment”).
It is impossible to legitimately rely on Powell and Dunn here because two terms later in Morrison v. California, 291 U.S. 82, 54 S.Ct. 281, 78 L.Ed. 664 (1934), the Supreme Court in a unanimous opinion by Justice Cardozo, followed the ancient En*329glish rule that an inconsistent verdict of conviction in a multiple defendant case based on a criminal agreement must be quashed as a matter of due process. In that case the Court found in a state criminal case that the California Supreme Court erred in violation of the Due Process Clause in upholding a conspiracy verdict against one party to an illegal contract for the sale of land when the other party lacked the requisite element of intent and was, therefore, acquitted. Justice Cardozo explained:
It is impossible in the nature of things for man to conspire with himself. Turinetti v. United States, 2 F.2d 15, 17. In California as elsewhere conspiracy imports a corrupt agreement between not less than two with guilty knowledge on the part of each. People v. Richards, 67 Cal. 412, 7 Pac. 828; People v. Kizer, 22 Cal.App. 10, 14, 133 Pac. 516, 521; [People v. Kirk,] 22 Cal.App. 10, 134 P. 346; People v. Entriken, 106 Cal.App. 29, 32, 288 Pac. 788; Sands v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 871, 21 Graft. (Va.) 871, 899; Pettibone v. United States, 148 U.S. 197, 203, 205, 13 S.Ct. 542, 37 L.Ed. 419.... In such circumstances the conviction of Morrison because he failed to assume the burden of disproving a conspiracy was a denial of due process that vitiates the judgment as to him. Nor is that the only consequence.....The conviction failing as to the one defendant must fail as to the other. Turinetti v. United States, supra; Williams v. United States, 282 Fed. 481, 484; Gebardi v. United States, supra.
291 U.S. at 92-93, 54 S.Ct. 281 (emphasis added). Under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court reversed the conspiracy conviction and followed the English rule in existence when our Constitution was framed. The Court has never questioned the validity of its unanimous due process holding in Morrison. It has never retracted or narrowed the constitutional holding quoted above derived directly from the ancient English rule. See, e.g., Hartzel v. United States, 322 U.S. 680, 682 n. 3, 64 S.Ct. 1233, 88 L.Ed. 1534 (1944) (the Court described two other defendants as “the only co-conspirators of petitioner named in the indictment and the setting aside of their convictions makes it impossible to sustain petitioner’s conviction upon the basis of count 7 of the conspiracy count”). In Powell, relied on in error by the majority, the Supreme Court does not even mention Morrison or the traditional rule — obviously considering it unrelated to Powell’s single-defendant, separate count inconsistency, just as the English courts considered the two rules completely unrelated, as Justice Holmes recognized in his opinion in Dunn. Powell is, therefore, entirely irrelevant to the problem before us and cannot be legitimately spun as a justification by the majority in favor of upholding Getsy’s execution.
It is equally misguided for the majority to say that a clear, unanimous constitutional holding in 1934 in Morrison, never overruled or questioned since, does not meet the standard of “clearly established law” found in AEDPA. If a clear rule of law four centuries old, adopted as a matter of Due Process 70 years ago by the Supreme Court, will not meet the AEDPA test, nothing will.
In response to this dissenting opinion, the majority has attempted to distinguish the Morrison case. It says that Morrison does not apply because (a) one of the two alleged co-conspirators, Santine, was acquitted by a jury rather than by a court, and because (b) the inconsistent punishment in this case was imposed “by different juries in separate trials” instead of in a *330joint trial. The majority would create a brand new “ancient” rule that is incompatible with the original common law rule and with the Morrison case. They gut the ancient rule of consistent and proportional punishment adopted in Morrison by limiting it to situations where only a judge rather than a jury has acquitted one of the two alleged co-conspirators, and then only after a joint trial. These two exceptions were explicitly rejected by the English common law and by Parliament, as the cases and parliamentary action discussed above clearly demonstrate. The majority refuses to acknowledge that the English common law rule adopted in Morrison applies to jury acquittals in separate trials.
Justice Cardozo’s unanimous opinion in Morrison states the rule it adopts using the same language as the English courts: “It is impossible in the nature of things for a man to conspire with himself.... The conviction failing as to one defendant must fail as to the other.” 291 U.S. at 93, 54 S.Ct. 281. This language states a general rule and leaves no room for the majority’s two exceptions. The Morrison rule does not turn on fortuitous circumstances like whether the trial judge granted a severance and tried the defendant separately, or granted a motion for acquittal rather than letting the case go to the jury. In the present case, Getsy and Santine were indicted jointly but severed for trial. The majority makes the question of life or death in this case turn on the granting of a severance. My colleagues in the majority refuse to carry out the basic purpose of the rule: the elimination of inconsistent and disproportionate punishment among alleged co-conspirators.
In addition, and equally important, the effect of the majority’s exception for separate trials is to make Morrison and the ancient rule completely inapplicable to all modern death penalty cases. The states that continue to use the death penalty bifurcate such trials by conducting a guilt phase trial and then a second trial for imposing the punishment. E.g., Ohio Rev. Code § 2929.03 (describing trial jury’s role in determining the sentence for a capital defendant). As a result, trial judges in capital cases now grant a severance and try defendants separately rather than jointly. The bifurcation of all capital trials, together with extensive voir dire of jurors and the present requirements for jury findings of individual aggravating circumstances, makes the conduct of multidefendant capital trials too complex. Therefore, the current practice in capital cases is to grant a severance and try defendants separately, as in the case of Getsy and Santine. The majority’s exceptions mean that the ancient rule of consistency and proportionality of punishment no longer applies in death penalty cases because such trials are not conducted as joint trials.
The ancient rule was adopted and applied when there were almost 200 crimes in addition to murder carrying the death penalty — robbery, larceny, burglary, rape, assault, treason, sedition, blasphemy, sodomy, and many others. The ancient rule was designed to eliminate some of the harshness and arbitrariness of the death penalty by introducing a common sense rule of consistency and proportionality among the participants in the same criminal episode. It is ironic, indeed, that the majority has now eliminated the rule in capital cases. What was true for four centuries in such cases — “it is impossible in the nature of things for a man to conspire with himself’ — is no longer true. The majority is willing to destroy the ancient rule, but the judges are unable to cite a single capital case supporting their position from the entire history of Anglo-*331American law. No such case has ever suggested, much less applied, the majority’s exceptions. The Morrison rule has existed for four centuries only to be effectively overruled today in capital cases by the majority of this Court.
II. Post -Furman Death Penalty Jurisprudence Also Outlaws Getsy Death Sentence
Modern post-Furman Eighth Amendment proportionality analysis dramatically reinforces the ancient rule’s policy against unequal or disproportionate punishments in connection with the same criminal event. The post -Furman line of Eighth Amendment death penalty cases based on “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”1 emphasize the need to eliminate the kind of grossly disproportionate, arbitrary death sentences found in this case. As I will explain below, the Supreme Court’s Enmund Eighth Amendment proportionality case reinforces the Supreme Court’s adoption of the ancient rule in the Morrison due process case. The modern, post-Fwman mode of death penalty analysis— based on the more humane set of “evolving standards of decency” that now limit the death penalty — reinforces the ancient rule’s natural law requirements of rationality and symmetry. Therefore, the more formalist, “originalist” judge and the more pragmatic, “living-constitution” judge should be able to agree on the outcome of this case. But my brothers and sisters in the majority are unable to open their minds to a consideration of either mode of analysis.
In Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972), the Supreme Court, in a one paragraph per curiam opinion, held that the death penalty was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Id. at 239-40, 92 S.Ct. 2726. The concurring opinions that followed explained that the death penalty was being imposed so discriminatorily, id. at 240, 92 S.Ct. 2726 (Douglas, J., concurring), and so wantonly and freakishly, id. at 306, 92 S.Ct. 2726 (Stewart, J., concurring), that any given death sentence was unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual.” Indeed, the death sentences examined by the Supreme Court in Furman were “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of [capital crimes], many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners [in Furman were] among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death ha[d] in fact been imposed.” Id. at 309-10, 92 S.Ct. 2726 (Stewart, J., concurring). Thus, Furman established that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this penalty to be arbitrarily, capriciously and inconsistently imposed. Id. at 310, 92 S.Ct. 2726; Spaziano v. Florida, 468 U.S. 447, 460, 104 S.Ct. 3154, 82 L.Ed.2d 340 (1984) (Furman established that “[i]f a State has *332determined that death should be an available penalty for certain crimes, then it must administer that penalty in a way that can rationally distinguish between those individuals for whom death is an appropriate sanction and those for whom it is not.”); Godfrey v. Georgia, 446 U.S. 420, 428, 100 S.Ct. 1759, 64 L.Ed.2d 398 (1980) (Furman established that “if a State wishes to authorize capital punishment it has a constitutional responsibility to ... apply its law in a manner that avoids the arbitrary and capricious infliction of the death penalty.”).
It is now also well settled that the penalty of death is different in kind from any other punishment imposed under our system of justice. “From the point of view of the defendant, it is different both in its severity and its finality. From the point of view of society, the action of the sovereign in taking the life of one of its citizens also differs dramatically from any other legitimate state action.” Gardner v. Florida, 430 U.S. 349, 357, 97 S.Ct. 1197, 51 L.Ed.2d 393 (1977). The qualitative difference of death from all other punishments requires a correspondingly greater need for reliability, consistency, and fairness in capital sentencing decisions. It is of vital importance to the defendant and to the community that any decision to impose the death sentence be, and appear to be, based on reason rather than caprice or emotion. Gardner, 430 U.S. at 357, 97 S.Ct. 1197. Accordingly, the courts must “carefully scrutinize” sentencing decisions “to minimize the risk that the penalty will be imposed in error or in an arbitrary and capricious manner. There must be a valid penological reason for choosing from among the many criminal defendants the few who are sentenced to death.” Spaziano, 468 U.S. at 460 n. 7, 104 S.Ct. 3154. The death-is-different principle can only be observed here by holding that the inconsistent and disproportionate sentences in the same case violate the clearly established Furman arbitrariness principle and hence the Eighth Amendment.
In evaluating whether a death sentence is arbitrary, the Supreme Court has directed courts to evaluate a defendant’s culpability both individually and in terms of the sentences of codefendants and accomplices in the same case. Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782, 788, 798, 102 S.Ct. 3368, 73 L.Ed.2d 1140 (1982). In Enmund, the Supreme Court found a violation of the Eighth Amendment when defendants with “plainly different” culpability received the same capital sentence. The Court required proportionality comparison with others participating in the same crime:
Enmund did not kill or intend to kill and thus his culpability is plainly different from that of the robbers who killed; yet the State treated them alike and attributed to Enmund the culpability of those who killed the Kerseys. This was impermissible under the Eighth Amendment.
Id. at 798, 102 S.Ct. 3368.
The instant case presents the situation where the defendant with the lesser culpability received the harsher sentence — the death penalty. Numerous state courts have applied the Enmund principle to require reasonable symmetry between culpability and the sentencing of codefendants. See, e.g., People v. Kliner, 185 Ill.2d 81, 235 Ill.Dec. 667, 705 N.E.2d 850, 897 (1998) (“[Sjimilarly situated codefendants should not be given arbitrarily or unreasonably disparate sentences.”); Larzelere v. State, 676 So.2d 394, 406 (Fla.1996) (“When a codefendant ... is equally as culpable or more culpable than the defendant, disparate treatment of the codefendant may render the defendant’s punishment disproportionate.”); Hall v. State, 241 Ga. 252, *333244 S.E.2d 833, 839 (1978) (“We find that ... the death sentence, imposed on Hall for the same crime in which the co-defendant triggerman received a life sentence, is disproportionate.”). Similarly, the Federal Death Penalty Act recognizes that a comparison of the sentences received by codefendants is required. See 18 U.S.C. § 3592(a)(4) (listing as a mitigating factor the lack of death sentences for equally or more culpable codefendants).
The principle requiring rational, proportionate punishment is the essence of the rule of law. It has deep roots in our cultural and biological heritage. Aristotle observed in the Nicomachean Ethics that basic notions of justice require treating like cases alike:
If, then, the unjust is unequal, the just is equal, as all men suppose it to be, even apart from argument.... This, then, is what the just is — the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. ... [I]t is by proportionate requital that the city holds together.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea, in The Works of Aristotle V.3.1131a-1131b, V.5.1132b (W.D. Ross ed. & trans.1954). In a recent article, Judge Morris Hoffman and Timothy Goldsmith, a distinguished Yale biologist, make this point:
[I]t is not surprising that collectively we struggle to balance the form and amount of punishment that is appropriate, a struggle that lies at the heart of what we mean by “justice.” ....
The two faces of justice — to deal firmly with transgressors, but not too harshly- — reflect an intrinsic human sense of fairness and are important to the political ideal of equality. When Aristotle commands that like cases be treated alike, he is touching both on the personal notion that none of us wants to be punished more than anyone else (and therefore on our self-interest) and on the social notion that none of us wants to punish others more than they deserve (and therefore on the equilibrium between our inclination to punish and our intuitions about fairness and sympathy).
Morris B. Hoffman & Timothy H. Goldsmith, The Biological Roots of Punishment, 1 Ohio St. J.Crim. L. 627, 638-39 (2004).
In another instance of obfuscation, the majority argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Pulley v. Harris, 465 U.S. 37, 104 S.Ct. 871, 79 L.Ed.2d 29 (1984), precludes our consideration of the “comparative proportionality” of sentences in this case. Pulley's holding has nothing to do with this case. Pulley simply held that the Eighth Amendment does not require a state supreme court to systematically review the comparative proportionality of sentences in other cases unrelated to the case at hand. Id. at 50-51, 104 S.Ct. 871. Pulley concerned whether the Eighth Amendment mandates in every case a proportionality review of a particular death sentence in comparison with the punishment imposed on others for the same general type of crime in unrelated cases. Our holding neither contradicts this rule nor requires systematic comparative proportionality review of unrelated cases. Instead, we simply adhere to the clearly established, common sense principle of Enmund that, in a capital case with respect to the very same crime stemming from the very same facts, the Eighth Amendment does not permit the codefendant with less culpability to receive the death penalty when the codefendant with greater culpability receives a lesser sentence. The majority’s view is in conflict with the holding of Enmund and allows the less culpable participant in the same criminal episode to *334receive , the death penalty when the more culpable participant receives the lesser sentence.
Thus both the ancient rule invalidating inconsistent conspiracy verdicts and the modern rule directly phrased in terms of consistency, rationality and proportionality require the conclusion that Getsy’s death verdict should be set aside,

. Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 100-01, 78 S.Ct. 590, 2 L.Ed.2d 630 (1958):
The phrase in our Constitution ["cruel and unusual punishment”] was taken directly from the English Declaration of Rights of 1688, and the principle it represents can be traced back to the Magna Carta. The basic concept underlying the Eighth Amendment is nothing less than the dignity of man____ Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 30 S.Ct. 544, 54 L.Ed. 793. The Court recognized in that case that the words of the Amendment are not precise, and that their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.