Court Opinion

ID: 9498298
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:13:56.693335+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:45.096279
License: Public Domain

DISSENT
MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The Ohio Supreme Court, acting as a “reviewing” Court, made a constitutional *639error in this case by imposing a death sentence anew, after “reweighing” the evidence, without clearly taking the requisite responsibility for its actions. As a reviewing Court, it continued to shift part of the responsibility to the trial court. I would hold that an appellate court must take full and complete responsibility for “decreeing death” whenever it substitutes its judgment for the trial court’s by such “reweighing.” Here, instead of clearly taking responsibility, the Ohio Court viewed itself as merely engaging in appellate review of the trial court’s actions.
The Ohio Supreme Court found a series of substantial errors by the trial court in finding and balancing aggravating and mitigating circumstances. The Court itself “reweighed” the circumstances, and the justices themselves then decreed the death penalty. This process of allowing an appellate court to “reweigh” the circumstances in a death case and then itself impose the death penalty anew is the product of a fiye-four Supreme Court decision fifteen years ago in Clemons v. Mississippi, 494 U.S. 738, 110 S.Ct. 1441, 108 L.Ed.2d 725 (1990).1 That decision allows state appellate judges not just to review death verdicts for legal error, as is normally the case, but also allows the judges themselves to decree the death penalty.
Justice Scalia, in an essay, made the point that “reweighing” appellate judges may not view themselves as merely reviewing the trial court — as being “in ‘material cooperation’ with someone else” — but are instead fully responsible for the death sentence.
[Tjrial judges and jurors who must themselves determine that the death sentence will be imposed ... are not merely engaged in “material cooperation” with someone else’s action, but are themselves decreeing death on behalf of the state.
The same is true of appellate judges in those states where they are charged with “reweighing” the mitigating and aggravating factors and determining de novo whether the death penalty should be imposed: they are themselves decreeing death.
Scalia, God’s Justice and Ours, 2002 First Things 123 (May 2002): 17-21, 2002 WLNR 10639587 (emphasis added).
Caldwell v. Mississippi, 472 U.S. 320, 105 S.Ct. 2633, 86 L.Ed.2d 231 (1985), imposes a general rule of sentencing responsibility similar to Justice Scalia’s view of appellate responsibility in reweighing states. The Court ruled that the state, through its prosecutors and judges, may not leave a sentencing body with the impression that it is not fully responsible for the death sentence by shifting part of the responsibility to appellate judges.
[I]t is constitutionally impermissible to rest a death sentence on a determination made by a sentencer who has been led to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the defendant’s death rests elsewhere.
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*640This Court has always premised its capital punishment decisions on the assumption that a capital sentencing jury recognizes the gravity of its task and proceeds with the appropriate awareness of its “truly awesome responsibility.” In this case, the State sought to minimize the jury’s sense of responsibility for determining the appropriateness of death. Because we cannot say that this effort had no effect on the sentencing decision, that decision does not meet the standard of reliability that the Eight Amendment requires.
Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 328-29 & 341, 105 S.Ct. 2633. An “appellate court, performing its task with a presumption of correctness,” would not feel the requisite responsibility because “decreeing death” is “highly subjective” and the sentencer is “making what is largely a moral judgment of the defendant’s desert.” Id. at 340 n. 7, 105 S.Ct. 2633 (emphasis added). All of this language in Caldwell remains good law.2
This principle (that when an appellate court engages in reweighing it becomes a sentencer and, like any sentencer, must fully recognize its primary responsibility in decreeing death) places a significant burden on appellate courts when they “reweigh” under Clemons. It must be clear from their opinions that they understand and take sole responsibility for the resulting death sentence by knowingly “making what is largely a moral judgment,” not by just refusing to set aside the actions of others. Otherwise, we cannot be sure that the appellate court, as a sentencing body, “recognize[d] the gravity of its task and proceed[ed] with the appropriate awareness of its ‘truly awesome responsibility’ ” and thereby met the requisite “standard of reliability” under the Eighth Amendment.
Here, the Ohio Supreme Court has not met this requirement because it treated the reweighing process as simply a step in appellate review without taking responsibility itself for “decreeing death.” Although the Court purported to conduct an “independent sentence review,” pursuant to Ohio law, it refers to the trial court’s findings as to aggravating circumstances and ultimately states that it is merely affirming the judgment of the lower court. Other than invocation of the word “independent,” which is drawn directly from the state statute, there is absolutely no indication that the Ohio Supreme Court understands and has accepted the “truly awesome responsibility of decreeing death for a fellow human.” McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 208, 91 S.Ct. 1454, 28 L.Ed.2d 711 (1971). The Ohio Supreme Court is simply reviewing the decision of the lower sentencing court under Ohio Revised Code § 2929.05(A). Under that statute the Court acts as a “reviewing” Court to:
review all of the facts and other evidence to determine if the evidence supports the finding of the aggravating circumstances the trial jury or the panel of three judges found the offender guilty of committing, and shall determine whether the sentencing court properly weighed the aggravating circumstances the offender was found guilty of committing and the mitigating factors.
(Emphasis added). This statutory standard of review in Ohio is quite different *641from acting itself as the “sentencing court” and taking full responsibility for “decreeing death.” The language of our Court’s opinion implicitly recognizes that the Ohio Supreme Court looked upon its role not as accepting full responsibility for “decreeing death” but rather as having simply “cured such errors” of the trial court (Opinion, p. 636) in order to allow the lower court’s death sentence to stand. This may seem a subtle distinction, at first glance; but, as the Caldwell case and Justice Scalia’s essay demonstrate, “material cooperation with someone else’s action” shifts too much responsibility and renders the appellate judges less than fully accountable for their action. In matters of life and death, this distinction is important.

. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that its decision in Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584, 122 S.Ct. 2428, 153 L.Ed.2d 556 (2002), does not apply retroactively, see Schriro v. Summerlin, 542 U.S. 348, 124 S.Ct. 2519, 159 L.Ed.2d 442 (2004), and therefore cannot govern the case subjudice, it seems very likely that Ring has overruled Clemons. In Ring, the Court held that defendants have a Sixth Amendment right to have a jury, not a judge, find aggravating circumstances in death penalty cases. It is hard to imagine how this principle would not also apply to the reweighing process described in Clemons. If a defendant has a right to have a jury find all the facts that make him eligible for the death penalty, he must also have the right to have a jury make the final determination that he actually will be sentenced to death.

. A majority of the Court, including Justice O'Connor, concurred in these specific sections of the Caldwell opinion. The only part of the Caldwell opinion that did not have five votes and has since been modified is Part IVA, as explained by Justice O'Connor in her concurring opinion in Romano v. Oklahoma, 512 U.S. 1, 114 S.Ct. 2004, 129 L.Ed.2d 1 (1994) and referred to in the majority opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, id. at 8-9, 114 S.Ct. 2004.