Court Opinion

ID: 9426829
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:03.238813+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:03.351261
License: Public Domain

Mb. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom Mb. Justice White joins, dissenting.
The Court today holds that the State of Louisiana is not entitled to vindicate its substantial interests in protecting the foot soldiers of an ordered society by mandatorily sentencing their murderers to death. This is so even though the State has demonstrated to a jury in a fair trial, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a particular defendant was the murderer, and that he committed the act while possessing “a specific intent to kill, or to inflict great bodily harm upon, ... a peace officer who was engaged in the performance of his lawful duties . . . .” La. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 14:30 (2) (1974). That holding would have shocked those who drafted the Bill of Rights on which it purports to rest, and would commend itself only to the most imaginative observer as being required by today’s “evolving standards of decency.”
I am unable to agree that a mandatory death sentence under such circumstances violates the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against “cruel and unusual punishments.” I am equally unable to see how this limited application of the mandatory death statute violates even the scope of the Eighth Amendment as seen through the eyes of last Term’s plurality in Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U. S. 325 (1976) (hereafter Stanislaus Roberts). Nor does the brief per curiam opinion issued today demonstrate why the application of a mandatory death sentence to the criminal who intentionally murders a peace officer performing his official duties should be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” in light of either the view of society when the Eighth Amendment was passed, Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 176-177 (1976); the “objective indicia that reflect the public attitude” today, id., at 173; or even the more *643generalized “basic concept of human dignity” test relied upon last Term in striking down several more general mandatory statutes.
While the arguments weighing in favor of individualized consideration for the convicted defendant are much the same here as they are for one accused of any homicide, the arguments weighing in favor of society’s determination to impose a mandatory sentence for the murder of a police officer in the line of duty are far stronger than in the case of an ordinary homicide. Thus the Court’s intimation that this particular issue was considered and decided last Term in Stanislaus Roberts, supra, simply does not wash. A footnoted dictum in Stanislaus Roberts discussing a different section of the Louisiana law from the one now before us scarcely rises to the level of plenary, deliberate consideration which has traditionally preceded a declaration of unconstitutionality.
Such a meager basis for stare decisis would be less offensive were we not dealing with large questions of how men shall be governed, and how liberty and order should be balanced in a civilized society. But authority which might suffice to determine whether the rule against perpetuities applies to a particular devise in a will does not suffice when making a constitutional adjudication that a punishment imposed by properly enacted state law is “cruel and unusual.” Mr. Justice Frankfurter wisely noted that a “footnote hardly seems to be an appropriate way of announcing a new constitutional doctrine,” Kovacs v. Cooper, 336 U. S. 77, 90-91 (1949); it is hardly a more appropriate device by which to anticipate a constitutional issue not presented by the case in which it a.ppears. This seemingly heedless wielding of our power is 'least acceptable when we engage in what Mr. Justice Holmes described as “the gravest and most delicate duty that this Court is called upon to perform.” Blodgett v. Holden, 275 U. S. 142, 147-148 (1927) (separate opinion).
*644Five Terms ago, in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238 (1972), this Court invalidated the then-current system of capital punishments, condemning jury discretion as resulting in “freakish” punishment. The Louisiana Legislature has conscientiously determined, in an effort to respond to that holding, that the death sentence would be made mandatory upon the conviction of particular types of offenses, including, as in the case before us, the intentional killing of a peace officer while in the performance of his duties. For the reasons stated by Me. Justice White for himself, The Chief Justice, Me. Justice Blackmun, and me in his dissent in Stanislaus Roberts, supra, and by me in my dissent in Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U. S. 280, 308 (1976), I am no more persuaded now than I was then that a mandatory death sentence for all, let alone for a limited class of, persons who commit premeditated murder constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
But even were I now persuaded otherwise by the plurality’s analysis last Term, and were I able to conclude that the mandatory death penalty constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” when applied generally to all those convicted of first-degree murder, I would nonetheless disagree with today’s opinion. Louisiana’s decision to impose a mandatory death sentence upon one convicted of the particular offense of premeditated murder of a peace officer engaged in the performance of his lawful duties is clearly not governed by the holding of Stanislaus Roberts, and I do not believe that it is controlled by the reasoning of the plurality’s opinion in that case. Today’s opinion assumes, without analysis, that the faults of the generalized mandatory death sentence under review in Stanislaus Roberts, must necessarily inhere in such a sentence imposed on those who commit this much more carefully limited and far more serious crime.1 In words that would be *645equally appropriate today, Mr. Justice White noted last Term, 428 U. S., at 358:
“Even if the character of the accused must be considered under the Eighth Amendment, surely a State is not constitutionally forbidden to provide that the commission of certain crimes conclusively establishes that the criminal’s character is such that he deserves death. Moreover, quite apart from the character of a criminal, a State should constitutionally be able to conclude that the need to deter some crimes and that the likelihood that the death penalty will succeed in deterring these crimes is such that the death penalty may be made mandatory for all people who commit them. Nothing resembling a reasoned basis for the rejection of these propositions is to be found in the plurality opinion.”
*646Under the analysis of last Term’s plurality opinion, a State, before it is constitutionally entitled to put a murderer to death, must consider aggravating and mitigating circumstances. It is possible to agree with the plurality in the general case without at all conceding that it follows that a mandatory death sentence is impermissible in the specific case we have before us: the deliberate killing of a peace officer. The opinion today is willing to concede that “the fact that the murder victim was a peace officer performing his regular duties may be regarded as an aggravating circumstance.” Ante, at 636. But it seems to me that the factors which entitle a State to consider it as an aggravating circumstance also entitle the State to consider it so grave an aggravating circumstance that no permutation of mitigating factors exists which would disable it from constitutionally sentencing the murderer to death. If the State would be constitutionally entitled, due to. the nature of the offense, to sentence the murderer to death after going through such a limited version of the plurality’s “balancing” approach, I see no constitutional reason why the “Cruel and Unusual Punishments” Clause precludes the State from doing so without engaging in that process.
The elements that differentiate'this case from the Stanislaus Roberts case are easy to state. In both cases, the factors weighing- on the defendant’s side of the scale are constant. It is consideration of these factors alone that the opinion today apparently relies on for its holding. But this ignores the significantly different factors which weigh on the State’s side of the scale. In all murder cases, and of course this one, the State has an interest in protecting its citizens from such ultimate attacks; this surely is at the core of the Lockean “social contract” idea. But other, and important, state interests exist where the victim was a peace officer performing his lawful duties. Policemen on the beat are exposed, in the service of society, to all the risks which the constant effort to prevent crime and apprehend criminals entails: Because these people *647are literally the foot soldiers of society’s defense of ordered liberty, the State has an especial interest in their protection.
We are dealing here not merely with the State’s determination as to whether particular conduct on the part of an individual should be punished, and in what manner, but also with what sanctions the State is entitled to bring into play to assure that there will be a police force to see that the criminal laws are enforced at all. It is no service to individual rights, or to individual liberty, to undermine what is surely the fundamental right and responsibility of any civilized government: the maintenance of order so that all may enjoy liberty and security. Learned Hand surely had it right when he observed:
“And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.” The Spirit of Liberty 190 (3d ed., 1960).
Policemen are both symbols and outriders of our ordered society, and they literally risk their lives in an effort to preserve it. To a degree unequaled in the ordinary first-degree murder presented in the Stanislaus Roberts case, the State therefore has an interest in making unmistakably clear that those who are convicted of deliberately killing police officers acting in the line of duty be forewarned that punishment, in the form, of-death, will be inexorable.2
*648This interest of the State, I think, entitled the Louisiana Legislature, in its considered judgment, to malee the death penalty mandatory for those convicted of the intentional murder of a police officer. I had thought Justices Stewart, Powell, and Stevens had conceded that this response — this need for a mandatory penalty — could be permissible when, focusing on the crime, not the criminal, they wrote last Term in Gregg, 428 U. S., at 184, that
“the decision that capital punishment may be the appropriate sanction in extreme cases is an expression of the community’s belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death.” (Emphasis added.)
I am quite unable to decipher why the Court today concludes that the intentional murder of a police officer is not one of these “certain crimes.” The Court’s answer appears to lie in its observation that “it is incorrect to suppose that no mitigating circumstances can exist when the victim is a police officer.” Ante, at 636-637. The Court, however, has asked the wrong question. The question is not whether mitigating *649factors might exist, but, rather, whether whatever “mitigating” factors that might exist are of sufficient force so as to constitutionally require their consideration as counterweights to the admitted aggravating circumstance. Like Mr. Justice White, I am unable to believe that a State is not entitled to determine that the premeditated murder of a peace officer is so heinous and intolerable a crime that no combination of mitigating factors can overcome the demonstration “that the criminal’s character is such that he deserves death.” 428 U. S., at 358.
As an example of a mitigating factor which, presumably, may “overcome” the aggravating factor inherent in the murder of a peace officer, the Court today gives us the astonishing suggestion of “the existence of circumstances which the offender reasonably believed provided a moral justification for his conduct . . . .” Ante, at 637. I cannot believe that States are constitutionally required to allow a defense, even at the sentencing stage, which depends on nothing more than the convict’s moral belief that he was entitled to kill a peace officer in cold blood. John Wilkes Booth may well have thought he was morally justified in murdering Abraham Lincoln, whom, while fleeing from the stage of Ford’s Theater, he characterized as a “tyrant”; I am appalled to believe that the Constitution would have required the Government to allow him to argue that as a “mitigating factor” before it could sentence him to death if he were found guilty. I am equally appalled that a State should be required to instruct a jury that such individual beliefs must or should be considered as a possible balancing factor against the admittedly proper aggravating factor.
The historical and legal content of the “Cruel and Unusual Punishments” Clause was stretched to the breaking point by the plurality’s opinion in the Stanislaus Roberts case last Term. Today this judicially created superstructure, designed and erected more than 180 years after the Bill of Rights was *650adopted, is tortured beyond permissible limits of judicial review. There is nothing in the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment which disables a legislature from imposing a mandatory death sentence on a defendant convicted after a fair trial of deliberately murdering a police officer.

 In Woodson, the plurality noted that a public opinion poll “revealed that a 'substantial majority’ of persons opposed mandatory capital punish*645ment.” 428 U. S., at 298-299, n. 34. It does not follow, even accepting that poll, that a “substantial majority” oppose mandatory capital punishment for the murderers of police officers. What meager statistics there are indicate that public opinion is at best pretty evenly divided on the subject. In a June 1973 Harris Survey, 41% of the people surveyed thought that “all” persons convicted of killing a policeman or a prison guard should get the death penalty; as opposed to 28% for the more general crime of first-degree murder. Vidmar & Ellsworth, Public Opinion and the Death Penalty, 26 Stan. L. Rev. 1245, 1252 (1974). A May 1973 poll in Minnesota revealed that 49% of the sample favored “automatic” capital punishment for "'murder of a law enforcement officer/” Id., at 1251. With-such substantial public support, one would have thought that the determination as to whether a mandatory death penalty should exist was for the legislature, not for the judiciary through some newfound construction of the term “cruel and unusual punishments.” Yet while the plurality observes that “[c]entral to the application of the Amendment is a determination of contemporary standards regarding the infliction of punishment,” 428 U. S., at 288, the opinion today makes absolutely no attempt to discuss “contemporary standards” with respect to the particular category now before us. The reason, of course, is not hard to deduce: the plurality’s separation of “standards of decency” from “the dignity of man” indicates that, with respect to the latter, the plurality itself, and not society, is to be the arbiter.

 Cf. 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *82:
“To resist the king’s forces by defending a castle against them, is a levying of war .... But a tumult, with a view to pull down a particular house, or lay open a particular inclosure, amounts at most to a riot; this being no general defiance of public government.”
As recently noted by Chief Justice Laskin of the Canadian Supreme Court, *648Miller and Cockriell v. The Queen, 70 D. L. R. 3d 324, 337, [1976] 5 W. W. R. 711, 735 (1976), in discussing whether a mandatory death sentence constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” within the meaning of § 2 (b) of the Canadian Bill of Rights:
“I do not think, however, that it can be said that Parliament, in limiting the mandatory death penalty to the murder of policemen and prison guards, had only vengeance in view. There was obviously the consideration that persons in such special positions would have a sense of protection by reason of the grave penalty that would follow their murder .... It was open to Parliament to act on these additional considerations in limiting the mandatory death penalty as it did, and I am unable to say that they were not acted upon. On this view, I cannot find that there was no social purpose served by the mandatory death penalty so as to make it offensive to §2 (b).” (Concurring opinion.)