Court Opinion

ID: 9488914
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:59:37.049799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:11.186396
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I dissent.
I.
To place this case in its appropriate context, we examine the action of the Nebraska Supreme Court in this case. The court stated:
We have balanced the aggravating and mitigating factors anew and have determined that the aggravating circumstances outweigh any statutory or non statutory mitigating circumstances in this case.... Sentences of death remain the appropriate penalties for Reeves.
State v. Reeves (Reeves III), 239 Neb. 419, 476 N.W.2d 829, 841 (1991).
The question for this court is from whence did the Nebraska Supreme Court obtain and assert this power?
The Reeves court articulates a very specific source. This right derives from the United States Supreme Court case of Clemons v. Mississippi, 494 U.S. 738, 110 S.Ct. 1441, 108 L.Ed.2d 725 (1990). As the Reeves opinion asserts:
In summary, Clemons v. Mississippi, 494 U.S. 738, 110 S.Ct. 1441, 108 L.Ed.2d 725 ... (1990), sets forth three options available to appellate courts in death penalty cases where there has been an error concerning the trial court’s finding of aggravating and/or mitigating circumstances. First, the court may analyze and reweigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances itself to determine whether or not the scale tips in favor of the death penalty. Second, the court may conduct a harmless error analysis to determine whether or not error by the district court in finding aggravating or mitigating circumstances has prejudiced the rights of the defendant. Third, the court may remand the cause for a new sentencing hearing.
Reeves, 476 N.W.2d at 834.
All well and good so far! The Nebraska Supreme Court asserts a power permitted by the United States Supreme Court. But what if the statutes of a state do not permit the sentencing options permitted by Clemons “l
An answer is indicated by the very same Clemons ease. The Mississippi Supreme Court on remand from the United States Supreme Court stated that the United States Supreme Court has
settled the question from a federal constitutional standpoint of a state appellate court’s ability to reweigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances ... [but] we must decide, as a matter of state law, our authority to reweigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances in order to uphold a death sentence which is based in part upon an improperly defined aggravating circumstance.
Clemons v. State, 593 So.2d 1004, 1005 (Miss. 1992).
Reviewing its own sentencing procedures, which as the majority notes are quite similar to those in Nebraska, the Mississippi high court stated,
From these statutory provisions, two things are clear: only the jury, by unanimous decision, can impose the death penalty; as to aggravating circumstances, this *1432Court only has the authority to determine whether the evidence supports the jury’s or judge’s finding of a statutory aggravating circumstance. There is no authority for this Court to reweigh remaining aggravating circumstances when it finds one or more to be invalid or improperly defined, nor is there authority for this Court to find evidence to support a proper definition of an aggravating circumstance in order to uphold a death sentence by reweighing. Finding aggravating and mitigating circumstances, weighing them, and ultimately imposing a death sentence are, by statute, left to a properly instructed jury.
Id. at 1006.
Moreover, the Mississippi Supreme Court recognized that it had previously upheld death sentences on several occasions earlier where there existed an invalid aggravating circumstance. The Clemons court then unequivocally rejected its previous opinion (Johnson v. State, 547 So.2d 59, 60 (Miss. 1989)), which may have contained an “indication” or “implication” for the court’s authority to reweigh under Clemons. Id. at 1006.
Does a similar analysis apply in Nebraska?
After following the tortured and extensive course of the Clemons litigation in state and federal courts, this basic question arises in state appellate review of death sentences in weighing states such as Mississippi and Nebraska where an invalid aggravating circumstance has been improperly weighed in with other aggravating and mitigating circumstances and produced a death penalty: Does the state appellate court have power under state law to reweigh the remaining valid aggravating and mitigating circumstances so as to sustain that penalty?
As I have observed, Mississippi, through its Supreme Court, has said “No.”
What has Nebraska said on this issue? The answer is plainly “Nothing.” It has never spoken on the subject. Like Mississippi’s earlier cases,10 it merely assumed it possessed the power.
In this case, two excellent Nebraska judges serving the federal courts, Magistrate Judge David Piester initially in recommending habeas relief and United States District Judge Richard Kopf in granting relief under habeas corpus, carefully examined the Nebraska cases and the Nebraska law.
In an extensive district court opinion, Judge Kopf reached the following conclusions:
the Nebraska Supreme Court wrongly read Clemons (and its progeny) to mean that if federal law allowed appellate resen-tencing, state law also allowed appellate resentencing; ...
When the Nebraska Supreme court made this assumption, it created a state procedure that had not been authorized by the Nebraska Legislature.
Reeves v. Hopkins, 871 F.Supp. 1182, 1194 (D.Neb.1994).
The federal district court then addressed in detail the state statutes of Nebraska relating to death sentences:
Nebraska statutes clearly create a two-tier sentencing process. Moreover, the Nebraska statutes differentiate the roles to be performed by the state district court sentencing panel and the Nebraska Supreme Court. And, most importantly, the Nebraska statutes simply do not give the Nebraska Supreme Court the authority to resentence once it has found that the sentencing panel engaged in harmful error in its weighing of aggravating and mitigating *1433circumstances. Rather, state law makes clear that it is the sentencing panel that must “sentence,” not the appellate court, and when Petitioner was deprived of this state-created right in Reeves III, his federal due process rights were violated.
First, the Nebraska statutes go to great lengths to set out how the sentencing hearing will be conducted by the district court sentencing panel, even requiring the sentencing panel to “set forth the general order of procedure at the outset of the sentence determination proceeding.” Neb. Rev.Stat. § 29-2521 (Reissue 1989). After such proceedings have been completed, the sentencing panel is required to issue a written determination, including findings of fact, “based upon the records of the trial and the sentencing proceeding....” Neb. Rev.Stat. § 29-2522 (Reissue 1989). There is no similar provision in the Nebraska statutes pertaining to the Nebraska Supreme Court and, hence, absolutely no reason to think that the Nebraska Legislature authorized or intended to authorize the Nebraska Supreme Court to perform the same function as the sentencing panel.
Second, Nebraska statutes provide only two remedies where the Nebraska Supreme Court disagrees with the sentencing panel on aggravating and mitigating circumstances: (a) the Nebraska Supreme Court may “reduce” the sentence, Neb. Rev.Stat. § 29-2521.03 (Reissue 1989); or (b) it may remand for a “new trial” (sentencing proceeding). Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2528 (Reissue 1989).
If the Nebraska Supreme Court disagrees with the sentencing panel regarding aggravating and mitigating circumstances, “[t]he Supreme Court may reduce any sentence which it finds not to be consistent with sections ... 29-2522 [which requires the sentencing panel to, among other things, weigh the statutory aggravating and mitigating circumstances]_” Neb. Rev.Stat. § 292-2521.03 (emphasis added).
If the Nebraska Supreme Court chooses not to reduce the sentence pursuant to Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2521.03 under such circumstances, there is no authorization in the Nebraska statutes for the court to “reweigh” the aggravating and mitigating circumstances for purposes of resentenc-ing. Indeed, aside from the ability to “reduce” a death penalty sentence because it does not comply with the Nebraska statute that requires the district court sentencing panel to weigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances, Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2521.03, the Nebraska Supreme Court is limited to three orders, none of which allow resentencing through reweighing by the Nebraska Supreme Court:
Death penalty cases; Supreme Court; orders. In all cases when the death penalty has been imposed by the district court, the Supreme Court shall, after consideration of the appeal, order the prisoner to be discharged, a new trial to be had, or appoint a day certain for the execution of the sentence.
Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2528 (emphasis added).
Since the Nebraska Legislature went to the trouble to be quite explicit about the remedies given the Nebraska Supreme Court in the event of nonharmless error regarding aggravating/mitigating circumstances (reduction of sentence or remand for a new hearing), the Nebraska statutes cannot properly be construed to provide a remedy that is not explicitly mentioned in those statutes.
Third, the Nebraska statutes give the “weighing” function only to the district court sentencing panel. Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2522. In contrast, the statutes direct the Nebraska Supreme Court to “review and analyze” the actions of the sentencing panel. Neb.Rev.Stat. §§ 29-2521.01(5) & 29-2521.02 (Reissue 1989).
The only place in the Nebraska statutes where any court is directed by the Nebraska Legislature to “weigh” aggravating and mitigating circumstances is Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2522, where “the jttdge or judges ” are directed to “fix the sentence at either death or life imprisonment” after determining, among other things, “[wjhether sufficient mitigating circumstances exist which approach or exceed the weight given to the aggravating circumstances....” Id. (emphasis added).
*1434In this regard, I observe that the phrase “judge or judges” as used in the foregoing statute can only mean the state district court sentencing panel which must, pursuant to Neb.Rev.Stat. § 29-2520 (Reissue 1989), consist of the trial judge or the trial judge plus two other judges (or in the case of disability or disqualification of the trial judge, three other state district judges). The Nebraska statutes consistently use the words “Supreme Court” when referring to the Nebraska Supreme Court. See, e.g., Neb.Rev.Stat. §§ 29-2521.01(5), 29-2521.02, 29-2521.03, 29-2521.04 (Reissue 1989). Thus, the difference in the statutory language, i.e., “judge or judges” versus “Supreme Court,” makes it clear that the words “judge or judges” in section 29-2522 refer to the sentencing panel and not the Nebraska Supreme Court.
In summary, the Nebraska statutes plainly do not permit appellate resentenc-ing when there is nonharmless error regarding aggravating/mitigating circumstances because (1) the Nebraska statutes provide a very specific procedure for sentencing before the sentencing panel, but no such procedure is provided for the appellate court; (2) the Nebraska statutes explicitly provide that the Nebraska Supreme Court’s remedial powers in the event of nonharmless error regarding aggravating/mitigating circumstances are limited to “reduction” of sentence or to ordering a new sentencing hearing; (3) the “weighing” function is explicitly given to the state district court sentencing panel, and the “review-and-analysis” function is allocated to the Nebraska Supreme Court; and (4) the only court authorized to impose a death sentence is the district court, not the Nebraska Supreme Court.
b.
The second reason I am persuaded that Nebraska law does not allow appellate re-sentencing is that Reeves III is silent on the matter. Nowhere in Reeves III does the Nebraska Supreme Court explicitly confront the question of whether Nebraska law allows appellate resentencing. Nowhere does the Nebraska Supreme Court explain under what state grant of authority the court believed itself empowered to engage in appellate resentencing. Nowhere does the Nebraska Supreme Court explain by reference to the Nebraska death penalty laws how the court derived the power to engage in appellate resentencing, thereby depriving Reeves of his statutory entitlement to sentencing by the district court sentencing panel.
Reeves v. Hopkins, 871 F.Supp. at 1195-98 (footnotes omitted).
Judge Kopfs opinion then observes that the Nebraska Supreme Court has never referred to state law as a basis for its reweighing function. Id. at 1198-99.
I, too, have searched the Nebraska case law and agree with the district court in concluding that the Nebraska Supreme Court has never articulated a source of authority to reweigh in its state statutes.
For its excellent scholarship and discourse on Nebraska law, the majority gives these Nebraska federal judges this comment: “As noted, the district court exceeded the bounds of its authority in rejecting the Nebraska Supreme Court’s interpretation of Nebraska law.” Op. at 1427-28.
This comment is undeserved. One can look in vain for any source of state statutory power authorizing the Supreme Court of Nebraska to reweigh. Nowhere does the majority discuss Nebraska statutory sentencing procedures. Moreover, nowhere in its opinion does the majority discuss statutory sentencing procedures or Nebraska cases discussing state law as authorizing reweighing (resentencing).
As I see it, where the Nebraska Supreme Court has never interpreted its sentencing statutes in regard to resentencing or reweighing, the federal courts are free to do so, indeed may be obligated to do so. See Burrus v. Young, 808 F.2d 578, 586 (7th Cir.1986) (Coffey, J., concurring) (“when reviewing a federal writ of habeas corpus we are frequently called upon to interpret state law and in that manner are properly performing our function as a federal appellate court”); see also Banner v. Davis, 886 F.2d 777, 782 (6th Cir.1989) (contrasting prior case where *1435court had permissibly interpreted state law in “narrow situation in which the state courts below had failed to give a clear expression on the issue” with present case where state courts had carefully considered and analyzed scope of state statues); cf. Cole v. Young, 817 F.2d 412, 422-23 n. 7 (7th Cir.1987) (refuting dissent’s criticism that majority was failing to abide by state court’s interpretation of state law question and claiming state law question left unanswered by state court).
Thus, the district court did not depart from its proper function in examining and interpreting the Nebraska statutes in this habeas proceeding. No prior Nebraska Supreme Court decision foreclosed that duty.
II.
In addition, the district court properly followed the precedent laid down by another panel of this court relating to a Nebraska death sentence in Rust v. Hopkins, 984 F.2d 1486 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 508 U.S. 967, 118 S.Ct. 2950, 124 L.Ed.2d 697 (1993) and, in my judgment the majority failed in its obligation to follow that case.
Judge Richard Kopf, then serving as magistrate judge, made the analysis in the Rust case. The district judge then adopted Judge Kopf s analysis. I am certain that with this background, Judge Kopf became keenly aware of the issues relating to the death sentences imposed on Reeves.
In Rust, the state sentencing panel in imposing death found aggravating circumstances by a standard of proof less than beyond a reasonable doubt. This erroneous proof was reweighed by the Nebraska Supreme Court as sufficiently proved beyond a reasonable doubt and it reinstated the death penalty. Rust, 984 F.2d at 1487-89.
A panel of three judges, John R. Gibson, Lay and Loken, in an unanimous opinion by Judge John R. Gibson, affirmed the grant of habeas relief notwithstanding the claim of Nebraska through Warden Hopkins that Clemons v. Mississippi 494 U.S. 738, 110 S.Ct. 1441, 108 L.Ed.2d 725 (1990), the reweighing analysis performed by the Nebraska Supreme Court.
The panel reviewed the Nebraska statutes and determined that Rust:
had a statutory right to: (1) have his trial judge or a three-judge panel including his trial judge consider aggravating circumstances based on facts proven beyond a reasonable doubt and to sentence him based on those findings; and (2) have the determination of that sentencing panel reviewed in the Nebraska Supreme Court. While created by state law, these are not “procedural right[s] of exclusively state concern,” they are liberty interests protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Rust v. Hopkins, 984 F.2d 1486, 1493 (8th Cir.1993).
The Nebraska two-tiered sentencing procedure first created a liberty interest in having a panel of judges make particular findings which could not be cured by appellate review and, secondly, a constitutional right to a meaningful appellate review of the sentence. The Rust court said:
The whole point of the two-tier sentencing procedure is that the initial determination is reviewed by an independent appellate court. The two-tier process would be subverted if the Nebraska Supreme Court could step in and fully perform the work of the sentencing panel. Yet that is precisely what happened in this case.

Id.

The majority seeks to distinguish Rust on its facts but such attempted distinction has no application to the crucial underpinning of Rust that Nebraska follows a two-tier sentencing scheme, giving a criminal defendant the due process right to be sentenced or resentenced (reweighed) by a panel of district judges and further to receive meaningful appellate review.
The district court properly relied on Rust for its ruling.
III.
As I have noted, the district court applied Rust as one of its reasons to bar appellate reweighing in Nebraska.
As the district court aptly observed and commented that the Nebraska Supreme Court has read and followed Rust, and has not attempted to reweigh a defendant’s sen-*1436tenee after the issuance of the Rust decision by this circuit. The district court opinion stated:
Subsequent to Reeves III, the Nebraska Supreme Court announced it would no longer engage in appellate resentencing as a result of the Eighth Circuit decision in Rust v. Hopkins. State v. Moore, 243 Neb. 679, 502 N.W.2d 227 (1993). While asserting that “we have the authority to resentence by analyzing and reweighing the aggravating and mitigating factors of the case,” id., 243 Neb. at 681, 502 N.W.2d at 229, the Nebraska Supreme Court stated in Moore that it would no longer do so in light of Rust v. Hopkins. The court made it clear that it disagreed with Rust v. Hopkins, but also recognized that it would be a waste of judicial resources to proceed with appellate resentencing in light of the holding in Rust because “the federal court would likely reverse.” Id., 243 Neb. at 683, 502 N.W.2d at 230.
The only basis for the opinion expressed in Moore that the Nebraska Supreme Court had the authority under state law to engage in appellate resentencing was a citation to Reeves III. Id., 243 Neb. at 681, 502 N.W.2d at 228-29. And, as noted earlier, the only basis for appellate resen-tencing in Reeves III was the Supreme Court’s opinion in Clemons. Accordingly, Moore is no more illuminating than the earlier opinions of the Nebraska Supreme Court on the state law basis for appellate resentencing.
I am thus convinced that none of the opinions of the Nebraska Supreme Court have articulated a state law basis for appellate resentencing.
Reeves v. Hopkins, 871 F.Supp. at 1199.
Finally, I would add the additional language of the Nebraska Supreme Court as written in State v. Ryan, 248 Neb. 405, 534 N.W.2d 766 (1995):
However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has held that appellate reweighing violates a defendant’s right to due process under Nebraska’s death penalty sentencing statutes. See Rust v. Hopkins, 984 F.2d 1486 (8th Cir.1993), cert. denied, 508 U.S. 967, 113 S.Ct. 2950, 124 L.Ed.2d 697_ See, also, Reeves v. Hopkins, 871 F.Supp. 1182 (D.Neb.1994). That leaves this court with the options of performing a harmless error analysis or remanding the cause to the district court for a new sentencing hearing. See State v. Reeves, 239 Neb. 419, 476 N.W.2d 829 (1991), cert. denied, 506 U.S. 837, 113 S.Ct. 114, 121 L.Ed.2d 71 ... (1992). We elect to perform a harmless error analysis.
Ryan, 534 N.W.2d at 796.
It is odd jurisprudence that the majority here gives so little credence to a panel opinion of the Eighth Circuit while district judges and the fíne judges of the Nebraska Supreme Court have little difficulty in interpreting the language of the Rust case to mean that the Nebraska Supreme Court will violate a prisoner’s due process rights by barring that prisoner’s right to resentencing to death or not by the sentencing panel and thereafter to meaningful appellate review, except for a review for harmless error.
I add a comment. I personally have high regard, as do my brothers and sister on this circuit, for the distinguished justices of the Nebraska Supreme Court. If that court should make an analysis of the Nebraska statutes and determine that those laws authorize reweighing by the high court of Nebraska, no federal judge can overrule that decision on state law. But until such a result is reached, which may be quite unlikely given the text of the relevant statutes, I believe that the Nebraska Supreme Court in its current practice is properly following a federal constitutional due process requirement in assigning reweighing (resentencing) in death sentence cases to the initial sentencing panel.
I believe that the majority opinion serves to confuse and create great uncertainty in the law of sentencing a person to death in Nebraska, where uncertainty is now absent.

. The Supreme Court of Mississippi wrote:
We acknowledge, as the United States Supreme Court recognized in its opinion, that this Court has upheld death sentences in the face of an invalid aggravating circumstance. See, e.g. Nixon v. State, 533 So.2d 1078, 1099 (Miss.1988); Lanier v. State, 533 So.2d 473, 491 (Miss.1988); Faraga v. State, 514 So.2d 295, 309 (Miss. 1987); Johnson v. State, 511 So.2d 1333, 1337 (Miss.1987); Stringer v. State, 500 So.2d 928, 945 (Miss.1986); Wiley v. State, 484 So.2d 339, 351 (Miss.1986); Irving v. State, 498 So.2d 305, 314 (Miss.1986); Edwards v. State, 441 So.2d 84, 92 (Miss. 1983). However, these cases express the notion, based on Zant v. Stephens, 462 U.S. 862, 880-84, 103 S.Ct. 2733, 2744-47, 77 L.Ed.2d 235 ... (1983), that so long as there remains even one valid aggravating circumstance this Court can uphold the death sentence. The United States Supreme Court has now unequivocally established in Clemons that an “automatic rule of affirmance in a weighing State would be invalid...." 494 U.S. at 752, 110 S.Ct. at 1450.
Clemons v. State, 593 So.2d at 1006.