Court Opinion

ID: 9492179
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:34:10.609844+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:09.520512
License: Public Domain

WOLLMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur fully in the court’s holding on the Batson issue. I also concur in the holding that the prosecutor’s penalty-phase closing argument requires us to set aside the death sentence. I write sepa*668rately only to express my view why the closing argument went beyond the bounds of constitutionally permitted advocacy.
We concluded our opinion in Newlon by finding that Newlon had been unfairly prejudiced by the prosecutor’s improper argument because, among other things, the argument was “ ‘calculated to remove reason and responsibility from the sentencing process.’” Newlon, 885 F.2d at 1338 (quoting Newlon v. Armontrout, 693 F.Supp. 799, 808 (W.D.Mo.1988)). What I find beyond the pale in Newlon is that portion of the closing argument in which the prosecutor stated:
If Rayfield [Newlon] was going to harm your child, would you kill him? Would you have prevented this killing if you’d been in the Conveniency store with a gun, and you could have saved Mr. Dave’s life? Would you have killed Rayfield? I think you would have — at least, I hope you would have had the courage to do either one of those. If you think you would have, kill him now. Kill him now.
Newlon, 885 F.2d at 1342.
So also with respect to that portion of the closing argument in the present case in which the prosecutor said,
You know, it’s not always wrong to kill. It’s maybe always difficult to kill; but if you kill in self-defense, that’s not wrong. If you kill in a just war, that is not wrong. It’s right. If somebody is going to kill your child and you have a chance to kill them to prevent it, would you do it? Of course. Kill Daryl Shurn.
To me, the statements “[K]ill him now. Kill him now,” and “Kill Daryl Shurn,” are an appeal to blood lust and mob justice rather than a call for the jury to return a sentence of death after calm, reasoned deliberation. This strident appeal to primitive emotion could not have done other than to touch the raw nerve of vengeance that lies within us all. The resulting “diminution of the jury’s sense of responsibility undermine[d] the Eighth Amendment’s heightened need for ‘the responsible and reliable exercise of sentencing discretion’ in capital cases.” Antwine v. Delo, 54 F.3d 1357, 1363 (8th Cir.1995) (quoting Caldwell v. Mississippi, 472 U.S. 320, 329, 105 S.Ct. 2633, 86 L.Ed.2d 231 (1985)).
This is not to say that a prosecutor should not argue for a death sentence with passion and conviction, for if the death penalty is to serve any valid purpose it should be sought and imposed in those cases in which the citizens of a state have determined that there are certain crimes the nature of which call for no lesser penalty. For those to whom the death penalty in all circumstances represents a barbaric, unconstitutional punishment, no doubt it is a contradiction in terms to say that a jury can impose it in a rational, deliberate manner. Yet that is what the constitution requires, which is why juries are required to weigh the inhumanity of the defendant’s deeds against the defendant’s humanness. The call to “Kill him. Kill him now,” diverts the jury from its solemn duty of making that calculation, for it is an appeal to base emotion rather than to the higher instinct of moral indignation, which, ultimately, is the foundation upon which the criminal law is based.
There recently appeared a thoughtful column on the subject of capital punishment, which says in part:
Can capital punishment possibly be civilizing? Might it be sometimes indispensable? Human nature, without a social contract, leads people to pursue and punish murderers in their own way. The social contract restrains man’s impulse toward rough justice. The contract states: Our authorities, acting under law for the community, will find the killers, try them and punish them. Implicit is the promise that the punishment will be sufficient to satisfy the need not only for moral satisfaction and justice but also for some measure of emotional satisfaction, a catharsis by — to admit it — legally ritualized revenge. A public hanging used to be a celebration of jus*669tice. The catharsis may have barbaric roots, yet by paradox is an essential civilizing instrument.
Lance Morrow, “Something We Cannot Accept,” TIME, March 8,1999, at 92.
If indeed the imposition of the death penalty is a form of “legally ritualized revenge,” then, to be constitutionally acceptable, that revenge — societal retribution, really — must be the result of reasoned deliberation and the exercise of moral judgment, rather than the product of a visceral response to the most primitive of emotions.