Court Opinion

ID: 9487455
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:16:56.272176+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:16.717674
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
with whom Circuit Judges PREGERSON and WILLIAM A. NORRIS join, dissenting:
Between 1977 and 1992 one person was executed by the state of Arizona. United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Capital Punishment 1992, p. 9, Table 10. In the same fifteen year period 103 persons were sentenced to death in Arizona. Id., p. 11, Appendix Table 2. We are now informed by the Office of the Attorney General of Arizona that there are 117 persons under sentence of death in Arizona, and that no one has been executed in 1993 or 1994. On the face of these facts it appears that the administration of the death penalty in Arizona is so arbitrary as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States as made applicable to the state of Arizona by the Fourteenth Amendment.
This contention has not been advanced by Jeffers. But this court has the power when justice requires it to consider sua sponte questions of law “neither pressed nor passed upon by the court or administrative agency below.” Hormel v. Helvering, 312 U.S. 552, 557, 61 S.Ct. 719, 721, 85 L.Ed. 1037 (1941). Joining Judge Pregerson’s dissent, I also dissent from the failure of the court to exercise its power to decide the constitutionality of the Arizona practice as justice requires the court to do.
A populist might say: “The people of Arizona want the death penalty. Our judges impose it. It is you federal judges who by your technical objections delay the speedy execution of the condign sentence. You cannot invoke your obstructionism as a reason for outlawing our chosen method of vindicating human life.”
Such a response would appeal only to those ignorant of the laws of Arizona and the United States. Under the law of Arizona every sentence of death is automatically appealed to the Supreme Court of Arizona. *426State v. Bible, 175 Ariz. 549, 560, 858 P.2d 1152, 1163 (1993); Ariz.R.Crim.P. 26.15, 31.2(b). The entire record is then reviewed by the court. Bible, 175 Ariz. at 608-09, §58 P.2d at 1211-12. The record in capital cases has a “voluminous nature.” Id. at 608, 858 P.2d at 1211. It can, for example, consist in “more than 120 volumes of testimony and numerous exhibits and filings easily exceeding 15,000 pages.” Id. The study of the record is “time-consuming.” Id. An opinion in a death penalty case may be over sixty pages in length. E.g., Bible, supra. The Supreme Court of Arizona has other appeals, civil and criminal, to decide in addition to death penalty appeals. Consequently, it has, in the years 1991 and 1992, decided only twelve death penalty appeals. In the same period twenty-two persons have been sentenced to death by Arizona trial courts. Capital Punishment 1992, p. 11, Appendix Table 2. The work load of the Supreme Court of Arizona alone assures that the number of persons under sentence of death in Arizona and unexecuted will increase if the trial courts continue to impose the death penalty at the same rate as they have imposed it in the past.
It is hypothetically possible, but realistically improbable, that the Supreme Court of Arizona would cease to decide other criminal appeals and all civil appeals and devote itself entirely to eliminating the backlog in death penalty appeals. It is highly unlikely that the people of Arizona would want a Supreme Court whose only business was the decision of death penalty cases. It is hypothetically possible, but realistically improbable, that the Supreme Court of Arizona would abandon its conscientious review of the entire record in death penalty cases and automatically affirm every sentence of death. Such a gratuitous and offensive suggestion has no factual foundation.
The Supreme Court of Arizona conscientiously reviews the entire record for error under the laws and constitution of Arizona and for error under the Constitution of the United States. The United States Supreme Court has found in the Constitution many restraints and limitations on the imposition of death by the state. Since 1967 courts have determined that in over 3,000 cases the death penalty was unconstitutionally imposed. See Hugo Adam Bedau, The Death Penalty in America (1982) 68. Between 1973 and 1992, 4,704 persons were sentenced to death. In 457 instances the statutes under which they were sentenced were invalidated; in 451 instances their convictions were overturned; in 790 instances, their sentences were set aside as illegal. In all 1,698 persons were found by appellate courts to have been wrongly sentenced to death, a rate of error of over 36%. Capital Punishment 1992, p. 10, Appendix Table 1.
Since 1973, the sentence of death has been imposed on 164 persons in Arizona. In 56 of these cases the conviction or the sentence has been judicially reversed. In more than one in three cases, then, a person has been erroneously sentenced to death by an Arizona trial court. Capital Punishment 1992, p. 13, Appendix Table 4. It is small wonder that the Supreme Court of Arizona conducts a careful review of death penalty cases to assure that neither state nor federal error has infected the process prejudicially.
There will be federal review after the state courts have finished their work — at least that is a reasonable presumption given the degree of devotion of opponents of the death penalty to exhausting all legal remedies and to the possibility, in at least many cases, of fairly raising a claim that certiorari should be granted by the United States Supreme Court or that habeas corpus should be granted by a federal district court. It is the work of the dedicated lawyers who pursue these legitimate appeals that extends the process and delays final resolution of a case. But these lawyers are not to be faulted for their zeal. They are neither pettifoggers nor fanatics. They are either seeking the application of established constitutional principles or presenting fair and reasoned argument for the extension of established principles. They are doing what any good lawyer always does for his or her client. They are not obstructing the judicial process but serving it.
That there are many precedents to invoke, to be applied or to be extended, is a fact of modern death penalty jurisprudence. That this should be true is not due to the courts *427alone but to a substantial shift from earlier centuries in educated opinion about the death penalty. Expressly set as a sanction in the Bible, employed by every European state, the imposition of death as a criminal sanction was routine and righteous. Paradoxically, the incalculable value of human life was affirmed by holding that, if a person took human life, only his own would be sufficient compensation. Then opinion, especially elite opinion, changed. For those without belief in human immortality, there is an awfulness about the utter extinction of a human person. For those who are religious, the deliberate human taking of life appears to be the usurpation of a power that belongs to God. Theorists challenge the state’s authority over life. Pragmatists doubt the deterrence supposedly achieved. Most European nations gave up the practice; so did a number of American states. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court came to the verge of declaring the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional.
The verge was reached. The death penalty survived. Hesitant, ambivalent, divided, the Supreme Court surrounded it with qualifications.
The murders for which the death sentence are imposed are of a peculiarly brutal character. They arouse outrage. They provoke the spontaneous reaction, “Such a beast should not be allowed to live!” But no law-abiding person today supposes that the proper response to such crime is lynch law. No law-trained person even supposes that a quick trial, no appeal, and speedy execution would be appropriate. Speed in executing justice has been sacrificed to assuring accuracy in the judgment and fairness in the procedure. Few lawyers or judges today would say, “Subordinate accuracy and fairness to speed.”
The result in Arizona is that, as each ease is reviewed for accuracy and fairness and each case with its volumes of transcripts passes under the eyes of the reviewing courts, the death sentences imposed have been carried out at the rate of one in seventeen years. To sentence many and execute almost none is to engage “in a gruesome charade.” Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Capital Punishment and the American Agenda (1980) 95.
Four arguments may be made to justify such a system as it is administered. First, symbolically the state affirms the value of human life by setting death as the penalty even if the penalty is postponed in its execution; much of law depends on symbols; the importance of a symbol is not to be denigrated. Second, the person who is put to death belongs to a class found to deserve death; there is no unfairness to him if others in the class are spared. Third, persons found to deserve death also deserve to wait for years with death hanging over their heads and if they do not care for this kind of punishment, they should waive all appeals. Fourth, the existence of the death penalty is a bargaining chip for prosecutors to be used by them in persuading a murderer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence less than death.
To these arguments, it must be answered first that it is one thing to preserve an inanimate object such as the flag as a symbol, another thing to take a human life as a symbol. To take a human life as a symbol suggests human sacrifice as a custom of the state; no rational modem society believes in such a custom. Second, although the death-worthy person is selected more rationally than the victim in a society practicing human sacrifice, his selection from the pool of death-worthy persons is arbitrary. In Arizona he is not chosen on a FIFO basis. Jeffers was first sentenced to death in 1978, but this sentence was not valid. State v. Jeffers, 135 Ariz. 404, 661 P.2d 1105 (1988). He was resentenced on July 10,1980. There were at least eight persons sentenced to death before that date in Arizona who have not been executed. Capital Punishment 1992, p. 11, Appendix Table 2. Jeffers is scheduled for execution only because his case was advanced in the process by decisions that bear no rational connection to his special worthiness as a sacrifice; his selection from the pool was arbitrary. Third, a sentence to live under a sentence of death is not a penalty prescribed by Arizona law; mock death cannot be substituted for the real thing. Prisoners cannot be turned into “dead men walking,” as once they were at San Quentin in California. See *428Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (1993), 156. Finally, it is unconstitutional to induce a guilty plea by a threat that is itself unconstitutional, which the death penalty is if its administration is cruel and unusual.
Finding Arizona’s law as administered to be so irrationally applied as to violate the Eighth Amendment as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, I would grant the relief sought by Jeffers.