The 5-to-4 decision instructed federal judges, in particular, to defer to the ruling of a state-court trial judge who concludes that a potential juror should be disqualified as unable to give appropriate consideration to imposing the death penalty. “It is the trial court’s ruling that counts,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.
The decision overturned a ruling by a conservative icon among federal appellate judges, Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Judge Kozinski’s majority opinion last June granted a writ of habeas corpus and ordered a new sentencing hearing for the defendant, Cal C. Brown.
Judge Kozinski said the trial judge, in a Washington State court, had improperly granted the prosecutor’s request to dismiss a juror who, while expressing some qualms about the death penalty, also said he would be willing to impose it in an “appropriate” case.
Writing for the four dissenters on Monday, Justice John Paul Stevens said the majority had erased an important distinction the Supreme Court had long drawn between “mere opposition to the death penalty” and “an inability to perform the legally required duties of a juror.” Justice Stevens said the court’s precedents made it clear that no matter what a juror’s personal opinion about capital punishment, that juror should not be dismissed in the absence of evidence of unwillingness or inability to follow the law.
The process of questioning potential jurors in a death penalty case, and weeding out those who hold such strong feelings for or against capital punishment that they would be unable to apply the law, is known as “death-qualifying” a jury. It is an exacting process that in this case took 11 days, and it is governed by a series of Supreme Court decisions going back to 1968, before the modern era in capital punishment. The concern in those cases has been that if prosecutors had too free a hand in eliminating those with doubts about the death penalty, the jury would be stacked against the defendant.
Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion acknowledged that history. “Capital defendants have the right to be sentenced by an impartial jury,” he said, adding that “the state may not infringe this right” by eliminating “those whose scruples against the death penalty would not substantially impair the performance of their duties.”
The dispute on the court in this case, Uttecht v. Brown, No. 06-413, was therefore not over the basic principle but rather how to apply it, especially in the context of habeas corpus, in which Congress has already circumscribed the authority of federal judges to review state criminal convictions. Special deference is required in the death-qualification context, Justice Kennedy said, because the trial judge “is in a superior position to determine the demeanor and qualifications of a potential juror.”
In this case, the juror, Richard Deal, had offered several ambiguous answers to questions from the judge, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer for Mr. Brown, who was charged with the murder of a woman whose car he had hijacked. He was convicted in 1991 and remained on death row until last year, when the Ninth Circuit set aside his sentence but not his conviction.
Mr. Deal said he did not believe the death penalty should be used very often. One appropriate use, he said, was when there was a high likelihood that a murderer would kill again if released from prison. Under Washington’s law, jurors who are sentencing a convicted murderer may choose only between death and life in prison without parole.
Justice Kennedy said Mr. Deal’s answer thus led to a “reasonable inference” that he would not give full consideration to the prospect of sentencing Mr. Brown to death. Justice Stevens objected that Mr. Deal had also made “numerous statements” about his willingness to consider the death penalty, and that his comments about capital punishment for those who might kill again were just one example of when he might find death an appropriate punishment — too flimsy a basis for dismissing a juror.
Justice Stevens, joined in dissent by Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, underscored his disagreement by reading a portion of his opinion from the bench. Forceful as his oral statement was, his written opinion was actually more pointed because in it he took the unusual step of identifying Judge Kozinski by name and placing him in a particular context in Supreme Court history.
Justice Stevens said that Judge Kozinski “surely was entitled to assume that the law had not changed so dramatically in the years following his service as a law clerk to Chief Justice Burger” that a majority would now “uphold the disqualification of a juror whose only failing was to harbor some slight reservation in imposing the most severe of sanctions.”
The subtext here is that Justice Kennedy and Judge Kozinski are particularly close. Justice Kennedy was himself once a judge on the Ninth Circuit, and Alex Kozinski was his law clerk. And Justice Kennedy regularly hires Judge Kozinski’s law clerks to work at the Supreme Court.
That Justice Stevens chose to make an oblique but unmistakable reference in print to this special relationship may reflect less an effort to persuade Justice Kennedy than an expression of the liberal justices’ frustration with how the term is going. Judge Kozinski also voted, somewhat against type, to uphold the Seattle school system’s voluntary integration plan in another Ninth Circuit decision that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn in the coming weeks. That case is undoubtedly a major irritant between the two sides of what appears to be an increasingly polarized court.
These were among other developments on Monday.
Prisoner’s Suit
Voting 7 to 2 in an unsigned opinion, the court reinstated a lawsuit brought by a Colorado prison inmate against officials who, he claimed, have unconstitutionally deprived him of medical treatment.
Acting as his own lawyer, the inmate, William Erickson, alleged that prison officials violated his Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment when they suspended his treatment for hepatitis C, with life-threatening consequences, on suspicion that he had misused a syringe.
Both the Federal District Court in Denver and the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that he was not entitled to go forward with his suit because his allegations were simply “conclusory.”
The Supreme Court’s opinion in Erickson v. Pardus, No. 06-7317, said this was a “stark” departure from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which require only a “short and plain statement of the claim,” a requirement the majority said Mr. Erickson had met.
Case Dismissed
The court dismissed a closely watched appeal in a criminal sentencing case because the man who filed the appeal has died. The case, argued on Feb. 20 with a decision expected any day, was Claiborne v. United States, No. 06-5618. The court was to decide the circumstances under which a federal district judge can impose a sentence that is substantially lower than the sentence called for under the federal guidelines.
The defendant, Mario Claiborne, who served a 15-month sentence for a drug conviction, was shot to death on a St. Louis street last Tuesday, at age 23. The court will substitute another case that presents the same question.