WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated a death sentence that a California jury imposed in 1982 and that was twice overturned by the federal appeals court in San Francisco.
Ruling 5 to 4, the justices held that a disputed instruction that the appeals court found had improperly constrained the jury’s discretion to consider all the defendant’s mitigating evidence in fact gave the jurors adequate advice and had probably not confused them.
The decision was the first of the court’s new term, which began on Oct. 3, the day on which this case, Ayers v. Belmontes, No. 05-493, was argued. Usually, the first decision of a term is unanimous, or nearly so, a logical result of the fact that unanimous decisions are easier to produce than those that must await a dissenting opinion.
No one at the court on Monday could remember a term that began with a 5-to-4 decision. But while this decision might, on the surface, suggest that the current court is on the way toward setting a record for internal division, that is not necessarily the case. A more likely explanation is that much of the majority opinion was in fact drafted last spring, before the court agreed to hear California’s appeal.
The entry on the court’s public docket shows that while the state’s appeal was pending the justices discussed it nine times at closed-door conferences. With cases typically being discussed only once or twice, if at all, nine is an unusually high number. It suggests that a group of justices was trying to win majority support for an opinion that would decide the case summarily, without argument or further briefing.
The failure of such an effort typically results in a compromise decision to accept the case for argument, with much of the opinion already having been drafted.
In any event, the dispute among the justices, as disclosed in the opinions issued on Monday, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing for the majority and Justice John Paul Stevens writing for the four dissenters, was one of nuance rather than disagreement on basic principles of death penalty jurisprudence.
The question was whether the jury instruction, which the court had found to be adequate in two earlier decisions involving different defendants, had given the jurors the impression that they could consider only one type of mitigating evidence.
The court’s death-penalty precedents require that the jury be able to give open-ended consideration to any mitigating evidence the defense chooses to offer. Except for Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who do not accept these precedents, there is general agreement on that point; those two justices nonetheless signed the majority opinion on the basis of their agreement with other, more specific precedents at issue in the case.
The defendant in this case, Fernando Belmontes, was convicted of beating a 19-year-old woman to death with a steel bar in the course of burglarizing her home. He wanted to present mitigating evidence not about the circumstances of the crime, but about his record during an earlier incarceration in a juvenile prison.
Mr. Belmontes was a model prisoner there who underwent a religious conversion. He wanted to argue that this record showed that he would be a well-behaved and productive inmate if he was sentenced to life in prison rather than death.
California’s death penalty statute lists a number of mitigating factors that a defendant may invoke, concluding with a “catch all” factor that includes “any other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime even though it is not a legal excuse for the crime.”
While subsequent California Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court decisions made clear that this factor was more open ended than it appeared to be, permitting evidence that relates to the defendant’s character rather than to the crime itself, the question in the case was how Mr. Belmontes’s jury understood the factor in its unadorned form.
In overturning his death sentence through a writ of habeas corpus, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found there was a “reasonable probability” that the jury did not realize that it could take into account Mr. Belmontes’s evidence of his likely behavior as a prisoner.
Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion said the Ninth Circuit was mistaken. He said that various comments by the trial judge “made it clear that the jury was to take a broad view of mitigating evidence.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the opinion along with Justices Scalia and Thomas.
In dissent, Justice Stevens said the record showed “that confusion pervaded every aspect” of the sentencing hearing, including the catch-all factor. All participants in the hearing were “addled,” he added.
Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter joined the dissent.