On petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of North
Carolina.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
Justice MARSHALL, with whom Justice BRENNAN joins,
dissenting.
Petitioner was sentenced to death after a hearing in which the
judge prevented the jury from considering evidence that it might
well have considered highly relevant to petitioner's motive at the
time of his crime and to the relationship of his character and
record to the offense he had committed. As a result, the jury was
called on to decide whether death was the appropriate punishment
but was deprived of the evidence petitioner offered in mitigation
of his crime. The death sentence must thus be vacated, for it
stands in glaring conflict with one of the most basic requirements
of the Eighth Amendment-" 'that the sentencer . . . not be
precluded from considering, as a mitigating factor, any aspect
of
Page 471 U.S.
1030 , 1031
a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances
of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a
sentence less than death.' " Eddings v. Oklahoma,
455 U.S.
104, 110, 874 (1982) (quoting Lockett v. Ohio,
438 U.S.
586, 604, 2964 (1978)).1
I
Petitioner Boyd was convicted of murdering his former girlfriend
after unsuccessfully attempting a reconciliation. They had lived
together for three years but had separated several months prior to
the murder. On the day of the murder, Boyd met the victim at a
local shopping mall. They sat and talked quietly for some time,
sitting in the midst of a church- sponsored event run by the
victim's father, a local pastor. Eventually, the victim's mother
approached her daughter and said it was time to leave, but Boyd
asked the daughter to stay and talk to him a little longer. After
talking some more, the victim said she would leave. She was also
reported to have said that if Boyd was going to kill her "he should
hurry up and get it over with." Boyd took out a knife but also
assured her that he would not hurt her. He then began to stab her
rapidly and repeatedly until bystanders dragged the two apart. The
victim died from the multiple stab wounds.
At his capital sentencing hearing, Boyd offered in mitigation
expert testimony by a sociologist, Dr. Humphrey, who had
interviewed Boyd and previously had done academic research into the
behavioral dynamics of suicide and homicide. Most relevantly, Dr.
Humphrey had coauthored a study of people who had murdered their
relatives or intimates. The trial judge excluded the entirety of
his testimony.
Page 471 U.S.
1030 , 1032
Dr. Humphrey would have testified, based on his study and his
personal interview with Boyd, that Boyd's crime and life history
conformed to a common pattern that distinguishes those who kill
intimates from those who kill others. According to the sociologist,
those in the former group are more likely to have had lives
characterized by repeated deep personal losses (such as death of
loved ones or abandonment by parents) and strong feelings of
self-destruction:
" 'The more loss in someone's life, the more likely they are to
become self-destructive. And it seems that killing a family member
or killing a close friend is an act of self-destruction. They are
after all, killing something that is a part of them, very close to
them, very important to their self. They are destroying them. So in
the act of killing another person they are in fact destroying part
of their self, a self-destructive act.' " 311 N.C. 408, 439,
319 S.E.2d
189, 209 (1984) (Exum, J., dissenting) (quoting voir dire
testimony of Dr. Humphrey).
In Dr. Humphrey's view, Boyd's life history conformed to the
pattern he had found in his research; Boyd's life had involved
repeated and intense personal losses that had generated strong
self-destructive feelings in him. [
Footnote 2] Dr. Humphrey thus understood Boyd's crime
"primarily [ as] a depression caused self-destructive act, closely
related to the impulse that leads to suicide, resulting from a life
history of an inordinate number of losses beginning with the
abandonment by the defendant's father and the death of his
grandfather and culminating with the threatened loss of [the
victim]." Id., at 419, 319 S.E.2d, at 197.
Boyd's counsel sought to introduce the expert's testimony to
provide the jury with a perspective on Boyd's personal history, on
his mental and emotional condition, and on how these factors may
have led to the crime. In that sense, it was evidence of motive;
but more broadly, the proposed testimony was an effort to "link
Page 471 U.S.
1030 , 1033
together all of the defendant's mitigating evidence into a
unified whole which explained the apparent contradiction of killing
the person the defendant loved the most." Ibid. [
Footnote 3]
On the prosecutor's motion, the trial court excluded Dr.
Humphrey's explanation of why Boyd killed his former girlfriend,
but the prosecutor nevertheless argued vigorously for an
alternative explanation of Boyd's motive. According to the
prosecutor, Boyd was selfish and mean; he killed the victim because
if he could not have her he wanted to make sure that no one else
could. Id., at 436, 319 S.E.2d, at 207 (Exum, J. dissenting). In
the words of the dissenting opinion below, the State's theory was
"a motive theory that is easy to sell in this kind of case . . . .
Defendant's motive theory was different, less apparent to the
average observer, and probably more difficult to sell. It was a
theory which does not excuse the crime but which might have
mitigated it in the eyes of the jury." Ibid. The legal question,
obviously, is not which of these theories is more worthy of belief,
but whether petitioner had a right to offer evidence in support of
his theory. Lockett and Eddings leave no doubt as to the correct
answer to that question; he had such a right.
With two justices in dissent, the State Supreme Court affirmed
the sentence of death. In the court's view the proffered testimony
only " placed [the] various 'stressful events' [of Boyd's life] in
a context suggesting that defendant's act [of murder] was
predictable." 311 N.C., at 423, 319 S.E.2d, at 199. It had "merely
constructed a profile of a murderer into which the defendant fits."
Ibid. The court doubted that this information could have much
weight in mitigation, especially because, in the court's view, some
of the traumas in Boyd's life (e.g., imprisonment) could not
"extenuate or reduce the moral culpability of the killing."
Ibid.
II
Lockett and Eddings have at their core an understanding that the
factors that can rationally militate against the appropriateness of
death are varied, subjective, and not subject to prior itemization.
See also McGautha v. California,
402 U.S. 183, 204-208,
1465-1468 (1971). Moreover, those cases clearly stand for the
proposition that, within a broad range of relevance, the weight of
any offered
Page 471 U.S.
1030 , 1034
factor of mitigation is for the sentencer to determine. Here the
sentencers were the jurors. Although evidence of various events in
Boyd's personal history was admitted, expert evidence that might
have been highly useful to the sentencer's attempt to understand
Boyd's crime and its relation to those events of personal history
was excluded. Expert knowledge of human motivation might well have
been considered highly relevant in the eyes of the jurors, for it
might have offered an alternative explanation for why Boyd killed.
Without that evidence, the scattered personal history evidence
might have had little apparent significance, but the expert
evidence might well have provided a link between the personal
history evidence and that "extenuat[ion] or reduc[ tion of] the
moral culpability of the killing" that might call for a sentence of
less than death. The exclusion of the expert evidence thus violated
Lockett and Eddings. Behind the State Supreme Court decision stand
certain premises concerning punishment. Most apparently, the court
took the view that it would be highly questionable to mitigate
punishment based on a criminal's conformity to a social psychology
profile that traces the crime's origins to the traumas of the
criminal's life and to the self-destructive impulses that those
traumas may produce. But under the Constitution, the weight of
mitigating factors is a judgment for the capital sentencer, and
neither court nor legislature may usurp the sentencer's role. In a
jury's eyes, the fact that a killer is moved by self-destructive
tendencies might make a crime seem more generally tragic and less
demanding of retribution, and it might make the criminal seem less
clearly evil and more capable of rehabilitation. Moreover, the jury
might become less concerned with the prospect of future
dangerousness where a defendant's violence stemmed from intimacy
and the likely alternative to death is that he spend his life in
prison far from loved ones. [
Footnote 4]
Page 471 U.S.
1030 , 1035
Although these possible uses of the proffered but excluded
evidence show that it was of clear relevance within even the most
traditional views of mitigation, its possible power with the jury
is even clearer when we consider the inherent subjectivity of
capital sentencing decisions. Put simply, viewing the defendant's
behavior in terms of a pattern that has governed a far greater
number of persons than the defendant alone might lead a jury to
step beyond initial revulsion and attempt to understand the crime
in more human terms. As one commentator has speculated, in many
cases a jury's ability to take precisely that step might be what
determines whether or not a defendant will be sentenced to die:
"[It may be that] many jurors vote to execute when they are
repelled by the defendant, because he presents the threatening
image of gratuitous, disruptive violence that they cannot
assimilate into any social or psychological categories they use in
comprehending the world. Jurors can probably give mercy to even the
most vicious killers if they can somehow understand what might
cause this person to be a killer. . . . A juror votes to expel the
defendant who presents an image of violence he or she cannot
assimilate into any stabilizing categories, and who thereby
threatens his or her sense of comfortable order in the world."
Weisberg, Deregulating Death, 1983 S.Ct.Rev. 305, 391.
It was our recognition of the importance to a defendant of just
this sort of subjective but intensely human analysis of mitigation
that stood behind this Court in Lockett and Eddings. Relying on
those cases, Boyd sought to place his crime within the jury's
understanding. The state courts denied him the right to make that
effort.
Page 471 U.S.
1030 , 1036
III
We have broadly declared that the law cannot preclude a capital
sentencer's consideration of " 'any aspect of a defendant's
character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense
that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than
death.' " Eddings, 455 U.S., at 110 (quoting Lockett, 438 U.S., at
604). Accordingly, a constitutional death sentence cannot result
from a process wherein the State may portray a defendant's acts as
so "inhuman," bizarre, and cruel as to be beyond the reach of human
sympathy, but a defendant is legally precluded from offering in
mitigation those " 'diverse frailties of humankind' " an
understanding of which might place the barbaric act within the
realm of the tragic but nonetheless human. 455 U.S., at 112, n. 7,
n. 7 (quoting Woodson v. North Carolina,
428 U.S.
280, 304, 2991 (1976)).
The Lockett-Eddings principle stems from the " 'fundamental
respect for humanity underlying the Eighth Amendment,' " Eddings,
supra, 455 U.S., at 112 (quoting Woodson v. North Carolina, supra,
428 U.S., at 304), and rests on the requirement that "[a] jury must
be allowed to consider on the basis of all relevant evidence not
only why a death sentence should be imposed, but also why it should
not be imposed." Jurek v. Texas,
428 U.S.
262, 271, 2956d 929 (1976). Without the Lockett-Eddings
principle, the uniqueness of a person's life, including how that
life may have led to the crime, may be casually ignored in
determining whether that person should live or die. The
Constitution cannot tolerate the execution of people "not as
uniquely individual human beings, but as members of a faceless,
undifferentiated mass to be subjected to the blind infliction of
the penalty of death." Woodson v. North Carolina, supra, 428 U.S.,
at 304. This Court should not stand by and allow the
Lockett-Eddings principle to erode. I would thus grant review, and
I dissent from the denial of certiorari.
Footnotes
Footnote 1 I continue to
adhere to my view that the death penalty is in all circumstances
cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and
Fourteenth Amendments. Gregg v. Georgia,
428 U.S.
153, 231, 2973 (1976) (MARSHALL, J., dissenting). But even if I
did not take this view, I would grant review in this case because
of the important issue raised concerning the proper interpretation
of Lockett and Eddings.
Unfortunately, this case is illustrative of a disturbing trend
in a number of state courts to read our holdings in Eddings and
Lockett in an unjustifiably narrow manner, and to declare, in spite
of these holdings, that an increasing number of proffered bases of
mitigation are simply irrelevant. See Eutzy v. Florida,
471 U.S. 1045d 336
(MARSHALL, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari); Patterson v.
South Carolina,
471
U.S. 1036 (MARSHALL, J ., dissenting from denial of
certiorari).
Footnote 2 Boyd's lawyers
had introduced evidence that Boyd's father had been an alcoholic
who abandoned his family when Boyd was a child, that his
grandfather-whom he had come to view as a father-had then died,
that he had a history of losing jobs and repeated imprisonment, and
that his life since adolescence had been characterized by drug and
alcohol abuse. When Dr. Humphrey interviewed Boyd, Boyd said that
he had so feared the loss of his girlfriend that he had
contemplated suicide shortly before the murder.
Footnote 3 The proffered
evidence would of course also have been quite relevant to such
issues as future dangerousness and prospects of rehabilitation.
Footnote 4 There is some
ambiguity in the State Supreme Court's opinion as to whether the
affirmance rested on a view that the proffered evidence was
properly excludable as irrelevant or was simply of so little weight
as to not be a basis for vacating the sentence in this case. Either
basis would of course be improper. The former would clearly be
contrary to the discussions of relevance in Lockett v. Ohio,
438 U.S. 586
(1978), and Eddings v. Oklahoma,
455 U.S. 104 (1982), and
the latter would ignore those cases' determination that the
sentencer be the judge of the proper weight to be given to
mitigating factors. Whatever might be the circumstances, if any,
that might allow a court to speculate as to the possible
harmlessness of an improper exclusion of a properly proffered
mitigating factor, cf. Eddings, supra, at 119 (O'CONNOR, J.,
concurring); see also Songer v. Wainwright,
469 U.S. 1133, 1140, and
n. 13, and n. 13 (1985) (BRENNAN, J., dissenting from denial of
certiorari), the standard can certainly be no less than the
constitutional harmless-error standard we have otherwise endorsed.
The court below did not engage in any determination that there was
error that could be found harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See
Chapman v. California,
386 U.S. 18 (1967).
Moreover, there is no reason to believe that any such determination
could reasonably have been made in a case such as this.
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