Impact on Crime Victim’s Family Is Ruled Irrelevant

In a major setback for the victim’s rights movement, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that a jury deliberating the fate of a convicted killer may not be told about the impact of the crime on the victim’s family.

On a 5-4 vote, the majority said the court system must tilt in the direction of ensuring fairness for a defendant, even if this means excluding distraught victims from having a voice in the process.

Writing for the court, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said that a statement on the “emotional distress” of the survivors is not only “irrelevant” to a judgment about the killer but also “creates an impermissible risk” that the defendant will be unfairly condemned to die.

The family of an elderly Baltimore couple had told jurors in a prepared statement that they were devastated by the stabbing death of their grandparents. The murders, committed by two heroin addicts, occurred just two days before the wedding of one granddaughter.

In vacating the death sentence given convicted killer John Marvin Booth, Powell said the jury must be made to focus its attention on the defendant and the crime committed, not on its impact on others. Allowing the jury to hear a statement from the survivors “can serve no other purpose than to inflame the jury,” he said.

Sensitivity Shown

It is not clear what impact the ruling will have on victim’s rights laws in general because the court carefully limited its ruling to death sentencing. Thirty-six states, including California, have a victim’s rights law on the books, but only Maryland and Nebraska were using statements of victims in deciding whether killers should be sentenced to death or prison, according to lawyers who follow capital cases.

Monday’s ruling shows again the high court’s sensitivity to the unique nature of capital punishment. While the justices have repeatedly upheld the death penalty against broad challenges, they have often sided with defendants who can show that their death sentence may have been arrived at in a process that was unfair or arbitrary.

In dissent, Justices Byron R. White and Antonin Scalia pointed out that the court has insisted on allowing convicted killers to present the jury with all “mitigating evidence” such as their childhood troubles or their good deeds. In April, the court threw out the death sentence given a Florida killer because his lawyer had been stopped from telling the jury about his childhood.

To give the defendant’s lawyer a free hand while excluding testimony from survivors “is in effect to prescribe a debate on the appropriateness of the capital penalty with one side muted,” Scalia said. Joining the dissents were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

‘Good Decision’

Tanya Coke of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York said the high court ruling was “a good decision because it safeguards against the racial and class discrimination we see so often in the death penalty.” She and other critics of so-called “victim impact statements” said such statements have the potential to give undue weight to the fact that the victims were prominent persons with influential relatives.

Coke added that there is a “need for a serious discussion about how victims can be heard” in criminal proceedings, but that presenting their statements during a sentencing hearing is “simply too inflammatory.”

Pete Wilkinson, the death penalty coordinator for the California Department of Justice, said the high court ruling in the case (Booth vs. Maryland, 86-5020) should not have a significant impact in the state.

“We don’t allow this type of evidence to be presented during the penalty phase,” when a jury decides whether to send a killer to prison or death, Wilkinson said. He added, however, that “a handful” of death penalty cases now under appeal in California could be affected if the prosecutor had told the jury about the impact of the murder on the surviving family.