Justices Uphold California Death Penalty Statute

The Supreme Court upheld California’s death penalty law against a broad constitutional attack on Thursday, sparing state prosecutors the huge headache of seeking new sentencing hearings for the 388 convicted killers who sit on the state’s Death Row.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices said jurors in California are given enough “common-sense” guidance to choose between sentencing a murderer to death or to life in prison without parole.

“The states may adopt capital sentencing processes that rely upon the jury, in its sound judgment, to exercise wide discretion,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

Although that conclusion seems reasonable, it conflicts with opinions in other recent death penalty cases that set strict standards for capital punishment in the Southern states. Indeed, Thursday’s ruling tried to clear up confusion that the Supreme Court itself had created.

Just two years ago, in an another opinion written by Kennedy, the justices struck down part of Mississippi’s death penalty law because it failed to guide sentencing jurors.

Then, the court used a scale as a model. Jurors must weigh aggravating factors and mitigating factors, it said. If the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors, the killer gets a death sentence. Otherwise, it would be life in prison.

Speaking for a 6-3 majority in the Mississippi case, Kennedy said it is now “a well-settled principle: Use of a vague or imprecise aggravating factor in the weighing process invalidates the sentence.” That is so, he said, because allowing jurors to weigh “an illusory circumstance” would unfairly put a “thumb . . . on death’s side of the scale.” In that case, the disputed circumstance was the prosecutor’s contention that the murder was “heinous, atrocious and cruel.”

California’s law has wording similar to Mississippi’s statute. Jurors are told that they “shall impose a sentence of death if (they) conclude that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances.”

Not surprisingly, defense lawyers cited the Mississippi decision in their appeals on behalf of Death Row inmates. Acting on two such appeals, the justices in January announced that they would hear a broad challenge to the California law.

One appeal was filed on behalf of Paul P. Tuilaepa, who in 1986 shot four men in a Long Beach bar and killed one of them. Los Angeles County prosecutor William Hodgman called Tuilaepa a “menacing figure and fearsome killer.”

The second appeal was filed on behalf of William Proctor, who in 1982 had raped, tortured and murdered a Shasta County schoolteacher.

Both appeals argued that the California law allowed jurors to weigh vague factors, such as the “circumstance of the crime” and the age of the defendant. Since it is hard to weigh something as definite as age or the circumstances of the crime, the law should be deemed unconstitutional, they argued.

But in its opinion Thursday in Tuilaepa vs. California, 93-5131, the high court barely mentioned the Mississippi case and dropped its references to weighing matters on a scale.

Once a person is convicted of murder with “special circumstances” under California law, “the jury then is free to consider a myriad of factors to determine whether death is the appropriate punishment,” Kennedy wrote. “Indeed, the sentencer (jury) may be given unbridled discretion in determining whether the death penalty should be imposed.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice David H. Souter commented that decisions about the death penalty are “not susceptible to mathematical precision.”

California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren expressed “a great relief” at the outcome. He said the ruling reaffirms his belief that California’s death penalty law is “fair and reasonable, and that penalties in these cases have been justly imposed.”

“It’s the same old thing: You run up against the too-much-murder rule,” said attorney Howard Gillingham of North Hollywood, who represented Tuilaepa in his appeal. “They don’t want to overturn 200 or 300 cases.”

Wendy C. Lascher, the Ventura attorney who represented Proctor, remains convinced that the state’s jury instructions are not sufficiently precise. “It’s as if the judge says, ‘We’re going to tell you the instructions’, but the instructions might as well be in Russian,” she said.

Lawyers said Tuilaepa and Proctor have several more steps in their appeals before they face an execution date.

Meanwhile, in a second death penalty ruling, the high court on a 5-4 vote said federal judges can intervene to block an execution before a defendant has filed a writ in federal court.

The ruling settles an abstract question of federal jurisdiction that took on practical significance recently in Texas. There, prosecutors move swiftly to execute Death Row inmates as soon as their final appeals are rejected in the state’s highest court.

In the case of Frank McFarland, a federal judge said he had no authority to stop the execution to give defense lawyers enough time to file a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. The U.S Court of Appeals in Texas agreed, raising the possibility that an inmate could die before a federal court could examine the substance of his appeal.

But in McFarland vs. Collins, 93-6497, the high court said federal judges are empowered to grant a stay of execution to allow time for the filing of a federal appeal.

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Times staff writer Dan Morain in Sacramento contributed to this story.