Justices Restore Death Sentence

The Supreme Court narrowly reinstated the death sentence of a Bakersfield man Wednesday in the first capital punishment case to come before the high court since John G. Roberts Jr. became chief justice.

With Roberts and retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the majority, the court voted 5 to 4 to overturn a 2004 decision of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which had voided the death sentence meted out to Ronald L. Sanders in 1982.

The case turned on a complicated issue involving the manner in which juries consider evidence during the penalty phase of a capital trial.

Sanders, now 43, was sentenced to death for bludgeoning Janice Allen to death during a robbery in Bakersfield in 1981. Sanders and an accomplice also were found guilty of attempting to kill Allen’s boyfriend, Dale Boender. Testimony was presented at trial that Sanders and his accomplice broke into the victims’ apartment, tied them with electrical cord and beat their skulls with a heavy blunt object. Boender survived and testified against Sanders.

In sentencing Sanders, jurors considered four aggravating factors, two of which -- that the crime was committed during a burglary and was committed in a cruel or heinous fashion -- were later found invalid by the California Supreme Court.

Nonetheless, California’s highest court in 1990 concluded that the death sentence was still valid because the jury could have sentenced Sanders to death based on any of the four aggravating factors.

Though it upheld Sanders’ murder conviction, the 9th Circuit vacated his sentence, saying that the jurors’ consideration of the invalid factors prejudiced the sentencing proceeding. The California attorney general’s office asked the high court to review the case, contending that a valid death sentence could have been imposed on Sanders despite the invalid factors presented to the jury. The high court agreed in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia.

“The erroneous factor could not have ‘skewed’ the sentence and no constitutional violation occurred,” Scalia wrote.

“If the jury finds the existence of one of the special circumstances, it is instructed to ‘take into account’ a separate list of sentencing factors describing aspects of the defendant and the crime,” Scalia continued. “These factors include, as we have said, [t]he circumstances of the crime of which the defendant was convicted in the present proceeding.”

Because the invalid factors were not needed to make Sanders eligible for a death sentence, they made no difference and the sentence can stand, Scalia concluded.

In addition to Roberts and O’Connor, associate justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas concurred in Scalia’s opinion.

The court’s moderate and liberal justices dissented in two separate opinions. Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by David H. Souter, wrote that “the decision is more likely to complicate than to clarify our capital sentencing jurisprudence.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the ruling could “deprive a defendant of a fair and reliable sentencing proceeding.”

The majority opinion, in a footnote, cited a decision written by U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., who on Wednesday completed his third day of Senate confirmation hearings to succeed O’Connor on the court. In the 1995 decision, Flamer vs. Delaware, Alito ruled that two death row inmates in Delaware were not entitled to a new sentence despite problems in the penalty phase of their cases. The two were executed months later.

Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, said the office was pleased with Wednesday’s ruling. He said that if the Supreme Court had found in Sanders’ favor it could have affected dozens of other death sentences in California. “This decision recognizes that juries entrusted with the responsibility to make the choice between life or death take those responsibilities seriously.”

Berkeley lawyer Nina Rivkind, who has represented Sanders for many years on appeal, said “we are very disappointed in the court’s decision. We hoped that the court would conclude that sentence was unconstitutional because two of the four circumstances the jury was told to consider on the death side of the scale were later held invalid.”

Rivkind said the case would return to the 9th Circuit for consideration of other penalty phase issues that the appeals court declined to resolve earlier.