Dark Year on Death Row - Guiding Sentencer Discretion After Zant, Barclay, and Harris

• NCJ Number: 96959
• Journal: U C Davis Law Review Volume: 17 Issue: 2 Dated: (Winter 1984) Pages: 689-729
• Author(s): R E Wirick
• Date Published: 1984
• Length: 41 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This examination of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent attempts to resolve controversies surrounding the constitutional requirements of circumstance and review safeguards in death sentencing statutes concludes that the Court is retreating from its progressive policy of strict sentencer guidelines and appellate scrutiny.

Abstract

The Supreme Court's major death penalty decisions have held that if a jury imposes a death sentence using a statute that fails to guide and channel the jury's discretion, that sentence violates the 8th and 14th amendments. Most State legislatures have responded with guided-discretion statutes that consist of bifurcated guilt and penalty phases at the trial and two safeguards to reduce and uncover error -- statutory aggravating circumstance and judicial review. The Court had the opportunity to address the constitutional compliance of such schemes in Zant v. Stephens (1983), Barclay v. Florida (1983), and Pulley v. Harris (1984). Zant and Barclay laid to rest lower court speculation concerning the permissibility of nonstatutory factors in the selection stage of sentencing and, by implication, foreclosed the constitutional necessity of any specific balancing or weighting instruction in the selection stage. Capital defendants in States with loosely structured schemes will continue to face the possibility of sentences based on constitutionally infirm factors. After Harris, it is clear that a systematized case comparison of every death sentence is not constitutionally required. Equally disturbing is the decision's failure to establish the constitutional necessity for some judicial review. In these decisions, the Supreme Court has told capital defendants that their juries may select them for death using only the most general legislative classifications and that review tribunals will ignore most deviations from additional mechanisms or instructions. The article includes 200 footnotes.