Roberts v. Louisiana (1976)
Roberts v. Louisiana (1976)
428 U.S. 325
Stanislaus Roberts was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death under Louisiana’s capital punishment statute, which had been amended after Furman v. Georgia to make the death penalty mandatory for those convicted of first-degree murder. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed, and the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari. For the reasons stated in Justice Stewart’s opinion in the companion case of Woodson v. North Carolina, Justice Stevens, speaking for himself and for Justices Stewart and Powell, announced the judgment of the court and invalidated Louisiana’s mandatory death penalty statute. Justice White, dissenting, wrote an opinion that responds to the judgments of the Court in both Roberts and Woodson.
Judgment of the Court: Stewart, Powell, Stevens.
Concurring in judgment: Brennan; Marshall.
Dissenting opinions: Blackmun; Burger; White, Blackmun, Burger, Rehnquist.
JUSTICE WHITE, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE, JUSTICE BLACKMUN, and JUSTICE REHNQUIST join, dissenting.
. . . I cannot conclude that the current Louisiana first-degree murder statute is insufficiently different from the statutes invalidated in Furman’s wake to avoid invalidation under that case. . . .
The difference between a jury having and not having the lawful discretion to spare the life of the defendant is apparent and fundamental. It is undeniable that the unfettered discretion of the jury to save the defendant from death was a major contributing factor in the developments which led us to invalidate the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia. This factor Louisiana has now sought to eliminate by making the death penalty compulsory upon a verdict of guilty in first-degree murder cases. As I see it, we are now in no position to rule that the State’s present law, having eliminated the overt discretionary power of juries, suffers from the same constitutional infirmities which led this Court to invalidate the Georgia death penalty statute in Furman v. Georgia. . . .
Nor am I convinced that the Louisiana death penalty for first-degree murder is . . . vulnerable because the prosecutor is vested with discretion as to the selection and filing of charges, by the practice of plea bargaining or by the power of executive clemency. . . . The Louisiana statutes . . . define the elements of first-degree murder, and I cannot accept the assertion that state prosecutors will systematically fail to file firstdegree murder charges when the evidence warrants it or to seek convictions for first-degree murder on less than adequate evidence. Of course, someone must exercise discretion and judgment as to what charges are to be filed and against whom; but this essential process is nothing more than the rational enforcement of the State’s criminal law and the sensible operation of the criminal justice system. The discretion with which Louisiana’s prosecutors are invested and which appears to be no more than normal, furnishes no basis for inferring that capital crimes will be prosecuted so arbitrarily and frequently that the present death penalty statute is invalid under Furman v. Georgia. . . .
The plurality offers two additional reasons for invalidating the Louisiana statute. . . .
The plurality holds the Louisiana statute unconstitutional for want of a separate sentencing proceeding in which the sentencing authority may focus on the sentence and consider some or all of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Implicit in the plurality’s holding that a separate proceeding might be held at which the sentencer may consider the character and record of the accused is the proposition that States are constitutionally prohibited from considering any crime no matter how defined so serious that every person who commits it should be put to death regardless of extraneous factors related to his character. . . . I cannot agree. It is axiomatic that the major justification for concluding that a given defendant deserves to be punished is that he committed a crime. Even if the character of the accused must be considered under the Eighth Amendment, surely a State is not constitutionally forbidden to provide that the commission of certain crimes conclusively establishes that the criminal’s character is such that he deserves death. Moreover, quite apart from the character of a criminal, a State should constitutionally be able to conclude that the need to deter some crimes and that the likelihood that the death penalty will succeed in deterring these crimes is such that the death penalty may be made mandatory for all people who commit them. Nothing resembling a reasoned basis for the rejection of these propositions is to be found in the plurality opinion. The fact that juries at times refused to convict despite the evidence [does not] prove that the mandatory nature of the sentence was the burr under the jury’s saddle rather than that one or more persons on those juries were opposed in principle to the death penalty under whatever system it might be authorized or imposed. Surely if every nullifying jury had been interrogated at the time and had it been proved to everyone’s satisfaction that all or a large part of the nullifying verdicts occurred because certain members of these juries had been opposed to the death penalty in any form, rather than because the juries involved were reluctant to impose the death penalty on the particular defendants before them, it could not be concluded that either those juries or the country had condemned mandatory punishments as distinguished from the death penalty itself. The plurality nevertheless draws such an inference even though there is no more reason to infer that jury nullification occurred because of opposition to the death penalty in particular cases than because one or more of the 12 jurors on the critical juries were opposed to the death penalty in any form and stubbornly refused to participate in a guilty verdict. . . .
The more fundamental objection than the plurality’s muddled reasoning is that in Gregg v. Georgia . . . it lectures us at length about the role and place of the judiciary and then proceeds to ignore its own advice, the net effect being to suggest that observers of this institution should pay more attention to what we do than what we say. The plurality claims that it has not forgotten what the past has taught about the limits of judicial review; but I fear that it has again surrendered to the temptation to make policy for and to attempt to govern the country through a misuse of the powers given this Court under the Constitution.