Brown, Jill (Warden) v. Sanders, Ronald (01/11/2006)

Questions presented: (1) Is the California death penalty statute, which allows a jury in the penalty phase to consider a single list of eleven "open-ended" factors, not labeled as aggravating or mitigating, a "weighing statute" for which the state court is required to determine that the presence of an invalid special circumstance was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt as to the jury's determination of penalty? (2) If an affirmative answer to the first question was dictated by precedent, was it necessary for the state supreme court to specifically use the phrases "harmless error" or "reasonable doubt" in determining that there was no "reasonable possibility" that the invalid special circumstance affected the jury's sentence selection?

BY ALISON GRANITO, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

While Janice Allen and her boyfriend Dale Boender were cooking dinner, Boender answered a knock at his Bakersfield, Cal., apartment door one Friday night in January 1981. When he opened it, Ronald Sanders pointed a gun at him and, along with his accomplice, John Cebreros, forced Boender and Allen to the floor, tied them up and blindfolded them.

The intruders ordered Boender, a known cocaine dealer, to tell them where he kept his drugs and his money. The break-in was the second time Sanders attacked Boender and tried to rob him of his drugs that week.

Two days earlier, on the morning of Jan. 21, Brenda Maxwell, her aunt Donna Thompson and Sanders lured Boender to Maxwell's mobile home where they told him they had a friend who wanted to buy cocaine.

When Boender arrived, Sanders -- whom he had never met before -- attacked him with a two-foot long piece of a pool cue, but Boender managed to overpower him and leave with his drugs.

Maxwell feared Boender would realize she had set him up and Sanders thought Boender would be able to identify him.

Two days later, when Sanders and Cebreros left the apartment, Boender's roommates returned home to find the apartment filled with smoke from a pot burning on the stove. They found Allen dead in one bedroom and Boender left for dead in another with a fractured skull.

Before they knocked him out, Boender heard Sanders and Cebreros arguing. One of them, it is unclear which one, wanted to take the drugs and money and leave.

During trial in Kern County, which ended with a hung jury, prosecutors failed to establish whether it was Sanders or Cebreros who actually killed Allen.

On Jan. 22, 1982, after a retrial, both were convicted of first degree murder, attempted murder, robbery and burglary. The jury found that the crime was a capital case because it met four special circumstances under California law – the murder was committed during a robbery and a burglary, served to eliminate a witness and was especially "heinous, atrocious and cruel."

In finding a death sentence or the possibility of life without parole equally unacceptable, Sanders declined to present any mitigating evidence during the sentencing phase of his trial. As an aggravating factor during his sentencing, the state presented a string of armed robberies committed during the 1970s, to which Sanders had pleaded guilty and for which he had served time in prison.

The jury sentenced Sanders to death. Cebreros got life without the possibility of parole.

In September 1990, the California Supreme Court set aside two of the four special circumstances -- the burglary circumstance, as well as the circumstance which found the murder to be "heinous, atrocious and cruel" because it was unconstitutionally vague.

However, the California high court upheld Sanders' conviction and his death sentence, finding that although the jury considered improper special circumstances, those circumstances would not have affected its decision to impose the death penalty.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

In 1993, Sanders filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus and was ordered to exhaust all his possible remedies in the California court system. Sanders appealed.

In July 2004, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel overturned the death sentence, concluding that Sanders' 8th Amendment rights were violated, and ordered California to either give him a new penalty trial or replace his death sentence with life in prison.

The court ruled that Sanders had a constitutional right to an individualized death sentence and that the jury's consideration of factors later deemed invalid by the California Supreme Court when deciding whether Sanders would live or die did not constitute a harmless error.

"The California Supreme Court neither independently reweighed aggravating and mitigating sentencing factors after it had invalidated two of the aggravating factors, nor did it conduct an appropriate harmless-error analysis," wrote Judge Raymond Fisher for the panel.

The court also concluded that California is a weighing state, "because the jury's sentencing discretion is not boundless – it must consider the defined list of aggravating factors, and may not consider other aggravating factors, in making its penalty determination."

Since juries do more than "merely count the aggravating and mitigating factors, and individual jurors may ascribe varying weight to any single aggravating factor," Fisher wrote, it may be difficult for an appellate court reviewing a death sentence to determine how much weight the jury actually gave to a particular factor.

"There is a real risk that the jury's decision to impose the death penalty rather than life imprisonment may have turned on the weight it gave to an invalid aggravating factor," Fisher wrote.

Seeking reinstatement of Sanders' death sentence, California asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review whether California's death penalty statute is "a ‘weighing statute' for which the state court is required to determine that the presence of an invalid special circumstance was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt as to the jury's determination of penalty.

Deputy Attorney General Jane N. Kirkland said the Sanders case could affect other California death penalty cases because the federal appeals court held that death sentences imposed by juries which considered a special circumstance later deemed invalid could be set aside.

"Our position is that we have a unique statue," and is distinct from other states that are clearly weighing states or non-weighing states, Kirkland explained.

The state contends it doesn't matter "if one, or two or even three" of special circumstances considered by a jury are later found invalid, she added, because in order for a crime to be death penalty eligible "all you need is one."

California also asked the Court to review whether it was necessary for the state supreme court to "specifically use the phrases ‘harmless error' or ‘reasonable doubt' in determining that there was no ‘reasonable possibility' that the invalid special circumstance affected the jury's sentence selection."

Sanders contends that over the long life of the litigation the state never until recently challenged Sanders' assertion that California is a weighing state, arguing instead that California's high court conducted a sufficient harmless error review in Sanders.

In her response to the state's petition, Sanders' attorney Nina Rivkind wrote: "When the state lost on appeal, it seized on an entirely new argument in its petition for a rehearing en banc. Now the state attacked the conclusion that California is a weighing state as a ‘false premise,' even though the state has acceded to this premise for years."

Sanders also argues that the California statute "is indistinguishable in any meaningful way" from other states that are clearly defined weighing states.

On March 28, 2005, the Court accepted review in the case, limited to Questions 1 and 3 in the warden's petition.

Richard Dieter of the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center said that the case seems unlikely to have a broad national impact.

"You always wonder when they take a 9th Circuit case, whether they're looking toward the greater debate," Dieter said. "We'll certainly watch what the Court says."

On Jan. 11, 2006, as the Senate held confirmatiion hearings for Samuel Alito, the Court issued its opinion, siding 5-4 with the state.

Writing for the bare majority, Justice Antonin Scalia concluded that no constitutional violation was involved, in that although two of the four special circumstances were invalidated, the remaining two were sufficient to make Sanders death eligible.

The majority saw little reason to delve into whether California should be declared a weighing or non-weighing sentencing scheme, and instead established a rule that an invalidated sentencing factor (whether an eligibility factor or not) would only render a sentence unconstitutional by reason of its adding an improper element to the aggravation scale in the weighing process if there was no other sentencing factor that enabled the sentencing judge or jury to give aggravating weight to the same facts and circumstances.

This was the first 5-4 split in the Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the majority.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg argued that the Court should have remanded the case to the 9th Circuit to determine if the errors at issue were harmless. They too concluded that it doesn't matter if California is a "weighing" or a "nonweighing" state, as ordinary rules of appellate review should apply.

Justices Stevens and Souter were more troubled by the differences that California's weighing scheme bring to the analysis. Though they conceded that under California's system, it is likely that a sentencing jury's consideration of a subsequently invalidated aggravating circumstance will be harmless, they dissented, noting that the Court's decision is "more likely to complicate than to clarify our capital sentencing jurisprudence."