Scalia quotes Marquis

KANSAS, PETITIONER v. MICHAEL LEE MARSH, II

certiorari to the supreme court of kansas

No. 04-1170.?Argued December 7, 2005--Reargued April 25, 2006--Decided June 26, 2006

Finding three aggravating circumstances that were not outweighed by mitigating circumstances, a Kansas jury convicted respondent Marsh of, inter alia, capital murder and sentenced him to death. Marsh claimed on direct appeal that Kan. Stat. Ann. §21-4624(e) establishes an unconstitutional presumption in favor of death by directing imposition of the death penalty when aggravating and mitigating circumstances are in equipoise. Agreeing, the Kansas Supreme Court concluded that §21-4624(e)'s weighing equation violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and remanded for a new trial.

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Thomas, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito, JJ., joined. Scalia, J., filed a concurring opinion. Stevens, J., filed a dissenting opinion. Souter, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined.

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Justice Thomas delivered the opinion of the Court.

Kansas law provides that if a unanimous jury finds that aggravating circumstances are not outweighed by mitigating circumstances, the death penalty shall be imposed. Kan. Stat. Ann. §21-4624(e) (1995). We must decide whether this statute, which requires the imposition of the death penalty when the sentencing jury determines that aggravating evidence and mitigating evidence are in equipoise, violates the Constitution. We hold that it does not.

I

Respondent Michael Lee Marsh II broke into the home of Marry Ane Pusch and lay in wait for her to return. When Marry Ane entered her home with her 19-month-old daughter, M. P., Marsh repeatedly shot Marry Ane, stabbed her, and slashed her throat. The home was set on fire with the toddler inside, and M. P. burned to death.

The jury convicted Marsh of the capital murder of M. P., the first-degree premeditated murder of Marry Ane, aggravated arson, and aggravated burglary. The jury found beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of three aggravating circumstances, and that those circumstances were not outweighed by any mitigating circumstances. On the basis of those findings, the jury sentenced Marsh to death for the capital murder of M. P. The jury also sentenced Marsh to life imprisonment without possibility of parole for 40 years for the first-degree murder of Marry Ane, and consecutive sentences of 51 months' imprisonment for aggravated arson and 34 months' imprisonment for aggravated burglary.

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Justice Scalia, concurring.

I join the opinion of the Court. I write separately to clarify briefly the import of my joinder, and to respond at somewhat greater length first to Justice Stevens' contention that this case, and cases like it, do not merit our attention, and second to Justice Souter's claims about risks inherent in capital punishment.

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Finally, I must say a few words (indeed, more than a few) in response to Part III of Justice Souter's dissent. This contains the disclaimer that the dissenters are not (yet) ready to "generaliz[e] about the soundness of capital sentencing across the country," post, at 9; but that is in fact precisely what they do. The dissent essentially argues that capital punishment is such an undesirable institution--it results in the condemnation of such a large number of innocents--that any legal rule which eliminates its pronouncement, including the one favored by the dissenters in the present case, should be embraced. See ibid.

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Of course, even with its distorted concept of what constitutes "exoneration," the claims of the Gross article are fairly modest: Between 1989 and 2003, the authors identify 340 "exonerations" nationwide--not just for capital cases, mind you, nor even just for murder convictions, but for various felonies. Gross 529. Joshua Marquis, a district attorney in Oregon, recently responded to this article as follows:

"[L]et's give the professor the benefit of the doubt: let's assume that he understated the number of innocents by roughly a factor of 10, that instead of 340 there were 4,000 people in prison who weren't involved in the crime in any way. During that same 15 years, there were more than 15 million felony convictions across the country. That would make the error rate .027 percent--or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent." The Innocent and the Shammed, N. Y. Times, Jan. 26, 2006, p. A23.

The dissent's suggestion that capital defendants are especially liable to suffer from the lack of 100% perfection in our criminal justice system is implausible. Capital cases are given especially close scrutiny at every level, which is why in most cases many years elapse before the sentence is executed. And of course capital cases receive special attention in the application of executive clemency. Indeed, one of the arguments made by abolitionists is that the process of finally completing all the appeals and reexaminations of capital sentences is so lengthy, and thus so expensive for the State, that the game is not worth the candle. The proof of the pudding, of course, is that as far as anyone can determine (and many are looking), none of cases included in the .027% error rate for American verdicts involved a capital defendant erroneously executed.

Since 1976 there have been approximately a half million murders in the United States. In that time, 7,000 murderers have been sentenced to death; about 950 of them have been executed; and about 3,700 inmates are currently on death row. See Marquis, The Myth of Innocence, 95 J. Crim. L. & C. 501, 518 (2006). As a consequence of the sensitivity of the criminal justice system to the due-process rights of defendants sentenced to death, almost two-thirds of all death sentences are overturned. See ibid. "Virtually none" of these reversals, however, are attributable to a defendant's " 'actual innocence.' " Ibid. Most are based on legal errors that have little or nothing to do with guilt. See id., at 519-520. The studies cited by the dissent demonstrate nothing more.

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly. That is a truism, not a revelation. But with regard to the punishment of death in the current American system, that possibility has been reduced to an insignificant minimum. This explains why those ideologically driven to ferret out and proclaim a mistaken modern execution have not a single verifiable case to point to, whereas it is easy as pie to identify plainly guilty murderers who have been set free. The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment--in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes--outweighs the risk of error. It is no proper part of the business of this Court, or of its Justices, to second-guess that judgment, much less to impugn it before the world, and less still to frustrate it by imposing judicially invented obstacles to its execution.

read the full FindLaw article here.