Brown v. Sanders
Sanders was sentenced to death and filed a federal habeas petition claiming that his sentencing violated the Eighth Amendment because he did not receive an individualized death sentence. California’s death penalty statute requires jurors to determine the existence of eleven special circumstances before sentencing a defendant to death. In Sanders’s case, the jury found that four of the special circumstances existed and sentenced Sanders to death. On appeal, the California Supreme Court invalidated two of the four special circumstances but upheld the conviction and sentence.
Sanders then filed his federal habeas petition, which the district court denied. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court and remanded the case with instructions to grant the petition if the state did not either provide a new sentencing trial trial or replace the death sentence with another punishment. The Ninth Circuit found that California’s death penalty statute is a “weighing” statute, which requires juries to determine the appropriateness of the death penalty by weighing aggravating factors against mitigating factors (non-weighing states allow a jury to impose a death penalty based on the existence of any one factor). Because California is a weighing state, the California Supreme Court had three options after it invalidated two of the factors: remand for resentencing; reweigh the factors; or conclude that the jury’s consideration of the invalidated factors was “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Ninth Circuit held that if the California Supreme Court had intended to follow the last option, it failed to do so by not stating that it found “harmless error.”
Question 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?
