Bid for confrontation right at death sentencing
on Sep 12, 2007 at 8:17 pm
UPDATE 9:50 AM, Thursday: Petition now available for download.
Nearly six decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled that judges, in deciding whether to impose a death sentence, may rely upon out-of-court statements not challenged by cross-examination. The Court in the case of Williams v. New York drew a sharp line between constitutional limits on evidence when guilt was at issue, and the more open-ended use of information when deciding on a sentence. A new appeal to the Supreme Court seeks to test whether that line still holds. It asks for a ruling that the Sixth Amendment’s right to confront witnesses applies at sentencing — and, especially, in capital sentencing hearings.
The petition in Fields v. U.S. (07-6395, download here), filed Sept. 4 by the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas Law School, raises five issues, but the Confrontation Clause question is the central one. It asks whether the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington, limiting the use at trial of out-of-court testimony not subjected to cross-examination, has so altered constitutional understanding that it should be extended to sentencing. The dissenting judge in the Fields case, relying upon Crawford and recent developments in criminal sentencing, argued that, when a death sentence depends upon fact-finding, the facts should only be those “tested through confrontation.”
The Fifth Circuit Court, in this 2-1 decision on March 29, ruled that the Williams decision — although not directly controlling because it was based on the Due Process Clause, not the Confrontation Clause — used logic that is still valid, maintaining a constitutional distinction between trial evidence and sentencing information. “Williams’s distinction between guilt and sentencing proceedings and its emphasis on the sentencing authority’s access to a wide body of information in the interest of indvidualized punishment is relevant to our Confrontation Clause inquiry,'” it concluded. The 1949 decision has never been overruled, the majority said, and, in fact, the Supreme Court continues to cite it “for the proposition that there are no per se constitutional prohibitions on the introduction of hearsay at sentencing.”
The case involves Sherman Lamont Fields, who was convicted of murder and other federal criminal charges based on crimes he committed after escaping from federal custody. He was sentenced to death for the murder conviction, based on the shooting murder of his ex-girlfriend, Suncerey Coleman, in Waco, Texas, in November 2001.
At the penalty phase of his trial, the prosecution offered testimonial hearsay through live witnesses and documents to prove that Fields had previously been violent and would be dangerous in the future — “non-statutory” aggravating circumstances. None of that had been subjected to cross-examination. Defense lawyers objected to its introduction, but the trial judge allowed it.
Fields’ appeal to the Supreme Court contends that “there are many strong arguments for reconsidering and limiting” the reach of the 1949 Williams decision. At that time, the Court had not yet applied the Confrontation Clause to the states. In addition, the petition argues, the lower courts are increasingly divided on whether confrontation rights exist at capial sentencing. The most important factor, Fields’ lawyers contend, is that “it is impossible to assess the continuing precedential force of Williams,” at least for capital cases, in the face of the Supreme Court’s “continuing reevaluation of Sixth Amendment doctrine in recent years.”
The two main errors it alleges in the Fifth Circuit majority ruling were the view that the Confrontation Clause is still only a constitutional rule agaiinst hearsay, tied to the rules of evidence, and the conclusion that basically different procedures are allowed in the guilt phase from those in the sentencing phase.
The federal government’s response to the appeal is due Oct. 11..
