Brown v. Payton - Opinion Announcement

Argument of Chief Justice

Mr. Justice: The opinion of the Court in No. 03-1039, Brown against Payton will be announced by Justice Kennedy.

Argument of Justice Kennedy

Mr. Kennedy: As the Chief Justice indicated, this is Brown versus Payton.

And in 1980, the respondent, William Payton, was convicted of the rape and murder of Pamela Montgomery and of the attempted murders of a Patricia Pensinger and her 10-year-old son.

Payton presented no evidence in the guilt phase of the trial and he was convicted on all counts.

During the penalty phase, his only evidence in mitigation was that in the one year and nine months he had spent in prison since his arrest, he had made a sincere commitment to God, participated in prison Bible study classes in the prison ministry, and had a calming effect on other prisoners.

To guide the jury in determining whether to impose a sentence of death or life imprisonment after the jury heard the aggravating and mitigating testimony, the trial judge gave jury instructions that follow verbatim the text of a California statute.

One of these was what was then known in California as the Factor (k) instruction.

It was the last in a list of special instructions, and it was a catchall instruction.

It directed jurors to consider any circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime.

During closing argument, the prosecutor offered jurors his erroneous opinion that Factor (k) did not allow them to consider anything that happened after the crime.

The defense counsel objected.

The court admonished the jury that the prosecutor’s statements were only argument and not evidence.

The Trial Court did not, however, explicitly instruct the jury that the prosecutor’s interpretation was incorrect.

The jury recommended that Payton be sentenced to death and this was the sentence imposed.

Payton appealed to the California Supreme Court.

He argued that the text of Factor (k) was ambiguous made more so in light of the prosecutor’s argument.

The California Supreme Court rejected that claim and it relied on our decision in Boyde versus California.

The Boyde case had considered the constitutionality of the identical Factor (k) instruction and upheld it.

The California Supreme Court also held that in the context of the whole proceding, there was no reasonable likelihood that a jury believed it could not consider the mitigating evidence.

In an en banc decision, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that the California Supreme Court’s decision was an objectively unreasonable application of our precedents, and in its view, two things made Payton’s case unlike the Boyde case that the California Supreme Court had relied on.

First, Boyde concerned pre-crime not post-crime mitigation evidence.

Second, unlike in Boyde, the prosecutor in Payton’s case misstated the proper scope of Factor (k) and therefore, they granted Payton habeas relief.

In this case, we must determine whether the Ninth Circuit’s decision exceeded the limits of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, referred to as AEDPA.

AEDPA provides that in a case like this, a Federal Court may not grant habeas relief unless the State Court’s adjudication of the claim resulted in a decision that was contrary to or involved in an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law.

We hold today that these conditions for the grant of federal habeas corpus relief have not been met in Payton’s case.

We do not think that in light of Boyde, the California Supreme Court acted unreasonably in declining to distinguish between pre-crime and post-crime mitigating evidence.

Further, the California Supreme Court could reasonably conclude that the prosecutor’s argument did not mislead the jury about Payton’s mitigation evidence.

The prosecutor’s argument came after the defense presented eight witnesses spending some two days of testimony.

There was not a single objection to the prosecutor as to relevance.

And for the jury to believe that it could not consider Payton’s mitigating evidence, it would have had to believe that the penalty phase served no purpose at all.

Furthermore, the Trial Court instructed the jury to consider all evidence received during any part of the trial.

In this context, the State Court could conclude, as it did, that there was no reasonable likelihood that the jury believed Payton’s mitigation evidence was beyond its reach because the State Court’s conclusion was a reasonable application of Boyde to similar but not identical facts.

AEDPA shields it from a Federal Court review.

The Ninth Circuit was in error to conclude otherwise.

Its judgment is reversed.

Justice Scalia has filed a concurring opinion in which Justice Thomas joins; Justice Breyer has filed a concurring opinion; Justice Souter has filed a dissenting opinion in which Justices Stevens and Ginsburg join.

The Chief Justice took no part in the decision of this case.