Ohio Adult Parole Authority v. Woodard

Petitioners
Ohio Adult Parole Authority, et al.
Respondent
Eugene Woodard
Petitioners' Claim
That Ohio clemency procedures violated a death-row inmate's Fourteenth Amendment right to due process and his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
Chief Lawyer for Petitioners
Jeffrey S. Sutton
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
David H. Bodiker
Justices for the Court
Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor,William H. Rehnquist (writing for the Court), Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas
Justices Dissenting
John Paul Stevens
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
25 March 1998
Decision
Reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Held that neither the Fifth Amendment nor the Due Process Clause were violated by thestate of Ohio's clemency procedures.
Significance
With this ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the states more freedom in deciding when and how they grant pardons to convicted death row inmates. In reaching the conclusion that an inmate's Fourteenth and Fifth Amendment rights werenot violated by Ohio's clemency procedures, the Court sharply restricted therole of the judiciary in clemency issues. The justices were divided over exactly how much constitutional protection states must include in their clemencypractices, but upheld Ohio's existing procedures.
Background
Ever since the establishment of the British colonies North America, the concept of clemency has been an integral part of the American justice system. Clemency can mean the granting of a pardon, or commutation, meaning the changingof a death sentence to life imprisonment. It has long been put to use as a fail-safe way to protect the innocent from wrongful execution. At the end of the twentieth century, the American states that allowed the death penalty alsoauthorized their governors to grant clemency to death row inmates.
The state of Ohio reinstituted its death penalty in 1981. The Ohio State Constitution gives its governor the power to grant clemency after a "thorough investigation" of the inmate's case. Although the power to grant clemency is thegovernor's, the authority to regulate the application and investigation process belongs to the Ohio General Assembly. The Ohio Adult Parole Authority (APA) has had the responsibility for carrying out those investigations since 1965. It holds interviews and hearings, completes clemency reviews, and makes nonbinding recommendations to the governor.
A Protected Life Interest on Death Row
In 1990, Eugene Woodard was convicted in Ohio of aggravated murder and sentenced to die on 7 October 1994. In 1993 and 1994, his conviction and his deathsentence were affirmed by the Ohio Court of Appeals and the Ohio Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in 1994. The Ohio SupremeCourt, however, on 24 August 1994 stayed the execution date so that Woodard could seek post-conviction relief. APA regulations required that clemency hearings must be scheduled 45 days prior to the execution. Because the Ohio Supreme Court's stay was granted less than 45 days before execution, however, Woodard's clemency review and his post-conviction litigation were to continue concurrently. The APA notified Woodard two weeks after his stay was granted thathis clemency hearing had been scheduled in ten days, on 16 September 1994. The APA also informed Woodard that he could have a pre-hearing interview on 9September 1994. Woodard protested the short notice. Because he also had post-conviction litigation in process, he requested, contrary to APA regulations,that his lawyer be present at both the interview and hearing. His request wasdenied, and Woodard filed suit in the U.S. District Court disputing the constitutionality of the APA's clemency process. He claimed that the process breached both his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.
The case later went before the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. That court stated that Woodard had failed to establish " . . . out of the clemencyproceeding itself . . . a protected life or liberty interest." It did find, however, that the Fourteenth Amendment protected his "original" life and liberty interest when the clemency process was regarded as part of the "entire punitive scheme." The court held that at any particular stage of this scheme, the amount of process due was proportional to how integral that stage was to the entire judicial process. Because the clemency process, the court said, "wasfar removed from trial, the process due could be minimal." The court then remanded the decision on what the actual process should be to the district court. The court, in conclusion, agreed with Woodard's claim that the process violated his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. It held that the interviewprocedure presented him with a choice between asserting that right and takingpart in the clemency procedure. This choice, it said, might well give rise to an unconstitutional situation.
The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, or ordered the lower courtto forward the record of its proceedings for review, to consider the case's constitutional implications more closely. The Court had two issues before it,each dealing with how the Constitution limits state clemency procedures. Thefirst was whether or not an inmate has a constitutionally-protected life or liberty interest in those procedures. The second issue was whether the optiongiven inmates to voluntarily participate in a clemency interview violates that inmate's Fifth Amendment right to silence.
On the first question Chief Justice Rehnquist, delivering the Court's opinion, responded to Woodard's argument that inmates preserve an original, or pretrial, life interest which continues until the moment of execution and requiresdue process until then. Justice Rehnquist rested his response on the SupremeCourt's reasoning in the Connecticut Board of Pardons v. Dumschat (1981) case. In that case, the Court held that an inmate had

no constitutional or inherent right to commutation of his sentence . . . [because] the individual's interest in release or commutation [of his sentence had] already been extinguished by the conviction and sentence.

Justice Rehnquist asserted that the reasoning in Dumschat "did not depend on thefact that it was not a capital case" and so the same reasoning should be applied in Woodard's case. He conceded that an inmate, justly tried and convicted, retains an "interest in not being executed." However, he reasoned, the inmate cannot use that interest to challenge clemency procedures and thus possibly change the outcome of his or her clemency decision.
In analyzing the nature of the clemency mechanism, Justice Rehnquist drew a clear distinction between the adjudicatory and clemency processes. He called apetition for clemency in effect merely a

unilateral hope. [The inmate] . . . accepts the finality of death for purposes of adjudication, andappeals for clemency as a matter of [executive] grace.

Thus, hereasoned, clemency procedures were free from the kind of due process requirements which bind the judicial system. Because this executive discretion was not constrained by the type of protections sought by Woodard, he concluded, Ohio's clemency procedures did not violate his Fourteenth Amendment right to dueprocess.
Justice Rehnquist addressed the Fifth Amendment right to silence issue by noting that the amendment only protected against compelled self-incrimination. He compared the inmate's participation in the voluntary interview to a defendant who chooses to take the stand in his or her own defense, thus giving up his or her right against self-incrimination. He found it "difficult to see howa voluntary [clemency] interview could `compel' [Woodard] to speak." Thus, heheld, Ohio's clemency interview was not in violation of the Fifth Amendment.The court of appeals judgment was reversed on both questions.
Safeguarding Against Irresponsible Clemency
Justice O'Connor concurred in part with the judgment. She took some exception, however, with the idea that a death-row inmate's interest in life had beenextinguished. She felt that although clemency had always been an executive privilege, and not the business of the judiciary, some "minimal procedural safeguards apply to clemency proceedings." She reasoned that the courts may be correct in intervening, for example, when the clemency procedure involved "a state official [flipping] a coin." She believed that Ohio's clemency process violated Woodard's rights and was joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer in that finding.
In his lone dissent Justice Stevens, in agreement with Justice O'Connor, differed with the Chief Justice's reasoning and conclusions on the due process question. He agreed with Woodard that Dumschat was not the proper controlling precedent since that case was concerned with only a liberty interest, not a life interest. He further contended that a death-row inmate does retaina "continuing life interest" which should be protected by the Due Process Clause. He agreed with the majority that Woodard's Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination were not violated by the clemency interview process.
Impact
By limiting the involvement the judiciary can have in questions concerning the executive power to grant clemency, the Court gave more autonomy to the states. Charles Hobson of the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation stated,

This decision makes it clear that a state's clemency processis essentially unavailable for scrutiny by federal courts. Had the court adopted . . . [Woodard's] claims, every state would have had to choose between abandoning clemency altogether or having it dictated to them by federal judges.

Yet others, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, argue that without authoritative framing of

basic procedural standards by [the Supreme] Court, clemency can no longer be relied on to fulfill its historical role in state schemes of capital punishment.

Related Cases

• Greenholtz v. Nebraska Penal Inmates, 442 U.S. 1 (1979).
  
• Connecticut Board of Pardons v. Dumschat, 452 U.S. 458 (1981).
  
• Evitts v. Lucey, 469 U.S. 387 (1985).
  
• Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986).
  
• Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993).

Statistics on Clemency
Generally, clemency is an act of mercy or leniency. Clemency includes pardons, reprieves, and commutations of criminal sentences, and it is given to a criminal defendant by the president on the federal level, and, in most instances, by the governor on the state level.
There is no single source for data on the granting of clemency in the UnitedStates, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons and Amnesty International began gathering data on the issue in the late twentieth century. The general trend is to grant clemency in fewer cases.
Between 1972 and 1993, at least 70 prison inmates who were sentenced to deathhad their death sentences commuted to prison terms. Approximately 58 percentof the clemencies were granted because the government believed that it wouldlose on appeal, and clemency was less expensive than challenging the appealin court. All of the 38 states that allow the death penalty have given the governor and/or the parole board the power to grant clemency to death row inmates.
Sources
Radelet, Michael L., and Barbara A. Zsembik. "Executive Clemency in Post-Furman Capital Cases." University of Richmond Law Review, Vol. 27,winter 1993.