Pulley v. Harris

The Harris decision described a minimum procedural threshold for statutory death penalty schemes.

The 14- year-long case against Robert Alton Harris began in 1978, when Harris asked his brother, Daniel, to help him rob a bank. In July, the two brothers began to buy materials for the robbery, including pistols, rifles, ammunition, and face masks. After practicing shooting while running and rolling in a rural area near Mira Mesa, California, Harris and his brother staked out the San Diego Trust and Savings Bank on Mira Mesa Boulevard on 4 July 1978. The next morning they decided to steal a car to use for a getaway in the robbery. Spotting 15-year-old John Mayeski and 16-year-old Michael Baker in a car eating hamburgers near the bank, Harris approached the car, hopped into the back seat, pulled out his pistol, and ordered the boys to drive to a rural area.

Although Harris had assured his brother that no one was "going to get hurt," Harris eventually shot Mayeski in the back, fired four shots at the shrieking Baker, and then returned to Mayeski for a pistol shot to the head and, finally, a blast from the shotgun. After killing the boys, Harris ate the boys' hamburgers and then chided his brother Daniel for being too weak to join him. Harris laughed about the murders and, when Daniel remarked that the pistol was covered with fragments of flesh, Harris chuckled, saying as he flicked pieces of Mayeski's brain onto the street that he had "really blown [Mayeski's] brains out." Later that day, Harris and his brother robbed the bank of Mira Mesa Boulevard, but they were quickly apprehended when a witness to the robbery followed them from the bank to Harris' house and then called the police.

Daniel confessed to the police less than three hours after the arrests. Robert Harris confessed shortly thereafter on four different occasions to three different law enforcement officials and one psychiatrist. Both men were charged in a California state court with the murders, but prosecutors offered Daniel a lesser charge of kidnapping in exchange for a plea of guilty to that charge and his testimony against his brother. At his trial for first-degree murder, Robert Harris testified that his confessions were lies, and that he had lied to save his brother, who was the real killer. Harris had done the same thing in 1975, when he was accused and convicted of killing a neighbor; after confessing, Harris attempted to pin the blame on another of his brothers Ken. Harris was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 1975 case. For the 1978 slayings of Mayeski and Baker, Harris was convicted of first-degree murder. Harris admitted to the murders at the penalty phase of his trial and explained to the jury that he had suffered a difficult childhood, but the jury sentenced him to death.

The Supreme Court of California affirmed the conviction and the sentence, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari. Harris filed a habeas corpus petition against his prison's warden in state court, but the petition was denied, and the U.S. Supreme Court again denied certiorari. Harris then filed a petition for habeas corpus in federal district court; the district court denied the writ and refused to stay Harris' execution, but the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the decision. The appeals court held that, under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, Harris was entitled to a judicial determination of whether Harris' sentence was proportionate to sentences imposed for similar crimes. The appeals court ordered the district court to issue a writ revoking the sentence unless the Supreme Court of California conducted a proportionality review with 120 days. The state of California appealed this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court through Harris' prison warden, and the High Court, by a vote of 7-2, reversed the decision.

Writing for the majority, Justice White defined proportionality in the context of sentencing as "an abstract evaluation of the appropriateness of a sentence for a particular crime." The Court acknowledged that the lack of proportion in a particular sentence could violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The High Court had held, in the past, that the severity of a sentence could be inherently disproportionate to the seriousness of the crime. However, the Court had never engaged in the kind of proportional analysis offered by Harris and accepted by the appeals court. Specifically, Harris was claiming that he was entitled to a judicial review to determine that the death sentence was proportionate compared to the sentences meted out in cases with similar facts.

Harris argued, in part, that the Court's ruling in Furman v. Georgia (1972) supported a constitutional right to the so-called "comparative review." In Furman, the Court held that the death penalty was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment, effectively outlawing the death penalty. The Court ruled the same way in two companion cases, Proffitt v. Florida (1976) and Jurek v. Texas (1976). The Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) that certain states had cured the infirmities in their death penalty sentencing schemes, effectively reinstating the death penalty. Still, the Gregg Court had not departed from the reasoning employed by the Court in Furman, so the Furman case remained good law, and the Court was forced to meet Harris' argument.

The Furman Court, without a clear majority, essentially had held that the death penalty, at the time, "was being imposed so discriminatorily, so wantonly and freakishly, and so infrequently, that any given death sentence was cruel and unusual." After the Furman decision, states changed their capital sentencing statutes to limit the jury's discretion to impose the penalty and to "avoid arbitrary and inconsistent results." States gave to capital defendants the right of automatic appeal of a death sentence to a court with statewide jurisdiction, and they also created a second proceeding, called the sentencing phase, that took place after a guilty verdict in a capital case. The sentencing proceeding allowed the introduction of evidence and testimony and was designed to ensure that the sentencing authority (the judge or jury) had sufficient information and guidance to make a fair decision on the sentence.

Most states did require the reviewing court to determine whether the sentence was proportionate to that imposed in similar crimes, but some states did not require such a comparative proportionality review. According to Justice White and the majority, the Court in Gregg, Proffitt, and Jurek did not think that such a proportionality review was necessary. Just because some states required a sentence proportionality review in death penalty cases, that did not "mean that such review [was] indispensable." The most important factors that had resolved the constitutional infirmities in the statutory death penalty schemes were the provisions for stricter guidance of the sentencing authority and the availability of appellate review. Comparative proportionality review was not, declared the Court, a factor in the 1976 cases. In 1983, the Court in Zant v. Stephens had upheld a death sentence based in part on the fact that the defendant had a right to comparative proportionality review. However, the right to comparative proportionality review was merely "an additional safeguard against arbitrarily imposed death sentences" and was not "constitutionally required."

The majority analyzed California's capital sentencing scheme and found it constitutionally sound. Although California did not provide for comparative proportionality review, it did provide "checks on arbitrariness" by requiring the sentencing authority to conduct a detailed process in deciding whether to impose the death penalty. The Court concluded that it could not "say that the California procedures provided Harris inadequate protection against the evil identified in Furman." By reversing the appeals court's decision, the Supreme Court placed Harris back on death row.

Justice Stevens concurred in the judgment, but he agreed with only part of the majority's reasoning. To Stevens, the Court's own precedent indicated that "meaningful" appellate review was required in death penalty cases. Stevens was not convinced, though, that comparative proportionality was "the only method by which an appellate court can avoid the danger that the imposition of the death sentence in a particular case, or a particular class of cases, will be so extraordinary as to violate the Eighth Amendment."

Justice Brennan authored a long, passionate dissent in which Justice Marshall joined. In the estimation of Brennan and Marshall, the minimal procedures that the majority required in capital sentencing were not enough to prevent the arbitrary and capricious imposition of the death penalty. Brennan was concerned mainly about the possibility of racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty. Additional concerns for Brennan included the discriminatory imposition of the death penalty based on gender, socioeconomic status, and location within a state.

Brennan observed that most states required comparative proportionality review in capital case sentencing. This fact convinced Brennan that comparative review "serve[d] to eliminate some, if only a small part, of the irrationality that infect[ed] the . . . imposition of the death sentences throughout the various States." Thus, reasoned Brennan, such review should be required in capital case sentencing. Brennan discussed the teachings of various legal commentators on the topic of the death penalty and cited cases in which men were put to death on questionable grounds. Reviewing the proportionality of a death sentence by comparing it to the sentence imposed in cases with similar facts was "clearly no panacea," but "such review often serve[d] to identify the most extreme examples of disproportionality among similarly situated defendants." To the dissent, there was no reason not to require comparative proportionality review, especially when death sentences were being vacated in states that required it. Even if Brennan and Marshall did not believe that "the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment," they "could not join in such unstudied decision making."

Harris continued to file habeas corpus petitions in an attempt to avert his sentence. His sentence was stayed four times. In April of 1992, the appeals court stayed his execution and ordered the district court to conduct a hearing to determine whether the use of cyanide gas to kill Harris might constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that decision too, and Robert Harris died in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison in California on 21 April 1992.