Booth v. Maryland

Under the Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court held that states cannot allow juries to consider a "victim impact statement" (VIS) during the sentencing phase of a trial where a guilty conviction may impose the death penalty on the defendant.

In May of 1984, John Booth and Willie Reid entered the home of Irvin and Rose Bronstein for the purpose of stealing money to buy heroin. Booth, who lived only three houses away in the same neighborhood, was aware that the Bronsteins could identify him, so he and Reid stabbed the elderly couple to death. He was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of robbery, and conspiracy to commit robbery. After the trial, Booth opted to let the jury determine his sentence instead of the judge.

Before the sentencing phase began, the State Division of Parole and Probation presented a report that was required by state statute. Information required in the report included a victim impact statement (VIS) that described the affect of the crime on the victims and the victims' family. The VIS was either read to the jury, or the family members offered their views orally by appearing in court. In this case, the VIS was based on a statement by the victims' son, daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter. The Bronstein family told about the warmness of Irvin and Rose and about all the problems that members of the family suffered due to their loss. In their VIS, the family also offered opinions and characterizations of the crimes and their opinions about the persons who committed the crime. In one part of the VIS, the Bronsteins' daughter said "I don't feel that the people who did this could ever be rehabilitated and I don't want them to be able to do this again."

The state trial court denied the petitioner's request to suppress the VIS, rejecting the argument that information in the VIS was "irrelevant, unduly inflammatory, and therefore its use in a capital case violated the Eighth Amendment." After considering the state's presentencing report, including the victim impact statement, the jury gave Booth the death penalty.

On appeal, the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's decision, finding that the VIS "serves an important interest by informing the sentence of the full measure of harm caused by the crime." The petitioner again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where the lower court's sentencing (but not the conviction) was vacated and remanded back for further proceedings.

In presenting arguments before the Supreme Court, the chief attorney for the petitioner argued that when making a decision about the death penalty, juries should only consider two criteria: the defendant's background and the circumstances of the crime. He pointed out that neither criterion was part of the VIS presented during his client's sentencing phase. Counsel also pointed out that, typically, persons who gave statements in a VIS were not witness to the crime, so their testimony should not be considered admissible as "aggravating circumstances." Moreover, the petitioner's attorney maintained that information collected and presented in a VIS was individual and therefore not of consistent value in all cases. Each family has a different ability to show grief, thus, VIS presentations varied greatly. In fact, he maintained that some victims were without families and, therefore, a "family-less" VIS would likely impact a jury's deliberations differently than a VIS containing the personal statements of a victim's family. Finally, counsel posited that a VIS that contained emotionally-charged opinions by family members would be inconsistent with reasoned decision making required in capital cases.

Conversely, the attorney for the respondent claimed that a VIS was important precisely because it referred to the emotional state of a victims' family. Counsel conceded that any grief or emotional trauma a family expressed in a VIS was not considered an aggravating factor under Maryland law. (Before the death penalty can be imposed, Maryland requires that a crime must meet at least one of ten possible aggravating circumstances such as was present in the robbery and murder of the Bronsteins.) But, he contended that the VIS was critical in the sentencing phase of a murder trial because there was a direct connection between a murder and the harm that murder caused to a victim's family. Because a perpetrator of murder can assume that the victim leaves a family behind, the perpetrator must also know that the death of the victim must also affect the victim's family too. Thus, in order to have better insight into aggravating circumstances (as an outcome of a murder), a jury needed to read or hear a VIS before imposing the death penalty.

The majority decision of the Supreme Court found that introducing a VIS into jury deliberations during the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial posed a risk of overly prejudicing a jury and thus violated the Eighth Amendment. Writing for the majority, Justice Powell observed that in a capital case, the jury's sentencing task is based on consideration of a defendant as a unique individual. The focus of a VIS, however, was not on the defendant but on the victim's character and reputation and the effect of the crime on a victim's family. Justices agreed with Booth's attorney--the potential for admission of emotionally-charged opinions that might be presented in a VIS was irrelevant to sentencing deliberations because each family possesses a differing ability to show grief. Although the murder of the Bronsteins was a heinous crime, the Court held that, at the time of the crime, Booth was nonetheless unaware of potential consequences on the victims' family (or that the victims had a family) and such information would have been irrelevant in his decision to kill. Thus, such factors as contained in a VIS were inappropriate to consider during sentencing. The majority opinion further reasoned that the presentation of a VIS could cause a jury to divert from the relevant evidence of the crime. Ultimately, the Court held that admission of a VIS created a constitutionally unacceptable risk that the jury might impose the death penalty "in an arbitrary and capricious manner."

In writing the dissenting opinion, Justice Scalia reflected what would, in later years, become an increasing social bias in favor of victim's rights over those of the accused. Dissenting justices felt that if punishment could be enhanced in noncapital cases on the basis of the harm caused (such as information of the kind provided in a VIS), then there was no reason why the majority opinion should have found the same unconstitutional in capital cases. Moreover, justices felt that if the defendant was entitled to be considered as an individual, so too, the victim should have been considered an individual whose death represented a unique loss to family and society. Thus, the dissenting opinion concluded that the only proper basis for setting punishment was not merely the perpetrator's circumstances or frame of mind, but also the amount of harm inflicted on the victim.

In the intervening years since the Court's decision, state legislatures began to reconsider the balance of victims' and defendants' rights. In 1991, the state of New Jersey passed legislation that was considered an important step toward a more equal balance, giving a victim the ability to give an oral statement at the time of sentencing. In the same year, when Payne v. Tennessee was appealed to the Supreme Court, the decision of the lower court to admit testimony by the victims grandmother was affirmed; the decision specifically refuted the defendant's claim that, considering the ruling in Booth v. Maryland, his Eighth Amendment, rights were violated.

In 1996, a scant decade after the Court rendered their decision in this case, American sensibilities veered towards the rights of victim's and away from unconditionally protecting the rights of offenders. Responding to the perceived increase of violent crimes in U.S cities, an alarmed public demanded and received attention from legislative representatives in Congress. In hearings concerning the Victim's Bill of Rights Amendment, the impact of the Court's decision in Booth v. Maryland was examined for its negative impact on the conduct of trials for violent crimes. Speaking before the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate, Paul G. Cassell, an associate professor of law from the University of Utah, spoke about the manner in which the adjudication of Booth v. Maryland prompted a judge to exclude a victim's mother from capital proceedings lest her presence predispose the jury to the death penalty. Similar Supreme Court decisions concerning rights of perpetrators of violent crimes, resulted in the enactment of legislation that protected the victims of crime and enhanced punishment for offenders. And while Booth v. Maryland did not single-handedly change the way legislatures sought to redraft violent crime legislation, it was nonetheless an important, contributing factor in legislative deliberations.