Justices Uphold Victims’ Rights, ‘Cruel’ Penalties

The Supreme Court ended its term Thursday by upholding a sentence of life in prison for first-time drug possession and declaring that victims’ rights, not just defendants’ rights, may be weighed in death penalty cases.

The pair of rulings culminate a term in which the solidly conservative court not only gave police and prosecutors more power but overruled decisions that had protected the rights of defendants.

And the rulings were issued on the same day that liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his resignation. He dissented from both decisions.

The two decisions showed the new boldness of the conservative majority. Although the justices have issued conservative rulings in crime cases over the last decade, they have rarely overruled a clear legal precedent.

But, in Thursday’s death penalty case, the court, on a 6-3 vote, flatly overruled decisions from 1987 and 1989 that said juries weighing imposition of the death penalty must be told only about the murderer and his crime, not about the crime’s impact on survivors of a victim.

Those rulings turned “the (murder) victim into a faceless stranger,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in announcing that they had been overruled. Allowing a convicted killer to have family and friends testify on his behalf to a sentencing jury while silencing the victim’s family “unfairly weighted the scales” of justice, Rehnquist said.

He rejected the argument that juries would think killers whose victims were prominent citizens were more deserving of the death penalty than killers whose victims were less well known.

The decision to allow testimony by victims’ family members is the first time that the high court has put its stamp of approval on the growing “victims’ rights” movement.

In the drug possession case, the court showed that it will not thwart the most severe punishments imposed by the states. The court’s 5-4 decision upheld a Michigan law, the nation’s stiffest, requiring a life term without possibility of parole for anyone convicted of possessing more than 1 1/2 pounds of cocaine.

The five-member majority in the case largely abandoned the principle that the punishment must fit the crime. Although an ancient notion, it is not contained in the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” and, so, need not be considered by the court, they said.

Justice Antonin Scalia added that the tough sentence for drug possession was not “cruel and unusual punishment.” He wrote, “Severe, mandatory penalties may be cruel, but they are not unusual in the constitutional sense, having been employed in various forms throughout our nation’s history.”

In one of his dissents, Marshall sounded a warning about the court’s direction.

“The majority today sends a clear signal that scores of established constitutional liberties are now ripe for reconsideration,” Marshall said. He predicted “an even broader and more far-reaching assault upon this court’s precedents.”

Thursday’s decision allowing victims’ survivors to testify during the sentencing stage of capital punishment cases has the potential to increase the number of murderers who are given death sentences.

In most of the 37 states with capital punishment laws, a separate jury decides whether a convicted killer should get life in prison or death. The defendant is permitted to have family members testify on his behalf and introduce mitigating facts, such as evidence that he had a harsh childhood.

Victims’ rights advocates have contended it is unfair that, although a friend may put in a good word for the murderer, family members of the victim are not permitted to testify about the crime’s impact on them.

The victims’ rights movement’s efforts to change this situation suffered a blow in 1987, when the court struck down a Maryland law permitting members of a victim’s family to submit a statement describing the impact on them.

On a 5-4 vote in that case, the court said the defendant has a right to have a hearing focused solely on “the character of the individual (killer) and the circumstances of his crime.” Other information is “irrelevant,” said Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. Dissents were filed by Justices Byron R. White, Sandra Day O’Connor, Rehnquist and Scalia.

Less than two weeks later, on June 26, 1987, Powell resigned from the court.

On the next day, 20-year-old Pervis Payne pushed his way into the Memphis apartment of a 28-year-old woman and stabbed her 41 times with a butcher knife. He stabbed her 2-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son also. The girl died; the boy, Nicholas, lived.

Payne was covered with blood when arrested. He was quickly tried and convicted. During his sentencing hearing, the prosecutor called the young boy’s grandmother to the witness stand.

“He cries for his mom,” she told jurors. Also, the prosecutor told jurors that, when he grows up, Nicholas “is going to want to know what type of justice was done” to his mother’s killer.

The jury sentenced Payne to death. Although the state Supreme Court upheld his sentence, the justices announced that they would hear the case (Payne vs. Tennessee, 90-5721) to reconsider the 1987 ruling and a follow-up 1989 case.

Joining to overturn those rulings Thursday were the four dissenters from 1987 and the two justices appointed since then, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter.

“Power, not reason, is the new currency of this court’s decision-making,” said Marshall in one dissent. In a harshly worded second dissent that he read from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens accused the majority of bowing to the “strong political appeal” of the victims’ rights movement.

The decision in the drug case (Harmelin vs. Michigan, 89-7272) upheld the life prison term given to Ronald Harmelin, 45, who was arrested in a Detroit suburb with just over 1.5 pounds of cocaine in his car. The street value of the drug was estimated to be nearly $100,000.

Although it was his first conviction, Michigan law mandated a life sentence for his crime. The state has no death penalty law.

He appealed to the high court on the grounds that such a severe sentence violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, said the Eighth Amendment does not require that a sentence fit the crime. In a concurring opinion, Kennedy, O’Connor and Souter agreed, for the most part, but left open the possibility that “extreme sentences that are ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the crime” could be considered unconstitutional.