ROBERTS COURT HEARS FIRST DEATH PENALTY CASE
Oral argument for Brown v. Sanders set for Tuesday, October 11
The United States Supreme Court will hear its first death penalty case
of the new term on Tuesday. In the case of Brown v. Sanders,
the Court will review a 2004 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which
overturned the death sentence of California murderer Ronald Sanders.
This ruling was based on the fact that two of the four “special
circumstances” making Sanders eligible for the death penalty were
later held invalid.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has filed a
friend of the court brief in the case encouraging a decision to overturn
the Ninth Circuit and reinstate Sanders’ sentence.
“The law is clear that once a murderer has properly been found
eligible for the death penalty, the jury can consider all the circumstances
of the crime in making the final decision,” said Kent Scheidegger,
the Foundation’s Legal Director and author of the Sanders
brief. “The evidence supporting the two special circumstances in
question here was properly introduced and considered,” he added.
The case involves Sanders’ 1982 conviction and death sentence
for the murder of a Bakersfield woman and the attempted murder of her
boyfriend during a robbery. California law requires the jury to find
at least one designated special circumstance related to the murder in
order to qualify the murderer for a death sentence. In Sanders’
case, the jury found four: murder during a robbery, murder during a
burglary, murder of a witness to prevent her testimony, and murder that
was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel.
Sanders and an accomplice were found guilty of beating Janice Allen
to death and attempting to kill her boyfriend Dale Boender in 1981.
Sanders had attempted to rob the couple several weeks earlier but failed.
Fearing that the couple would identify him to police, Sanders and the
accomplice forced themselves into the victims’ apartment, bound
them with electrical cord, and beat their skulls in with a heavy blunt
object. The murderers then ransacked the apartment. Allen died of brain
trauma resulting from a severe skull fracture. Boender also suffered
a fractured skull, but survived.
At the trial, Boender and Brenda Maxwell, a friend of Sanders’
who helped plan the robbery, identified Sanders as a participant in
the crimes. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, but the case was
later retried and a jury convicted Sanders and sentenced him to death
in January 1982.
In 1990 on direct appeal, the California Supreme Court declared the
burglary and the especially heinous special circumstances invalid, but
upheld Sanders’ death sentence because there remained two valid
special circumstances to support it. The Court determined that because
the sentencing jury is allowed to consider all aggravating factors related
to the crime, the burglary evidence and cruelty of the murder were properly
introduced by the prosecution and did not prejudice Sanders’ case.
After 11 years of review of his error claims in the state courts, Sanders’
habeas corpus petition was denied by the federal District Court in 2001.
Last year, a panel of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed
the lower court. The Court of Appeals disagreed with the way the California
Supreme Court applied U. S. Supreme Court precedents in its decision
to uphold the sentence. The precedents in question prescribed how to
determine when aggravating circumstances, later ruled invalid, affected
the jury’s sentencing decision.
In its amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, the Foundation
argues that, because the law allows all evidence regarding the circumstances
of a murder to be introduced at the sentencing hearing, the California
Supreme Court was correct in its analysis regarding the burglary evidence
and the especially cruel nature of the murder of Janice Allen. These
facts were properly before the jury, which found two valid special circumstances
qualifying Sanders for the death penalty. The invalid circumstances
did not place anything before the jury that was not there under other
valid sentencing factors. “This case provides the Supreme Court
with an opportunity to clarify an unsettled question important to the
enforcement of the death penalty,” said Scheidegger.
CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger is available
for comment at (916) 446-0345.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation helped win
seven U. S. Supreme Court decisions benefitting law enforcement and
public safety over the Court’s 2004/05 term.
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