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Supreme Court announces decision in Fry v. Pliler
In a decision announced today, the United States Supreme Court has rejected a California murderer’s claim that the wrong standard was used for determining that an error in his trial was harmless. The decision was unanimous on the main legal question before the Court but divided on the disposition of the individual case. The defendant, John Fry, argued that his 1993 conviction was invalid because the trial judge refused to allow the testimony of a defense witness. The issue before the Court was whether the standard utilized to review the defendant’s claim of trial error is too high in some cases.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation had submitted argument in the case encouraging a decision to uphold the current standard for judging when an error is harmless.
The case of Fry v. Pliler involved the murder of James and Cynthia Bell in Vacaville, California. The victims’ bodies were found in their car, parked alongside a highway, at 6:00 a.m. on October 27, 1992. Medical experts estimated that both victims had been dead for at least four to six hours, and both victims died of gunshot wounds from a .357 magnum pistol.
John Fry, a drug dealer who frequently sold methamphetamine to Cynthia Bell, told friends prior to the murders that Bell owed him money and that he planned to kill her.
At trial, several witnesses testified about Fry’s intention to kill Bell. Several other witnesses testified to seeing Fry after the murders with blood on his clothes, bragging about how much damage his .357 magnum did to the victims. Other witnesses reported seeing a truck matching the description of Fry’s truck at the murder scene along with the victims’ car around the time they were killed. Forensic experts reported that bullets recovered from the victims’ bodies and the crime scene were fired from a pistol registered to Fry, which other witnesses identified as a gun Fry was carrying on the day of the murders.
Fry’s defense consisted of testimony from friends who claimed he was with them at the time of the killings and his own testimony that he was just joking when he talked about killing Bell. He identified several other people as being responsible for the murders. During the trial, the judge refused to allow the testimony of one defense witness who claimed that her cousin, Anthony Hurtz, admitted to killing “a man and a woman in a car.”
Following his conviction and life sentence, Fry challenged the judge’s exclusion of the witness on appeal. The California Court of Appeal denied the claim, and the California Supreme Court denied further review. On habeas corpus, a federal district judge ruled that while the exclusion of the witness was error, it was harmless under the standard announced by the United States Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in Brecht v. Abrahamson (won by CJLF). In a later ruling, the federal Court of Appeals affirmed that holding.
In his appeal before the Supreme Court, Fry argued that the Brecht standard should not apply to his case and asked for a return to the earlier standard announced in Chapman v. California which allowed defendants to attack their convictions for errors that were highly unlikely to have made any difference.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the case to oppose Fry’s claim, arguing that the lower courts applied the correct Supreme Court standard for determining if a trial error prejudiced the defendant’s case or was harmless.
The high court agreed. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia stated, “We hold that . . . a court must assess the prejudicial impact of constitutional error in a state-court criminal trial under the ‘substantial and injurious effect’ standard set fourth in Brecht . . . . ”
“While the Court ruled 5 to 4 to uphold this defendant’s murder conviction, they were unanimous on the key holding that the Brecht standard sets the proper balance between the need for finality against the need to correct real injustices,” said CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger.
All nine Justices agreed that the Brecht standard was the correct one to use. Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Souter and Ginsburg, voted to reverse the Ninth Circuit’s application of that standard to this case. Justice Breyer voted to vacate the Ninth Circuit decision and send the case back to that court to reconsider both its harmless error holding and its holding that there was a federal constitutional error in the first place, which he considered inconsistent under the standards applicable to Fry’s claim.