Contact: Michael Rushford
(916) 446-0345
A unanimous United States Supreme Court today vacated a lower court decision which had overturned the death sentence of a Pennsylvania murderer. The decision limits the authority of the lower federal courts to disregard state procedural rules.
“The Court’s decision in Beard v. Kindler is an important victory for the enforcement of the criminal law generally and capital punishment in particular,” said Kent Scheidegger, Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. The Foundation’s amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief was cited twice in the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts.
The issue before the court was whether state procedural rules, adopted to prevent manipulation of the legal process, can be brushed aside by federal judges on a subsequent review of the case. The state court had decided that Kindler forfeited many of his claims when he escaped from jail while his motion was pending. In 2008, the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Pennsylvania’s fugitive forfeiture rule could not be invoked to prevent its review of the murderer’s claims because the rule provides a state judge with the discretion to grant review.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation joined Pennsylvania and 25 other states to encourage a decision overturning the lower court’s ruling and clarifying the standard that state procedural rules must meet in order to be respected by federal courts.
The case involves the conviction and sentence of Joseph Kindler for the kidnap and brutal murder of David Bernstein. In the summer of 1982, Bernstein joined Kindler and Scott Shaw in the burglary of a store in Lower Moreland Township, Pennsylvania. Police stopped the getaway car as the trio tried to flee, but while Bernstein and Shaw were apprehended, Kindler managed to escape. During questioning, Bernstein identified Kindler as the mastermind of the burglary and agreed to testify against both Kindler and Shaw.
Following Kindler’s arrest and release on bail, Kindler, Shaw and Shaw’s girlfriend, Michelle Raifer, decided to kill Bernstein to prevent his testimony. In the early morning of July 25, Bernstein opened his apartment door to Raifer and Kindler attacked him with a baseball bat. After hitting him in the head with the bat approximately 20 times, Kindler directed Shaw to jab him with an electric prod. Then, Kindler and Shaw dragged the heavily bleeding Bernstein to Raifer’s car. They drove to the Delaware River and threw him in. Discovering that Bernstein was still alive, the two men held him underwater until he drowned. They finally weighted his body down by tying a cinder block to his neck. As they drove back to Kindler’s home, the trio discarded the weapons at various sewer outlets along the way.
Within hours of the killing, police tracked down Raifer’s blood-soaked car, which had been identified by several witnesses. When confronted with evidence implicating her, Raifer confessed, describing how the murder plan was carried out, and directed police to the sewer outlets where the weapons had been discarded.
A Philadelphia jury found Kindler guilty of first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances and set the penalty at death. Prior to formal sentencing by the judge, Kindler filed post-verdict claims attacking the instruction given to the sentencing jury. Before the claims could be reviewed, he escaped from jail and made his way to Canada. The trial judge dismissed Kindler’s post-verdict claims, concluding that by escaping he had waived the right to have them reviewed.
Seven months later, Kindler was arrested in Quebec, but while an extradition request was under review, he escaped again. He remained at large until his face appeared on a 1988 episode of “America’s Most Wanted,” which led to his capture in New Brunswick. Upon his return to Philadelphia, Kindler’s motion to reinstate his post-verdict claims was denied, and he was formally sentenced to death. On direct appeal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld Kindler’s conviction and sentence and refused to consider his post-verdict claims. The court concluded that when he escaped, Kindler forfeited his right to have the claims reviewed and that the trial judge retained the discretion to deny review.
In 2000, a federal district judge overturned the judgment, deciding that a jury instruction used at Kindler’s trial was contrary to a rule created by the Supreme Court five years after the trial. In 2008, the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling, concluding that the state’s fugitive forfeiture rule could not be invoked to deny review because the rule had not been enforced under the unique circumstances of this case, and because, in spite of the rule, the trial judge had the discretion to hear Kindler’s claim.
When the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear Pennsylvania’s appeal of that ruling, CJLF accepted the Philadelphia District Attorney’s invitation to join the case. The Attorneys General of California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin have also filed arguments in this case to protect procedural default rules.
In a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, the Foundation argued that if state discretionary rules are deemed automatically inadequate, states may be compelled to adopt rigid rules that will impact criminal defendants more severely, in order to avoid the cost of review on federal habeas corpus. In the court’s opinion, Chief Justice Roberts cites the Foundation’s brief as he states, “We are told that, if forced to choose, many States would opt for mandatory rules to avoid the high costs that come with plenary review. That would be unfortunate in many cases, as discretionary rules are often desirable.”
“Today’s decision will reduce unnecessary and often unjust review of death sentences given to clearly guilty murderers,” said Scheidegger. “The language of the opinion and Justice Kennedy’s concurrence also indicate further reductions are coming in the future.”