Boyd v. North Carolina

Decision Date15 April 1985
Docket NumberNo. 84-5819,84-5819
PartiesArthur Martin BOYD, Jr. v. NORTH CAROLINA
CourtU.S. Supreme Court

On petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Justice MARSHALL, with whom Justice BRENNAN joins, dissenting.

Petitioner was sentenced to death after a hearing in which the judge prevented the jury from considering evidence that it might well have considered highly relevant to petitioner's motive at the time of his crime and to the relationship of his character and record to the offense he had committed. As a result, the jury was called on to decide whether death was the appropriate punishment but was deprived of the evidence petitioner offered in mitigation of his crime. The death sentence must thus be vacated, for it stands in glaring conflict with one of the most basic requirements of the Eighth Amendment—" 'that the sentencer . . . not be precluded from considering, as a mitigating factor, any aspect of a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death.' " Eddings v. Oklahoma, 455 U.S. 104, 110, 102 S.Ct. 869, 874, 71 L.Ed.2d 1 (1982) (quoting Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U.S. 586, 604, 98 S.Ct. 2954, 2964, 57 L.Ed.2d 973 (1978)).1

I

Petitioner Boyd was convicted of murdering his former girlfriend after unsuccessfully attempting a reconciliation. They had lived together for three years but had separated several months prior to the murder. On the day of the murder, Boyd met the victim at a local shopping mall. They sat and talked quietly for some time, sitting in the midst of a church-sponsored event run by the victim's father, a local pastor. Eventually, the victim's mother approached her daughter and said it was time to leave, but Boyd asked the daughter to stay and talk to him a little longer. After talking some more, the victim said she would leave. She was also reported to have said that if Boyd was going to kill her "he should hurry up and get it over with." Boyd took out a knife but also assured her that he would not hurt her. He then began to stab her rapidly and repeatedly until bystanders dragged the two apart. The victim died from the multiple stab wounds.

At his capital sentencing hearing, Boyd offered in mitigation expert testimony by a sociologist, Dr. Humphrey, who had interviewed Boyd and previously had done academic research into the behavioral dynamics of suicide and homicide. Most relevantly, Dr. Humphrey had coauthored a study of people who had murdered their relatives or intimates. The trial judge excluded the entirety of his testimony.

Dr. Humphrey would have testified, based on his study and his personal interview with Boyd, that Boyd's crime and life history conformed to a common pattern that distinguishes those who kill intimates from those who kill others. According to the sociologist, those in the former group are more likely to have had lives characterized by repeated deep personal losses (such as death of loved ones or abandonment by parents) and strong feelings of self-destruction:

" 'The more loss in someone's life, the more likely they are to become self-destructive. And it seems that killing a family member or killing a close friend is an act of self-destruction. They are after all, killing something that is a part of them, very close to them, very important to their self. They are destroying them. So in the act of killing another person they are in fact destroying part of their self, a self-destructive act.' " 311 N.C. 408, 439, 319 S.E.2d 189, 209 (1984) (Exum, J., dissenting) (quoting voir dire testimony of Dr. Humphrey).

In Dr. Humphrey's view, Boyd's life history conformed to the pattern he had found in his research; Boyd's life had involved repeated and intense personal losses that had generated strong self-destructive feelings in him.2 Dr. Humphrey thus understood Boyd's crime "primarily [as] a depression caused self-destructive act, closely related to the impulse that leads to suicide, resulting from a life history of an inordinate number of losses beginning with the abandonment by the defendant's father and the death of his grandfather and culminating with the threatened loss of [the victim]." Id., at 419, 319 S.E.2d, at 197.

Boyd's counsel sought to introduce the expert's testimony to provide the jury with a perspective on Boyd's personal history, on his mental and emotional condition, and on how these factors may have led to the crime. In that sense, it was evidence of motive; but more broadly, the proposed testimony was an effort to "link together all of the defendant's mitigating evidence into a unified whole which explained the apparent contradiction of killing the person the defendant loved the most." Ibid.3

On the prosecutor's motion, the trial court excluded Dr. Humphrey's explanation of why Boyd killed his former girlfriend, but the prosecutor nevertheless argued vigorously for an alternative explanation of Boyd's motive. According to the prosecutor, Boyd was selfish and mean; he killed the victim because if he could not have her he wanted to make sure that no one else could. Id., at 436, 319 S.E.2d, at 207 (Exum, J. dissenting). In the words of the dissenting opinion below, the State's theory was "a motive theory that is easy to sell in this kind of case. . . . Defendant's motive theory was different, less apparent to the average observer, and probably more difficult to sell. It was a theory which does not excuse the crime but which might have mitigated it in the eyes of the jury." Ibid. The legal question, obviously, is not which of these theories is more worthy of belief, but whether petitioner had a right to offer evidence in support of his theory. Lockett and Eddings leave no doubt as to the correct answer to that question; he had such a right.

With two justices in dissent, the State Supreme Court affirmed the sentence of death. In the court's view the proffered testimony only "placed [the] various 'stressful events' [of Boyd's life] in a context suggesting that defendant's act [of murder] was predictable." 311 N.C., at 423, 319 S.E.2d, at 199. It had "merely constructed a profile of a murderer into which the defendant fits." Ibid. The court doubted that this information could have much weight in mitigation, especially because, in the court's view, some of the traumas in Boyd's life (e.g., imprisonment) could not "extenuate or reduce the moral culpability of the killing." Ibid.

II

Lockett and Eddings have at their core an understanding that the factors that can rationally militate against the appropriateness of death are varied, subjective, and not subject to prior itemization. See also McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 204-208, 91 S.Ct. 1454, 1465-1468, 28 L.Ed.2d 711 (1971). Moreover, those cases clearly stand for the proposition that, within a broad range of relevance, the weight of any offered factor of mitigation is for the sentencer to determine. Here the sentencers were the jurors. Although evidence of various events in Boyd's personal history was admitted, expert evidence that might have been highly useful to the sentencer's attempt to understand Boyd's crime and its relation to those events of personal history was excluded. Expert knowledge of human motivation might well have been considered highly relevant in the eyes of the jurors, for it might have offered an alternative explanation for why Boyd killed. Without that evidence, the scattered personal history evidence might have had little apparent significance, but the expert evidence might well have provided a link between the personal history evidence and that "extenuat[ion] or reduc[tion of] the moral culpability of the killing" that might call for a sentence of less than death. The exclusion of the expert evidence thus violated Lockett and Eddings.

Behind the State Supreme Court decision stand certain premises concerning punishment. Most apparently, the court took the view that it would be highly questionable to mitigate punishment based on a criminal's conformity to a social psychology profile that traces the crime's origins to the traumas of the criminal's life and to the self-destructive impulses that those traumas may produce. But under the Constitution, the weight of mitigating factors is a judgment for the capital sentencer, and neither court nor legislature may usurp the sentencer's role. In a jury's eyes, the fact that a killer is moved by self-destructive tendencies might make a crime seem more generally tragic and less demanding of retribution, and it might make the criminal seem less clearly evil and more capable of rehabilitation. Moreover, the jury might become less concerned with the prospect of future dangerousness where a defendant's violence stemmed from intimacy and the likely alternative to death is that he spend his life in prison far from loved ones.4

Although these possible uses of the proffered but excluded evidence show that it was of clear relevance within even the most traditional views of mitigation, its possible power with the jury is even clearer when we consider the inherent subjectivity of capital sentencing decisions. Put simply, viewing the defendant's behavior in terms of a pattern that has governed a far greater number of persons than the defendant alone might lead a jury to step beyond initial revulsion and attempt to understand the crime in more human terms. As one commentator has speculated, in many cases a jury's ability to take precisely that step might be what determines whether or not a defendant will be sentenced to die:

"[It may be that] many jurors vote to execute when they are repelled by the defendant, because he presents...

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