Carmona v. Ward

• Decision Date: 08 January 1979
• Docket Number: No. 78-5531,78-5531
• Citation: 59 L.Ed.2d 58,99 S.Ct. 874,439 U.S. 1091
• Parties: Martha CARMONA and Roberta Fowler, petitioners, v. Benjamin WARD, Commissioner of the New York Department of Correctional Services, et al
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

439 U.S. 1091

99 S.Ct. 874

59 L.Ed.2d 58

Martha CARMONA and Roberta Fowler, petitioners,

v Benjamin WARD, Commissioner of the New York Department of Correctional Services, et al

No. 78-5531

Supreme Court of the United States

January 8, 1979

Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Mr. Justice MARSHALL, with whom Mr. Justice POWELL joins, dissenting.

In 1973, New York enacted a comprehensive drug law which prescribes mandatory maximum life sentences and varying minimum terms of imprisonment for all class A narcotics felonies. N.Y. Penal Law §§ 70.00(2)(a), 70.00(3)(a) (McKinney).¹ The Court today declines to consider whether two mandatory life sentences imposed under this statute, one for possession of an ounce of a substance containing cocaine, and the other for sale of 0.00455 of an ounce of a substance containing cocaine, constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

I

In 1975, petitioner Martha Carmona pleaded guilty to possession of an ounce of a substance containing cocaine in viola- tion of N.Y. Penal Law § 220.18 (McKinney Supp.1978).² The Appellate Division affirmed her conviction, and the New York Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal. People v. Carmona, 40 N.Y.2d 1081, 392 N.Y.S.2d 1031, 360 N.E.2d 965 (1976). She is currently serving a sentence of six years to life, the minimum possible for a § 220.18 violation under the 1973 statute. N.Y. Penal Law §§ 70.00(2)(a), (3)(a)(ii) (McKinney 1975).³ Prior to a series of events giving rise to the instant charges, petitioner Carmona had no criminal record except for one non-drug-related arrest 19 years earlier.⁴

Petitioner Roberta Fowler was convicted in February 1974, of selling 0.00455 of an ounce of a substance containing cocaine to an undercover agent for $20, in violation of N.Y. Penal Law § 220.39 (McKinney Supp.1978).⁵ The state trial court sentenced her to four years to life under §§ 70.00(2)(a) and 70.00(3)(a)(iii),⁶ and the New York Court of Appeals sustained that penalty over her Eighth Amendment challenge, sub nom. People v. Broadie, 37 N.Y.2d 100, 371 N.Y.S.2d 471, 332 N.E.2d 338, cert. denied, 423 U.S. 950, 96 S.Ct. 372, 46 L.Ed.2d 287 (1975). At the time of sentencing, Fowler, then age 20, had no prior record of possession or sale of narcotics, or of any violent criminal conduct, although she previously had been convicted of possession and use of drug paraphernalia, prostitution, and petit larceny.⁷

In 1975, Carmona petitioned the District Court for the Southern District of New York for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, on the ground that the sentencing provision of the 1973 statute was unconstitutional as applied. A month later, Fowler intervened as a petitioner. After a hearing, the District Court held that petitioners' mandatory maximum life sentences were so "grossly out of proportion to the severity of [their] crime[s]" as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. 436 F.Supp. 1153, 1164 (1977). Accordingly, the court ordered petitioners discharged at the end of their minimum terms unless the State imposed constitutionally appropriate maximum sentences within 90 days. Id., at 1175.

A divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed. Although agreeing in principle with the District Court that a sanction grossly disproportionate to the gravity of an offense would violate the Eighth Amendment, the majority concluded that petitioners' sentences were constitutional. 576 F.2d 405 (1978).

II

Few legal principles are more firmly rooted in the Bill of Rights and its common-law antecedents than the requirement of proportionality between a crime and its punishment. The precept that sanctions should be commensurate with the seriousness of a crime found expression in both the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights.⁸ And this Court has long recognized that the Eighth Amendment embodies a similar prohibition against disproportionate punishment.

In Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 30 S.Ct. 544, 54 L.Ed. 793 (1910), the Court struck down as cruel and unusual punishment a sentence under the Philippine Code for falsification of a Government document. Although the sentence was excessive not merely in its length but in its conditions—15 years of hard labor in chains, with lifetime surveillance after release—the duration of the imprisonment and subsequent supervision plainly contributed to the Court's conclusion that "[s]uch penalties for such offenses amaze those who . . . believe that . . . punishment for crime should be graduated and proportioned to offense." Id., at 366-367, 30 S.Ct. 544. In so ruling, the Court quoted with approval the Massachusetts Supreme Court's observation that imprisonment "for a long term of years might be so disproportionate to the offence as to constitute a cruel and unusual punishment." Id., at 368, 30 S.Ct. 544, quoting McDonald v. Commonwealth, 173 Mass. 322, 328, 53 N.E. 874 (1899).

Applying the analysis set forth in Weems, this Court has invalidated punishments that were disproportionate to the nature of the offense charged. Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 82 S.Ct. 1417, 8 L.Ed.2d 758 (1962) (imprisonment for the status of drug addiction), and to the penalties imposed in other jurisdictions, Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 78 S.Ct. 590, 2 L.Ed.2d 630 (1958) (plurality opinion) (denationalization for wartime desertion). Thus, while recognizing that the power to prescribe punishments rests in the first instance with the legislature, we have not abdicated our constitutional function to draw a meaning from the Eighth Amendment consonant with "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." Id., at 101, 78 S.Ct. 590.

Most recently, in Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584, 97 S.Ct. 2861, 53 L.Ed.2d 982 (1977), the Court refined the test for assessing Eighth Amendment challenges, concluding that

"a punishment is 'excessive' and unconstitutional if it (1) makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment and hence is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering; or (2) is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime." Id., at 592, 97 S.Ct. 2861.

In holding the Georgia death penalty for rape invalid on the latter ground, the Court followed the approach of Weems, focusing on the character of the crime, the punishment for the same offense in other jurisdictions, and the penalty for similar crimes in the same jurisdiction.

The Court of Appeals here purported to apply the principles enunciated in Coker and Weems. Whether it did so in fact is, in my judgment, open to serious question.

III

Under Coker, the threshold inquiry concerns the character of the offense. In assessing the severity of petitioners' crimes, the Court of Appeals made the following observations:

"The crime [drug abuse] spawns is well recognized. Addicts turn to prostitution, larceny, robbery, burglary and assault to support their habits. . . .

"The entire system depends upon ultimate disposition by sellers such as [petitioners] here who . . . are, 'the crucial link' in the pernicious cycle spawning the addiction which creates other sellers. We conclude that the legislature could only properly judge the severity of the crime involved by considering the well understood and undisputed operating procedures of the dirty business involved and its disastrous consequences." 576 F.2d, at 412 (footnote and citation omitted).

This analysis is problematic for several reasons. Petitioners were convicted of selling a single dose of cocaine and of possessing one ounce of a substance containing cocaine. They were not, as the dissent pointed out, "wholesalers, importers, dealers or distributors of that drug or of heroin." Id., at 423 (Oakes, J., dissenting).⁹ Yet New York's 1973 statute precluded the judges who sentenced Carmona and Fowler from taking into account any gradations of culpability when imposing the maximum punishment.

To rationalize petitioners' sentences by invoking all evils attendant on or attributable to widespread drug trafficking is simply not compatible with a fundamental premise of the criminal justice system, that individuals are accountable only for their own criminal acts. Nor is it consistent with the proportionality principle implicit in the Eighth Amendment. As Coker suggests, a crime that is sometimes accompanied by collateral offenses cannot constitutionally be punished as if it were always so linked. That the rape in Coker occurred while the defendant was committing armed robbery did not alter the plurality's analysis for, "[a]lthough [rape] may be accompanied by another crime, rape by definition does not include the death of, or even the serious injury to another person." 433 U.S., at 598, 97 S.Ct. 2861.¹⁰

Moreover, none of the collateral crimes to which the Court of Appeals adverted carry as severe a punishment as those currently at issue. In New York, the maximum prison term for first-degree robbery and burglary is 25 years, for first-degree assault it is 41/2 to 15 years, and for prostitution, 3 months.¹¹ To justify a stringent penalty for an act on the assumption that the act may engender other crimes makes little sense when those other crimes carry less severe sanctions than the act itself. See 576 F.2d, at 423 (Oakes, J., dissenting). In sum, by focusing on the corrosive social impact of drug trafficking in general, rather than on petitioners' actual—and clearly marginal—involvement in that enterprise, the Court of Appeals substantially overstated the gravity of the instant charges.

IV

When comparing petitioners' sentences with those prescribed for other crimes by New York, and for the same crime in other States, it is first necessary to clarify the precise nature of the penalty imposed. Although the Court of Appeals professed to acknowledge that the "major question on appeal is whether...