Maynard v. Cartwright

• Decision Date: 06 June 1988
• Docket Number: No. 87-519,87-519
• Citation: 100 L.Ed.2d 372,108 S.Ct. 1853,486 U.S. 356
• Parties: Gary D. MAYNARD, Warden, et al., Petitioners, v. William T. CARTWRIGHT
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

486 U.S. 356

108 S.Ct. 1853

100 L.Ed.2d 372

Gary D. MAYNARD, Warden, et al., Petitioners,

v William T. CARTWRIGHT.

No. 87-519.

Argued April 19, 1988.

Decided June 6, 1988.

Syllabus

Respondent, a disgruntled ex-employee of a married couple, entered the couple's home, shot the wife twice with a shotgun, shot and killed the husband, and then slit the wife's throat and stabbed her twice. Respondent was tried in an Oklahoma court and found guilty of the first-degree murder of the husband. The jury imposed the death penalty upon finding that two statutory aggravating circumstances, including the circumstance that the murder was "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel," had been established, and that these circumstances outweighed the mitigating evidence. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on direct appeal, and later affirmed a denial of state collateral relief. The Federal District Court then denied respondent's habeas corpus petition, but the Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the statutory words "heinous," "atrocious," and "cruel" do not on their face offer sufficient guidance to the jury to escape the strictures of Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346. The court also ruled that the Oklahoma courts had not adopted a limiting construction that cured the infirmity, concluding that the construction utilized by the state appellate court, which simply declared that the facts of the case were so plainly "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" that the death penalty was warranted, was itself unconstitutionally vague under the Eighth Amendment to the Federal Constitution. The court therefore enjoined the execution of the death sentence, but without prejudice to further state proceedings for redetermination of the sentence.

Held: As applied in this case, the statutory aggravating circumstance was unconstitutionally vague. Pp. 360-366.

(a) The State's contention that factual circumstances may, in themselves, plainly characterize the killing as "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" represents an improper, Due Process Clause approach to vagueness that fails to recognize the rationale of this Court's Eighth Amendment cases. Under Furman, supra, and its progeny, the proper analysis of a vagueness claim focuses on whether the challenged aggravating circumstance adequately informs the jury as to what it must find in order to impose the death penalty, or whether it leaves the jury with unchanneled discretion to make an arbitrary and capricious decision. Godfrey v. Georgia, 446 U.S. 420, 100 S.Ct. 1759, 64 L.Ed.2d 398, which applied that analysis controls this case. The language of the Oklahoma provision gave no more guidance to the jury here than did the "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhuman" language that was held unconstitutional in Godfrey. Moreover, Oklahoma's addition of the word "especially" no more limited the overbreadth of the aggravating factor than did the addition of "outrageously or wantonly" to the word "vile" in the language considered in Godfrey. Furthermore, the state appellate court's factual approach to construction was indistinguishable from the action of the Georgia court in Godfrey, which failed to cure the jury's unfettered discretion and to satisfy the Eighth Amendment. Pp. 360—364.

(b) The State's complaint that the Court of Appeals erroneously ruled that torture or serious physical abuse is the only constitutionally acceptable limiting construction of the aggravating circumstance is unfounded, since, although the court noted cases in which such a requirement was held to be curative, it expressly refrained from directing the State to adopt any particular construction. The contention that the death penalty should stand because the jury found another, unchallenged aggravating circumstance sufficient to sustain the sentence is also unpersuasive, since, when this case was decided, Oklahoma had no procedure for attempting to save a death penalty when one of several aggravating circumstances found by the jury was held to be invalid or unsupported by evidence, but simply vacated the death sentence and automatically imposed a life-imprisonment sentence. The significance for this case of the state appellate court's decisions, which were issued after the Court of Appeals' decision below, to adopt a torture-or-serious-physical-abuse limiting construction of the aggravating circumstance, and to no longer automatically set aside a death penalty where one of several aggravating circumstances is invalid or inapplicable, must be decided in the first instance by the Oklahoma courts in any further proceedings for redetermination of the appropriate sentence. Pp. 364-366.

822 F.2d 1477 (CA10 1987), affirmed.

WHITE, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court. BRENNAN, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which MARSHALL, J., joined, post, p. 366.

Susan S. Dickerson, Oklahoma City, Okl., for petitioners.

Mandy Welch, Norman, Okl., for respondent.

Justice WHITE delivered the opinion of the Court.

On May 4, 1982, after eating their evening meal in their Muskogee County, Oklahoma, home, Hugh and Charma Riddle watched television in their living room. At some point, Mrs. Riddle left the living room and was proceeding towards the bathroom when she encountered respondent Cartwright standing in the hall holding a shotgun. She struggled for the gun and was shot twice in the legs. The man, whom she recognized as a disgruntled ex-employee, then proceeded to the living room where he shot and killed Hugh Riddle. Mrs. Riddle dragged herself down the hall to a bedroom where she tried to use a telephone. Respondent, however, entered the bedroom, slit Mrs. Riddle's throat, stabbed her twice with a hunting knife the Riddles had given him for Christmas, and then left the house. Mrs. Riddle survived and called the police. Respondent was arrested two days later and charged with first-degree murder.

Respondent was tried and found guilty as charged. The State, relying on three statutory aggravating circumstances, sought the death penalty. The jury found two of them to have been established: first, the defendant "knowingly cre- ated a great risk of death to more than one person"; second, the murder was "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel." Okla.Stat., Tit. 21, §§ 701.12(2) and (4) (1981). Finding that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating evidence, the jury imposed the death penalty. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on direct appeal, Cartwright v. State, 695 P.2d 548, cert. denied, 473 U.S. 911, 105 S.Ct. 3538, 87 L.Ed.2d 661 (1985), and later affirmed a denial of state collateral relief. Cartwright v. State, 708 P.2d 592 (1985), cert. denied, 474 U.S. 1073, 106 S.Ct. 837, 88 L.Ed.2d 808 (1986). Respondent then sought federal habeas corpus on several grounds. The District Court rejected each of them, including the claim that the death sentence was invalid because it rested wholly or in part on an unconstitutional aggravating circumstance, namely, the unconstitutionally vague and overbroad aggravating circumstance that the murder was "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel." A panel of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed, 802 F.2d 1203 (1986), but rehearing en banc was granted limited to the claim concerning the challenged aggravating circumstance.

The en banc court recognized that the jury had found two aggravating circumstances, one of them being unchallenged. But it noted that in cases where a death sentence rested in part on an invalid aggravating circumstance, the Oklahoma courts did not reweigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances in an effort to save the death penalty; rather, the death sentence was vacated and a life-imprisonment sentence automatically imposed. Oklahoma had "no provision for curing on appeal a sentencer's consideration of an invalid aggravating circumstance." 822 F.2d 1477, 1482 (1987). It was therefore necessary to consider the vagueness challenge to one of the aggravating circumstances. The court proceeded to do so and unanimously sustained the challenge. It stated that the words "heinous," "atrocious," and "cruel" did not on their face offer sufficient guidance to the jury to escape the strictures of our judgment in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972). Nor, in the court's view, had the Oklahoma courts adopted a limiting construction that cured the infirmity and that was relied upon to affirm the death sentence in this case. It concluded that the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals' construction of the aggravating circumstance was "unconstitutionally vague" under the Eighth Amendment. 822 F.2d, at 1483, 1492. The death sentence, accordingly, was held to be invalid and its execution enjoined, but "without prejudice to further proceedings by the state for redetermination of the sentence on the conviction." Id., at 1492.

Petitioner sought review here of the Tenth Circuit's holding that the aggravating circumstance was unconstitutionally vague. Because of the conflict between the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma and because of the importance of this constitutional issue to the orderly and proper administration of state death-penalty statutes, we granted certiorari, limited to that issue. 484 U.S. 1003, 108 S.Ct. 693, 98 L.Ed.2d 645 (1988). We affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

The Court of Appeals, with some care, reviewed the evolution in the interpretation of the "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" aggravating circumstance by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals up to and including its decision in this case. Its reading of the cases was that while the Oklahoma court had considered the attitude of the killer, the manner of the killing, and the suffering of the victim to be relevant and sufficient to support the aggravating circumstance, that court had "refused to hold that any...