Moran v. Ohio, 83-6759

• Decision Date: 29 October 1984
• Docket Number: No. 83-6759,83-6759
• Parties: Betty MORAN v. OHIO
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

469 U.S. 948

105 S.Ct. 350

83 L.Ed.2d 285

Betty MORAN

v OHIO

No. 83-6759

Supreme Court of the United States

October 29, 1984

On petition for writ of certiorari to the Court of Appeals of Ohio, Cuyahoga County.

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

Justice BRENNAN, with whom Justice MARSHALL joins, dissenting.

Petitioner was convicted by an Ohio jury of the murder of her husband Willie Moran. She asserted at trial that she had acted in self-defense, as a result of the repeated and brutal beatings she had suffered at her husband's hands. She seeks certiorari to review the state appellate court's holding that the jury properly was instructed that she had the burden of proving self-defense by a preponderance of the evidence. According to petitioner, the Due Process Clause forbids the State to punish her for murder when the jury that convicted her may well have thought it as likely as not that she acted in self-defense. I would grant certiorari to consider the substantial constitutional question raised by this petition—a question that this Court has labeled as "colorable" and "plausible" in previous decisions and that has for years divided state courts and lower federal courts.

I

A.

There was substantial testimony at petitioner's trial that her husband—a man of violent temperament who virtually always carried firearms and owned a collection of pistols, rifles, and shotguns—had repeatedly beaten and brutalized her. For example, in one incident, Willie Moran "had her by the neck, by the throat, and he was hitting" her with a gun. In another incident, Willie Moran "hit her and knocked her off the chair and, then, kicked her." Petitioner's mother testified that earlier in the very week in which the murder occurred she saw Willie Moran "hit [petitioner] and knocked her on the floor, and I seen him take his feet and was kicking her."

On May 15, 1981, petitioner and Willie Moran had their last fight. According to petitioner's testimony, Willie Moran had told her that he wanted some money that he thought she had saved. He threatened that if petitioner did not have the money for him by the time he woke up from a nap, he would "blow [her] damn brains out." Petitioner, who did not have the money, unsuccessfully called a friend for help. Then, realizing that she had no way of raising the necessary funds, she entered the camper where Willie Moran was sleeping, picked up his gun, and fatally shot him.

B

At trial, petitioner pleaded not guilty, asserting that the killing was done in self-defense.¹ Petitioner's theory at trial was that she was a victim of battered woman's syndrome. See, e.g., L. Walker, The Battered Woman (1979). Descriptions of this syndrome emphasize the husband's repeated and violent beatings and the wife's dependency—economic and emotional—that make it practically impossible for her to leave. When faced with an immediate threat, victims may be driven to take the lives of their mates as the only possible method of escaping the threat. Although traditional self-defense theory may seem to fit the situation only imperfectly, see Eber, The Battered Wife's Dilemma: To Kill or to be Killed, 32 Hastings L.J. 895, 917-931 (1981); Note, Partially Determined Imperfect Self-Defense: The Battered Wife Kills and Tells Why, 34 Stan.L.Rev. 615 (1982), the battered woman's syndrome as a self-defense theory has gained increasing support over recent years.²

The jury at petitioner's trial was instructed: "[T]he burden of proving the defense of self-defense is upon the defendant. She must establish such defense by a preponderance of the evidence." Petitioner made a timely objection to the instructions on the ground that they unconstitutionally placed the burden of proof on her, rather than on the State.³ The trial court overruled the objection and the jury returned a verdict of guilty of aggravated murder. The Court of Appeals of the County of Cuyahoga affirmed the conviction and the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the appeal "for the reason that no substantial constitutional question exists." Petitioner seeks a writ of certiorari to vindicate her Fourteenth Amendment right to have the State bear the burden of proof in a criminal prosecution.

II

A.

This Court held in In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970), that "the Due Process Clause protects the accused against conviction except upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime with which he is charged." Id., at 364, 90 S.Ct., at 1073. We noted that this standard "plays a vital role in the American scheme of criminal procedure" and that "[t]he standard provides concrete substance for the presumption of innocence—that bedrock 'axiomatic and elementary' principle whose 'enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.' " Id., at 363, 90 S.Ct., at 1072 (quoting Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432, 453, 15 S.Ct. 394, 402, 39 L.Ed. 481 (1895)).

Several years later, we applied the teachings of Winship in Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. 684, 95 S.Ct. 1881, 44 L.Ed.2d 508 (1975). In Mullaney, the defendant had been convicted in a Maine state court of murder despite his defense of provocation. Under Maine law, as we explained in the opinion:

"[A]bsent justification or excuse, all intentional or criminally reckless killings are felonious homicides. Felonious homicide is punished as murder—i.e., by life imprisonment—unless the defendant proves by a fair preponderance of the evidence that it was committed in the heat of passion on sudden provocation, in which case it is punished as manslaughter—i.e., by a fine not to exceed $1,000 or by imprisonment not to exceed 20 years." Id., at 691-692, 95 S.Ct., at 1886.

The Mullaney trial judge instructed the jury that "if the prosecution established that the homicide was both intentional and unlawful, malice aforethought was to be conclusively implied unless the defendant proved by a fair preponderance of the evidence that he acted in the heat of passion on sudden provocation." Id., at 686, 95 S.Ct., at 1883. We held that this instruction was constitutionally infirm under the Due Process Clause and our holding in Winship: once evidence tending to show provocation was introduced, the State—not the defendant—had to bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt the absence of provocation.

Two years later, in Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197, 97 S.Ct. 2319, 53 L.Ed.2d 281 (1977), we applied these principles to the New York murder statutes. The defendant in Patterson had claimed that he had committed the murder under the influence of "extreme emotional disturbance" and was therefore entitled to a verdict of manslaughter. The jury found him guilty of murder. New York law provided that the State had to prove only "[t]he death, the intent to kill, and causation" in order to convict a defendant of murder. Id., at 205, 97 S.Ct., at 2324. If the State met its burden, the defendant could reduce the conviction to manslaughter by proving by a preponderance of the evidence that he had acted under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance for which there was a reasonable explanation. We held that—contrary to the situation in Mullaney—shifting the burden to the defendant on the issue of extreme emotional disturbance did not violate the Due Process Clause.

Nothing in Patterson questions the validity of the Winship holding that the burden of proof is on the State to prove beyond a reasonable doubt all of the elements that constitute the crime. Nor is there any doubt that the States have wide discretion in allocating the burden of proof between the prosecution and defense on issues that are not elements of the crime. Thus, in order to determine whether a State may allocate the burden of proof on an issue in a criminal prosecution to the defendant, it must first be determined what elements constitute the crime in question; this was the problem in Mullaney and Patterson. Yet the resolution of those cases left the solution to this problem in some doubt and the lower courts in considerable disarray.⁴ The difficulty can be seen by contrasting Mullaney's insistence that "Winship is concerned with substance rather than . . . formalism," 421 U.S., at 699, 95 S.Ct., at 1890, with the statement in Patterson that "the Due Process Clause requires the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt all of the elements included in the definition of the offense of which the defendant is charged." 432 U.S., at 210, 97 S.Ct., at 2327 (emphasis added). That the Due Process Clause permits the States considerable discretion in defining criminal offenses (and in allocating burdens of proof on matters outside the defined elements of its crimes) is clear. But the Patterson opinion did not purport to overrule Mullaney and itself recognized that "there are obviously constitutional limits beyond which the States may not go in this regard." 432 U.S., at 210, 97 S.Ct., at 2327. This case presents the opportunity for us to define those limits.

B

Petitioner did not seek to defend herself on the ground of provocation (as in Mullaney ) or extreme emotional disturbance (as in Patterson ). Rather, she relied on self-defense as a justification for her action. She asserts that, given the central place of self-defense in Anglo-American jurisprudence and the crucial role it can play in justifying—not merely mitigating—what would otherwise have been a criminal act,⁵ the Winship doctrine applies with full force to Ohio's allocation of the burden of proof on the issue: the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt the absence of self-defense in any case in which it is an issue.

Under its most restrictive interpretation, Patterson established that the State's definition of an offense within the "four corners" of its murder statute is dispositive on the question of how it may allocate the burden of proof. Even under this reading, it is not clear whether Ohio's practice of...