Tennard v. Dretke

Last updated
Tennard v. Dretke
Seal of the United States Supreme Court.svg
Argued March 22, 2004
Decided June 24, 2004
Full case nameRobert James Tennard v. Doug Dretke, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division
Citations542 U.S. 274 ( more )
124 S. Ct. 2562; 159 L. Ed. 2d 384; 2004 U.S. LEXIS 4575; 72 U.S.L.W. 4540; 17 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 420
Prior historyTexas trial court sentenced Tennard to death; decision affirmed on appeal; decision affirmed again by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals; habeas corpus petition denied, Civ. Action No. H-98-4238 (S.D. Tex. July 25, 2000), App. 121; Fifth Circuit affirmed, Tennard v. Cockrell, 284 F.3d 591 (2002); U.S. Supreme Court remanded for reconsideration, 537 U.S. 802(2002); Fifth Circuit reinstated, 317 F.3d 476 (2003), cert. granted, 540 U.S. 945(2003).
Holding
A certificate of appealability should issue where "reasonable jurists would find the district court's assessment of the constitutional claims debatable or wrong."
Court membership
Chief Justice
William Rehnquist
Associate Justices
John P. Stevens  · Sandra Day O'Connor
Antonin Scalia  · Anthony Kennedy
David Souter  · Clarence Thomas
Ruth Bader Ginsburg  · Stephen Breyer
Case opinions
MajorityO'Connor, joined by Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer
DissentRehnquist
DissentScalia
DissentThomas
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. VIII

Tennard v. Dretke, 542 U.S. 274 (2004), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court was asked whether evidence of the defendant's low IQ in a death penalty trial had been adequately presented to the jury for full consideration in the penalty phase of his trial. [1] The Supreme Court held that not considering a defendant's low IQ would breach his Eighth Amendment rights and constitute a cruel and unusual punishment. [1]

Supreme Court of the United States Highest court in the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. Established pursuant to Article III of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, it has original jurisdiction over a small range of cases, such as suits between two or more states, and those involving ambassadors. It also has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all federal court and state court cases that involve a point of federal constitutional or statutory law. The Court has the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution or an executive act for being unlawful. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction. The Court may decide cases having political overtones, but it has ruled that it does not have power to decide nonjusticiable political questions. Each year it agrees to hear about 100–150 of the more than 7,000 cases that it is asked to review.

Evidence Material supporting an assertion

Evidence, broadly construed, is anything presented in support of an assertion. This support may be strong or weak. The strongest type of evidence is that which provides direct proof of the truth of an assertion. At the other extreme is evidence that is merely consistent with an assertion but does not rule out other, contradictory assertions, as in circumstantial evidence.

Defendant accused person

A defendant is a person accused of committing a crime in criminal prosecution or a person against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case.

Contents

Facts of the case

Robert Tennard was convicted of capital murder by a Texas jury. Tennard and two accomplices robbed and killed two neighbors. The evidence presented at trial indicated that Tennard killed one of the victims by stabbing while his accomplice used a hatchet to kill the other victim. [2] In the evidence phase of the trial, the defense presented evidence that Tennard's IQ was 67, a fact which the prosecution did not dispute. The prosecutors argued that Tennard's IQ was irrelevant to the case. The jury was instructed to evaluate two issues: did the defendant deliberately commit the crime, and was the defendant likely to be dangerous in the future? [1] The jury answered yes to both questions and sentenced Tennard to the death penalty. [1]

Capital murder was a statutory offence of aggravated murder in Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which was later adopted as a legal provision to define certain forms of aggravated murder in the United States. In some parts of the U.S., this term can define certain acts of aggravated murder: a capital murder is any murder that makes the perpetrator eligible for the death penalty.

Texas State of the United States of America

Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Geographically located in the South Central region of the country, Texas shares borders with the U.S. states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the southwest, while the Gulf of Mexico is to the southeast.

Jury sworn body of people convened to render a verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment

A jury is a sworn body of people convened to render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment. Modern juries tend to be found in courts to ascertain the guilt or lack thereof in a crime. In Anglophone jurisdictions, the verdict may be guilty or not guilty. The old institution of grand juries still exists in some places, particularly the United States, to investigate whether enough evidence of a crime exists to bring someone to trial.

The defense then argued that the jury instructions in the penalty phase were inadequate, and Tennard's death penalty was in violation of the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. [2]

Jury instructions are the set of legal rules that jurors ought follow when deciding a case. Jury instructions are given to the jury by the jury instructor, who usually reads them aloud to the jury. They are often the subject of discussion of the case, how they will decide who is guilty, and are given by the judge in order to make sure their interests are represented and nothing prejudicial is said. They are a type of jury control procedure.

Cruel and unusual punishment is a phrase describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to it.

Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting unreasonable bail and cruel and unusual punishment

The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits the federal, state, and local governments of the United States, or any other government, or any corporation, private enterprise, group, or individual, from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments, in any part of the US, on US property, or against any US citizen, or any resident of the US. This amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the United States Bill of Rights. The phrases in this amendment originated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

Questions at issue

The District Court for the Southern District of Texas denied Tennard a certificate to appeal on the basis that a low IQ is not a sufficient reason for appeal there was no evidence presented that Tennard's behavior was mentally retarded and that mental retardation was related to the criminal act. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this finding. [1] The Supreme Court granted Tennard's writ of certiorari. [1]

United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas

The United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas is the Federal district court with jurisdiction over the southern part of Texas. The court's headquarters is in Houston, Texas and has six additional offices in the district.

Certiorari, often abbreviated cert. in the United States, is a process for seeking judicial review and a writ issued by a court that agrees to review. A certiorari is issued by a superior court, directing an inferior court, tribunal, or other public authority to send the record of a proceeding for review.

Issue

The U.S. Supreme Court then vacated the decision and remanded it back to the Fifth Circuit for reconsideration in light of the court's contemporaneous decision in Atkins v. Virginia . The Fifth Circuit considered and rejected the Atkins claim. Tennard appealed again.

A vacated judgment makes a previous legal judgment legally void. A vacated judgment is usually the result of the judgment of an appellate court, which overturns, reverses, or sets aside the judgment of a lower court. An appellate court may also vacate its own decisions.

Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but states can define who has intellectual disability. Twelve years later in Hall v. Florida the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the discretion under which U.S. states can designate an individual convicted of murder as too intellectually incapacitated to be executed.

The main issue the U.S Supreme Court considered was whether the Fifth Circuit improperly denied Mr. Tennard's certificate of appeal since he had presented substantial evidence of a violation of his constitutional rights, or had "demonstrated that reasonable jurists would find the district court's assessment of the constitutional claims debatable or wrong?" (quotation in original). [2]

Outcome

The Supreme Court held that all relevant mitigating factors must be considered in the penalty phase of a death penalty case. It is not sufficient to allow the defendant to present mitigating factors during the trial if those factors are not considered in the sentencing. If the jury is not instructed to consider all relevant mitigating factors, the defendant's Eighth Amendment rights are violated as failure to do so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. [2] The court concluded that Tennard's IQ was a relevant mitigating factor, and that the sentencing jury should have been made to consider it for the purposes of mitigation. [1]

Ultimately, Tennard's death sentence was reduced to life in prison. [3]

Significance

The case formed part of a series of decisions in which the Supreme Court adjusted and refined the capital sentencing methods of the various states. [2]

See also

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Tennard v. Dretke, 542 U.S. 274 (2004).
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Sentencer Could Reasonably Find That Such Evidence Warrants a Sentence Less Than Death". JAAPL.org. 2005. Retrieved 2007-10-24.
  3. ↑ http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_row/dr_offenders_no_longer_on_dr.html
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

Related Research Articles

Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision with regard to aggravating factors in crimes. The Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibited judges from enhancing criminal sentences beyond statutory maxima based on facts other than those decided by the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The decision has been a cornerstone in the modern resurgence in jury trial rights. As Justice Scalia noted in his concurring opinion, the jury-trial right "has never been efficient; but it has always been free."

Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), reaffirmed the United States Supreme Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. Referred to by a leading scholar as the July 2 Cases and elsewhere referred to by the lead case Gregg, the Supreme Court set forth the two main features that capital sentencing procedures must employ in order to comply with the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments". The decision essentially ended the de facto moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the Court in its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), was a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that it is unconstitutional to impose capital punishment for crimes committed while under the age of 18. The 5–4 decision overruled Stanford v. Kentucky, in which the court had upheld execution of offenders at or above age 16, and overturned statutes in 25 states.

Oregon v. Guzek, 546 U.S. 517 (2006), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not grant criminal defendants facing the death penalty the right to introduce new evidence of their innocence during sentencing that was not introduced during trial. Accordingly, states could constitutionally exclude such evidence from the sentencing phase of a capital trial.

Johnny Paul Penry is a Texas prisoner serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without parole for rape and murder. He was on death row between 1980 and 2008, and his case generated discussion about the appropriateness of the death penalty for offenders who are thought to be intellectually disabled.

Fortunato Pedro "Pete" Benavides is a Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His chambers are in Austin, Texas.

Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 (1990), was a United States Supreme Court case that upheld two important aspects of the capital sentencing scheme in Arizona — judicial sentencing and the aggravating factor "especially heinous, cruel, or depraved" — as not unconstitutionally vague. The Court overruled the first of these holdings in Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002). The second of these holdings has yet to be overturned.

Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that established the standard for determining when a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel is violated by that counsel's inadequate performance.

Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302 (1989), sanctioned the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders because the Court determined executing the mentally retarded was not "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment. However, because Texas law did not allow the jury to give adequate consideration as a mitigating factor to Johnny Paul Penry's intellectual disability at the sentencing phase of his murder trial, the Court remanded the case for further proceedings. Eventually, Penry was retried for capital murder, again sentenced to death, and again the Supreme Court ruled, in Penry v. Johnson, that the jury was not able to adequately consider Penry's intellectual disability as a mitigating factor at the sentencing phase of the trial. Ultimately, Penry was spared the death penalty because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which, while not directly overruling the holding in "Penry I", did give considerable negative treatment to Penry on the basis that the Eighth Amendment allowed execution of the mentally retarded.

Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 510 (2003), is a case in which the United States Supreme Court spelled out standards for "effectiveness" in the constitutional right to legal counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. Previously the court had determined that the Sixth Amendment included the right to "effective assistance" of legal counsel, but it did not specify what constitutes "effective", thus leaving the standards for effectiveness vague. In Wiggins v. Smith, the court set forth the American Bar Association Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases Guideline 11.8.6.(1989), as a specific guideline by which to measure effectiveness and competence of legal counsel.

In criminal law, a mitigating factor, also known as extenuating circumstances, is any information or evidence presented to the court regarding the defendant or the circumstances of the crime that might result in reduced charges or a lesser sentence. Unlike a legal defense, it cannot lead to the acquittal of the defendant. The opposite of a mitigating factor is an aggravating factor.

<i>Bigby v. Dretke</i>

Bigby v. Dretke 402 F.3d 551, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard a case appealed from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas on the issue of the instructions given to a jury in death penalty sentencing. The decision took into account the recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning the relevance of mitigating evidence in sentencing, as in Penry v. Lynaugh.

The Capital Jury Project (CJP) is a consortium of university-based research studies on the decision-making of jurors in death penalty cases in the United States. It was founded in 1991 and is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the CJP is to determine whether jurors' sentencing decisions conform to the constitution and do not reflect the arbitrary decisions the United States Supreme Court found when it ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia. That 1972 Supreme Court decision eliminated the death penalty which was not reinstated until Gregg v. Georgia in 1976.

United States criminal procedure derives from several sources of law: the baseline protections of the United States Constitution, federal and state statutes; federal and state rules of criminal procedure ; and state and federal case law. Criminal procedures are distinct from civil procedures in the US.

Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991), was a United States Supreme Court case which held that testimony in the form of a victim impact statement is admissible during the sentencing phase of a trial and, in death penalty cases, does not violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Payne narrowed two of the Courts' precedents: Booth v. Maryland (1987) and South Carolina v. Gathers (1989).

2009 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down nineteen per curiam opinions during its 2009 term, which began on October 5, 2009, and concluded October 3, 2010.

The United States Constitution contains several provisions related to criminal sentencing.

Smith v. Spisak, 558 U.S. 139 (2010), was a United States Supreme Court decision on the applicability of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. It further examined issues of previous court decisions on jury instructions and the effectiveness of counsel.

Kansas v. Carr, 577 U.S. ___ (2016), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States clarified several procedures for sentencing defendants in capital cases. Specifically, the Court held that judges are not required to affirmatively instruct juries about the burden of proof for establishing mitigating evidence, and that joint trials of capital defendants "are often preferable when the joined defendants’ criminal conduct arises out of a single chain of events". This case included the last majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia before his death in February 2016.

Cone v. Bell, 556 U.S. 449 (2009), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that a defendant was entitled to a hearing to determine whether prosecutors in his 1982 death penalty trial violated his right to due process by withholding exculpatory evidence. The defendant, Gary Cone, filed a petition for postconviction relief from a 1982 death sentence in which he argued that prosecutors violated his rights to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment by withholding police reports and witness statements that potentially could have shown that his drug addiction affected his behavior. In an opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court held that Cone was entitled to a hearing to determine whether the prosecution's failure to disclose exculpatory evidence violated Cone's right to due process; the Court noted that "the quantity and the quality of the suppressed evidence lends support to Cone’s position at trial that he habitually used excessive amounts of drugs, that his addiction affected his behavior during his crime spree". In 2016, Gary Cone died from natural causes while still sitting on Tennessee's death row.