Shafer, Wesley, Jr. v. South Carolina (03/20/2001)

By: Katherine Ritchey, Medill News Service

Questions presented

Whether Shafer's due process rights were violated by the trial court's refusal to instruct the sentencing jury that under South Carolina law, he ""would be ineligible for parole if the jury were to vote for a life sentence.""

Brief

In January 1998, after three and a half hours of deliberating whether 19-year-old Wesley Shafer should receive the death penalty or life in prison for murdering a South Carolina convenience store clerk, the jury brought two questions to the court:

Is there any remote chance for someone convicted of murder to be eligible for parole?Under what conditions would someone convicted for murder be eligible for parole?

There was good reason these questions were lingering on jurors' minds.

At a conference near the end of the trial, the prosecutor convinced Union County Circuit Judge John Hayes that the jury should not be told Shafer would never be eligible for parole.

The issue dates back to 1994, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Simmons v. South Carolina that due process gives capital defendants the right to refute a prosecutor's argument of ""future dangerousness"" by informing the jury if a life imprisonment sentence would mean life in prison without the chance for parole.

At the time, capital murderers in South Carolina could be paroled after serving 30 years.

Yet a year after the Simmons ruling, the South Carolina Legislature enacted a law making life in prison without parole the only punishment other than death for convicted murderers, as long as the state asked for the death penalty and the jury found aggravating circumstances.

An alternative sentence of at least 30 years in prison would be an option only if the jury determined there were no aggravating circumstances to make the defendant eligible for the death penalty. In Shafer's case, there were aggravating circumstances because he had attempted armed robbery of the convenience store.

But the prosecutor at Shafer's trial argued that ""future dangerousness"" had not been an issue in the case. He then asked the judge to stop Shafer's lawyer from telling the jury that Shafer would never be released from prison if they gave him a life sentence.

Shafer's lawyer pointed to a jailer who testified during the trial that Shafer had assaulted her while he awaited trial as evidence of ""future dangerousness.""

Judge Hayes declined to allow the jury to be told Shafer would never be eligible for parole.

Shafer's lawyer again argued that ""future dangerousness"" was indeed an issue after the prosecutor reminded jurors of a tape of the convenience store hold up, where witnesses worried that Shafer and the men he was with ""might come back.""

This time Hayes admitted the statements had ""come close"" to showing ""future dangerousness"" but said they did not ""cross the line.""

When the jury brought up the issue with their own questions, Hayes reiterated his prior ruling.

""Your consideration is restricted to what sentence to recommend,"" he told the jury. ""I will remind you that what you recommend is what I will impose as a trial judge.""

Hayes then cited a law stating that, ""Life imprisonment means until the death of the offender.""

To the jury's second question, he said only, ""Parole eligibility or ineligibility is not for your consideration.""

A little more than an hour later, the jury recommended that Shafer be sentenced to death.

In May 2000, the South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence, but with a different twist.

It maintained that South Carolina's new sentencing law made Simmons irrelevant because it was now possible for a capital murderer to receive less than a life sentence if the jury does not find aggravating circumstances.

""By asking for information on parole, the jury was attempting to ascertain the length of time appellant would realistically spend in prison if sentenced to life imprisonment,"" Justice A.J. Burnett wrote for the state's highest court. ""Informing the jury the appellant was parole ineligible when, unbeknownst to the jury, he faced a possible sentence of 30 years imprisonment after which he could be unconditionally released would not have fairly responded to the jury's inquiry.""

The South Carolina Supreme Court also rejected the claim that the trial judge's instructions to the jury that it should not consider parole eligibility or ineligibility suggested Shafer was eligible for parole.

On June 6, 2000, the South Carolina Supreme Court stayed Shafer's execution to allow his lawyer to file a petition for writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the petition, Shafer's lawyer, David Bruck, maintained that South Carolina had overstepped the boundaries of both Simmons and due process.

""Given the evidence and the jury's parole questions, it is plain that petitioner's future behavior, and his potential for future dangerousness, were among the factors weighed by the jury as it deliberated life and death,"" Bruck wrote in the petition.

On Sept. 26, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case, allowed Shafer to proceed in forma pauperis and limited review in the case to question 1 presented in Shafer's petition, as noted above.

On March 20, 2001, the Court reversed Shafer's death sentence, holding that South Carolina's Supreme Court incorrectly limited Simmons and that whenever future dangerousness is at issue in a capital sentencing proceeding, due process requires that the jury be informed that a life sentence carries no possibility of parole.

""South Carolina has consistently refused to inform the jury of a capital defendant's parole eligibility status,"" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated for the 7-2 majority.

The majority did concede something to the South Carolina courts.

""The South Carolina Supreme Court was no doubt correct to this extent,"" Ginsburg wrote. ""At the time the trial judge instructed the jury in Shafer's case, it was indeed possible that Shafer would receive a sentence other than death or life without the possibility of parole. That is so because South Carolina, in line with other States, gives capital juries, at the penalty phase, discrete and sequential functions.""

However, the majority concluded, the possibility of a third option beyond death or life without parole was gone by the time the jury came into the picture for sentencing.

""It is only when the jury endeavors the moral judgment whether to impose the death penalty that parole eligibility may become critical,"" wrote Ginsburg. ""Correspondingly, it is only at that stage that Simmons comes into play, a stage at which South Carolina law provides no third choice, no 30-year mandatory minimum, just death or life without parole.""

South Carolina also argued to the Court that it did not in fact put the issue of Shafer's future dangerousness before the jury at the sentencing stage. The Court declined to resolve that factual question.

""Because the South Carolina Supreme Court did not home in on the question whether the prosecutor's evidentiary submissions or closing argument in fact placed Shafer's future dangerousness at issue,"" the majority concluded, ""we leave that question open for the state court's attention and disposition.""

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

""While I concede that today's judgment is a logical extension of Simmons ... I am more attached to the logic of the Constitution, whose Due Process Clause was understood as an embodiment of common-law tradition, rather than as authority for federal courts to promulgate wise national rules of criminal procedure,"" Scalia wrote in a two-paragraph dissent.

Thomas's dissent argued that the jury instructions in Shafer's case were not misleading. ""Even accepting that sentencing courts in South Carolina must now permit the jury to learn about the impossibility of parole when life imprisonment is a sentencing possibility, I believe that the court's instructions and the arguments made by counsel in Shafer's case were sufficient to inform the jury of what 'life imprisonment' meant for Shafer,"" wrote Thomas.

""It is not this Court's role to micromanage state sentencing proceedings or to develop model jury instructions,"" Thomas concluded. ""I would decline to interfere further with matters that the Constitution leaves to the States.""