USDC’s Wolf rejects Sampson challenges

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U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf has rejected 26 motions Gary Sampson had filed raising constitutional challenges to his capital sentencing retrial under the Federal Death Penalty Act.

In 2003, Sampson pleaded guilty to federal charges of carjacking resulting in the 2001 deaths of retiree Phillip McCloskey and college student Jonathan Rizzo. A jury imposed the death penalty, a sentence that was vacated in 2010 because of misconduct by a juror.

Sampson filed the 26 motions in the new penalty phase in August 2014. Among those motions were several challenges that he had presented in 2003, but Wolf declined to apply the “law of the case” to rule those challenges out of bounds. However, on the substance of those challenges, Wolf found again that Sampson had come up short.

In three motions, Sampson failed to convince Wolf that the death penalty is unconstitutional because it is inconsistent with evolving societal standards of decency. In essence, Wolf acknowledged that Sampson chronicled a trend away from the death penalty, but not one that passed the necessary tipping point to find unconstitutionality.

Since 2003, seven state legislatures — Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York — have abolished the death penalty, while the highest courts in Connecticut and New York have also found the death penalty to be unconstitutional.

However, Wolf noted that 31 states and the federal government continue to authorize capital punishment, and further, contrary to Sampson’s assertion, those laws have not fallen into such disuse that there is no incentive to repeal it. To the contrary, Wolf said, in most states legislation to repeal the death penalty has been introduced, just not passed.

Wolf also was not persuaded by Sampson’s evidence inferring a change in attitude toward the death penalty from a decline in death verdicts by juries, national polls and the abolition of capital punishment internationally.

“The objective indicia of evolving contemporary standards of decency show that support for the death penalty is eroding in the United States,” Wolf wrote. “However, the record does not include sufficient objective evidence to prove that the FDPA provides for cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Sampson’s other arguments included that imposing capital punishment on someone suffering from “severe mental disorders” would violate the Eighth Amendment, a categorical exclusion recommended by the American Bar Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association and National Alliance of the Mentally Ill. But Wolf said the law distinguishes between juveniles and the mentally challenged, who are generally shielded from execution, and the mentally ill, for whom their condition is merely considered as a mitigating factor.

Wolf also rejected Sampson’s contention that the court, instead of taking the pulse of the nation on capital punishment, should be looking at attitudes more locally. Indeed, Wolf said, “adopting the approach Sampson advocates might violate the Fifth Amendment right of all persons in the United States to receive equal protection of the laws.”

In three motions, Sampson argued unsuccessfully that capital sentencing is imposed in an arbitrary and capricious manner in violation of the Fifth and Eighth amendments, pointing to, among other things, modern psychological studies that show jurors subconsciously devalue the lives of victims who are not white.

Wolf said Sampson’s data was even less compelling than that from the state of Georgia considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in the McCleskey case, which showed defendants with white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants with black victims. The Supreme Court nonetheless found that the data “does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias affecting the Georgia capital sentencing process.”

Sampson also claimed that juries are not doing a reliable job selecting the worst offenders for capital punishment due to fact-finding errors at both the guilt and sentencing phase of capital trials. In rejecting that contention, Wolf pointed to the FDPA’s “substantial procedural safeguards.”

“The court remains concerned, however, about the potential rate of error in federal capital cases generally and the risk of the execution of the innocent particularly,” he said, noting the similar concerns expressed by several Supreme Court justices.

Wolf also left open possibility of a future hearing on Sampson’s motion alleging “general arbitrariness,” “if a future, focused presentation persuades the court that a hearing is justified.”

Further, Wolf found that Sampson could not meet his “heavy burden” to show that jurors are not up to the tasks with which they are charged under the FDPA, making the law unconstitutional.

A study by the Capital Jury Project, allegedly finding several flaws in capital sentencing juries, was based on jurors’ distant recollections of the process of which they had been a part and thus was not compelling, Wolf said.

Wolf found that Michael Sullivan’s comments and actions as Plymouth County district attorney prior to becoming U.S. attorney did not violate Sampson’s right to an impartial prosecutor, and also rejected what was “essentially a selective prosecution claim”: that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft “decided to seek the death penalty against Sampson as part of a plan to reintroduce the death penalty to states, like Massachusetts, that had abolished it.”

Sampson also alleged a violation of his Eighth Amendment rights, given that a majority of Massachusetts residents do not support the death penalty and the punishment is unavailable, making a “death-qualified” jury not representative of the local community. However, Wolf noted the process of death qualification has been found to be constitutional.

Sampson challenged the FDPA based on the length of time it takes to execute those sentenced to death under the statute. With respect to his individual case, that claim was not yet ripe, Wolf said, denying it without prejudice.

More generally, Wolf said, “Sampson has not proven that the federal system is generally so slow that a finding that the FDPA is unconstitutional is warranted,” noting the federal system compares favorably to California, where a system was found to be “constitutionally deficient” because the “length of time from imposition of a death sentence to an execution in California was over twenty-five years, significantly longer than in other states.”

Wolf rejected as not yet ripe Sampson’s motions challenging how the court would select the place and manner of his execution if he is again sentenced to death, how Sampson would appeal any death sentence, and how that death sentence would be implemented.

Finally, Wolf declined to grant Sampson an open-ended extension of time to file more motions but allowed for the possibility that Sampson might be granted relief “if he has discovered new evidence that proves that his constitutional rights have been violated.”

Click here for the full-text opinion.