Richmond v. Lewis, 506 U.S. 56 (1992)

O'Connor delivers the opinion of the Court, joined by Rehnquist, White, Blackmun, Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas.


Thomas files a concurring opinion. 


Scalia files a dissenting opinion.


The Court holds that Richmond's death sentence violates the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Arizona's aggravating factor that the offense was committed in an "especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner" was unconstitutionally vague at the time the sentencing judge gave it weight. The State Supreme Court did not cure this error, because it did not actually reweigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances in affirming the sentence. 


Of the cases in which Scalia and Thomas write separate opinions not joined in full by the other, this is the first in Thomas' second term, and the first in which Thomas' opinion is more favorable to the criminal defendant than Scalia's (in contrast to U.S. v. R.L.C. and Georgia v. McCollum).


In this case, Scalia and Thomas are like ships passing in the night.  Scalia writes on the question of constitutionality, Thomas on the question of retroactivity (a decision announcing a new constitutional right for a criminal defendant may be applied retroactively).   Scalia doesn't even mention retroactivity; Thomas doesn't opine on whether the mitigating cases he's applying retroactively were correctly decided.  


Even more so than Georgia, this case gives lie to the accusation that Thomas doesn't believe in precedent.  In Georgia, Thomas applied a decision, which was decided the term before Thomas joined the Court, with which he disagreed because the challengers weren't questioning it; here, he applies Stringer v. Black, 503 U.S. 222 (1992), despite being in dissent on that case.  Perhaps if the challengers here had questioned Stringer.... Scalia and Thomas both employ precedent here -- they just focus on different precedent. Thomas relies explicitly on the less-than-a-year-old Stringer, and implicitly on the mitigating cases (which started with Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280 (1976)). Scalia, on the other hand, reaches back a few years earlier to Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), which is an interesting choice, considering that was the case that invalidated all death penalty statutes throughout the country as they were then written. However, the principle of Furman remains good law, with which the mitigating cases are "rationally irreconcilable", and, unlike the mitigating cases, it is "arguably supported" by the text of the Eighth Amendment (Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 (1990) (Scalia's opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment)).