HON. SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR JUSTICE, U.S. SUPREME COURT An Interview with Marci A. Hamilton Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public […]
And we are so blessed in America that we’ve had Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, her leadership changed so many of
The Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1996 Remarks by Sandra Day O’Connor Associate Justice, Supreme
Sandra Day O’Connor will forever be remembered as the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court. Her appointment
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JUSTICE O’CONNOR delivered the opinion of the Court.
The question presented is whether the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits the State of Arizona from sentencing respondent to death after the life sentence he had initially received was set aside on appeal. We agree with the Supreme Court of Arizona that Bullington v. Missouri, 451 U. S. 430 (1981), squarely controls the disposition of this case. Under the interpretation of the Double Jeopardy Clause adopted in that decision, imposition of the death penalty on respondent would be unconstitutional.
I
An Arizona jury convicted respondent of armed robbery and first degree murder. The trial judge, with no jury, then conducted a separate sentencing hearing to determine, according to the statutory scheme for considering aggravating and mitigating circumstances, Ariz.Rev.Stat.Ann. § 13-703 (Supp.1983-1984), whether death was the appropriate sentence for the murder conviction. Petitioner, relying entirely on the evidence presented at trial, argued that three statutory aggravating circumstances were present. Respondent, presenting only one witness, countered that no aggravating circumstances were present, but that several mitigating circumstances were. One of the principal points of contention concerned the scope of Ariz.Rev.Stat.Ann. § 13-703(F)(5) (Supp.1983-1984), which defines as an aggravating circumstance the murder’s commission “as consideration for the receipt, or in expectation of the receipt, of anything of pecuniary value.”
JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE and JUSTICE POWELL join, dissenting.
The Court today gives the right answer to the wrong question. The Court asks whether the police must have probable cause before either seizing an object in plain view or conducting a full-blown search of that object, and concludes that they must. I agree. In my view, however, this case presents a different question: whether police must have probable cause before conducting a cursory inspection of an item in plain view. Because I conclude that such an inspection is reasonable if the police are aware of facts or circumstances that justify a reasonable suspicion that the item is evidence of a crime, I would reverse the judgment of the Arizona Court of Appeals, and therefore dissent.
In Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443 (1971), Justice Stewart summarized three requirements that the plurality thought must be satisfied for a plain view search or seizure. First, the police must lawfully make an initial intrusion or otherwise be in a position from which they can view a particular area. Second, the officer must discover incriminating evidence “inadvertently.” Third, it must be “immediately apparent” to the police that the items they observe may be evidence of a crime, contraband, or otherwise subject to seizure. As another plurality observed in Texas v. Brown, 460 U. S. 730, 460 U. S. 737 (1983), these three requirements have never been expressly adopted by a majority of this Court, but
as the
JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE SOUTER and JUSTICE BREYER join, concurring.
The evidence in this case strongly suggests that it was a court employee’s departure from established recordkeeping procedures that caused the record of respondent’s arrest warrant to remain in the computer system after the warrant had been quashed. Prudently, then, the Court limits itself to the question whether a court employee’s departure from such established procedures is the kind of error to which the exclusionary rule should apply. The Court holds that it is not such an error, and I agree with that conclusion and join the Court’s opinion. The Court’s holding reaffirms that the exclusionary rule imposes significant costs on society’s law enforcement interests and thus should apply only where its deterrence purposes are “most efficaciously served,” ante, at 11.
In limiting itself to that single question, however, the Court does not hold that the court employee’s mistake in this case was necessarily the only error that may have occurred and to which the exclusionary rule might apply. While the police were innocent of the court employee’s mistake, they mayor may not have acted reasonably in their reliance on the recordkeeping system itself Surely it would not be reasonable for the police to rely, say, on a recordkeeping system, their own or some other agency’s, that has no mechanism to ensure its accuracy over time and that routinely leads to false arrests, even years after the probable cause
JUSTICE O’CONNOR, concurring.
This case requires us to determine whether Title VII prohibits an employer from offering an annuity plan in which the participating insurance company uses sex-based tables for calculating monthly benefit payments. It is important to stress that our judicial role is simply to discern the intent of the 88th Congress in enacting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, [ Footnote 3/1 ] a statute covering only discrimination in employment. What we, if sitting as legislators, might consider wise legislative policy is irrelevant to our task. Nor, as JUSTICE MARSHALL notes, ante at 463 U. S. 1078 -1079, n. 4, do we have before us any constitutional challenge. Finally, our decision must ignore (and our holding has no necessary effect on) the larger issue of whether considerations of sex should be barred from all insurance plans, including individual purchases of insurance, an issue that Congress is currently debating. See S. 372, 98th Cong., 1st Sess. (1983); H.R. 100, 98th Cong., 1st Sess. (1983).
Although the issue presented for our decision is a narrow one, the answer is far from self-evident. As with many other narrow issues of statutory construction, the general language chosen by Congress does not clearly resolve the precise question. Our polestar, however, must be the intent of Congress, and the guiding lights are the language, structure, and legislative history of Title VII. Our inquiry is made somewhat easier by the fact that this Court, in
JUSTICE O’CONNOR, with whom JUSTICE STEVENS joins, concurring.
I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in applying a First Amendment standard of review where, as here, the government is regulating neither speech nor an incidental, nonexpressive effect of speech. Any other conclusion would lead to the absurd result that any government action that had some conceivable speech-inhibiting consequences, such as the arrest of a newscaster for a traffic violation, would require analysis under the First Amendment. If, however, a city were to use a nuisance statute as a pretext for closing down a bookstore because it sold indecent books or because of the perceived secondary effects of having a purveyor of such books in the neighborhood, the case would clearly implicate First Amendment concerns and require analysis under the appropriate First Amendment standard of review. Because there is no suggestion in the record or opinion below of such pretextual use of the New York nuisance provision in this case, I concur in the Court’s opinion and judgment.
