Criminal Procedure, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, William Brennan

Arizona v. Rumsey

Criminal Procedure, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Majority, Thurgood Marshall, Warren Burger, William Brennan / By

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.”

Criminal Procedure, Dissent, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist

Arizona v. Hicks

Criminal Procedure, Dissent, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist / By

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

Concurrence, Criminal Procedure, David Souter, Stephen Breyer

Arizona v. Evans

Concurrence, Criminal Procedure, David Souter, Stephen Breyer / By

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