Dorsie Lee Johnson, JR. v. Texas (509 U.S. 350)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 24, 1993 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 509 U.S. 350 · 113 S. Ct. 2658
- Decided
- June 24, 1993
- Term
- October Term 1992
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Kennedy
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court. For the second time this Term, we consider a constitutional challenge to the former Texas capital sentencing system. Like the condemned prisoner in Graham v. Collins, 506 U. S. 461 (1993), the petitioner here claims that the Texas special issues system in effect until 1991 did not allow his jury to give adequate mitigating effect to evidence of his youth. Graham was a federal habeas corpus proceeding where the petitioner had to confront the rule of Teague v. Lane, 489 U. S. 288 (1989), barring the application of new rules of law on federal habeas corpus. In part because the relief sought by Graham would have required a new rule within the meaning of Teague, we denied relief. The instant case comes to us on direct review of petitioner’s conviction and sentence, so we consider it without the constraints of Teague, though of course with the customary respect for the doctrine of stare decisis. Based upon our precedents, including much of the reasoning in Graham, we find the Texas procedures as applied in this case were consistent with the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. I Petitioner, then 19 years of age, and his companion, Amanda Miles, decided to rob Allsup’s convenience store in Snyder, Texas, on March 23, 1986. After agreeing that there should be no witnesses to the crime, the pair went to the store to survey its layout…
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