Jill L. Brown, Warden v. William Charles Payton (544 U.S. 133)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided March 22, 2005 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 544 U.S. 133 · 125 S. Ct. 1432
- Decided
- March 22, 2005
- Term
- October Term 2004
- Vote
- 5–3
- Majority author
- Justice Kennedy
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Vacated and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, convening en banc, granted habeas relief to respondent William Payton. It held that the jury instructions in the penalty phase of his trial for capital murder did not permit consideration of all the mitigation evidence Payton presented. The error, the court determined, was that the general mitigation instruction did not make it clear to the jury that it could consider evidence concerning Payton’s post-crime religious conversion and the prosecutor was allowed to urge this erroneous interpretation. We granted the petition for certiorari, 541 U. S. 1062 (2004), to decide whether the Ninth Circuit’s decision was contrary to the limits on federal habeas review imposed by 28 U. S. C. § 2254(d). We now reverse. I In 1980, while spending the night at a boarding house, Pay-ton raped another boarder, Pamela Montgomery, and then used a butcher knife to stab her to death. Payton proceeded to enter the bedroom of the house’s patron, Patricia Pen-singer, and to stab her as she slept aside her 10-year-old son, Blaine. When Blaine resisted, Payton started to stab him as well. Payton’s knife blade bent, and he went to the kitchen to retrieve another. Upon the intervention of other boarders, Payton dropped the second knife and fled. Payton was arrested and tried for the first-degree…
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