Alito’s First Opinion Gives New Trial to Capital Murder Defendant on Due Process Grounds

The Supreme Court handed down Holmes v. South Carolina today, the first opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. In this case, a very elderly woman was brutally raped, which led to serious injuries and eventually her death. Holmes was charged with capital murder, and his lawyer’s defense was (in part) that the crime had been committed by another person, Jimmy White. The trial court excluded this defense. The Supreme Court of South Carolina affirmed the conviction, ruling that the government’s evidence against Holmes was so strong that the evidence that Jimmy White had committed the offense was inadmissible.

In the decision announced today, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed. According to Justice Alito, the South Carolina court had taken a standard evidentiary rule that courts can exclude evidence that is unduly distracting and “radically changed and extended the rule” starting in a 2001 decision to regulate when defendants are allowed to put on particular defenses. Instead of excluding evidence when it would be too inflammatory or distracting, the new rule gave judges the power to look at the government’s case and then decide whether the defense could go on in light of the judge’s sense of its strength. According to Justice Alito, this rule was inconsistent with the Due Process requirement (as articularted in prior precedents) that a defendant’s right to put on a defense cannot be abridged by evidence rules that infringe upon a weighty interest of the accused and are arbitrary or disproportionate to the purposes they are designed to serve.

From the opinion:

The rule applied in this case appears to be based on the following logic: Where (1) it is clear that only one person was involved in the commission of a particular crime and (2) there is strong evidence that the defendant was the perpetrator, it follows that evidence of third-party guilt must be weak. But this logic depends on an accurate evaluation of the prosecution’s proof, and the true strength of the prosecution’s proof cannot be assessed without considering challenges to the reliability of the prosecution’s evidence. Just because the prosecution’s evidence, if credited, would provide strong support for a guilty verdict, it does not follow that evidence of third-party guilt has only a weak logical connection to the central issues in the case. And where the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses or the reliability of its evidence is not conceded, the strength of the prosecution’s case cannot be assessed without making the sort of factual findings that have traditionally been reserved for the trier of fact and that the South Carolina courts did not purport to make in this case.

The rule applied in this case is no more logical than its converse would be, i.e., a rule barring the prosecution from introducing evidence of a defendant’s guilt if the defendant is able to proffer, at a pretrial hearing, evidence that, if believed, strongly supports a verdict of not guilty. In the present case, for example, the petitioner proffered evidence that, if believed, squarely proved that White, not petitioner, was the perpetrator. It would make no sense, however, to hold that this proffer precluded the prosecution from introducing its evidence, including the forensic evidence that, if credited, provided strong proof of the petitioner’s guilt.

The point is that, by evaluating the strength of only one party’s evidence, no logical conclusion can be reached regarding the strength of contrary evidence offered by the other side to rebut or cast doubt. Because the rule applied by the State Supreme Court in this case did not heed this point, the rule is “arbitrary” in the sense that it does not rationally serve the end that the Gregory rule and other similar third-party guilt rules were designed to further. Nor has the State identified any other legitimate end that the rule serves. It follows that the rule applied in this case by the State Supreme Court violates a criminal defendant’s right to have “ ‘a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense.’ ” Crane, 476 U. S., at 690 (quoting Trombetta, 467 U. S., at 485).

Very good stuff, I think. The reasoning is tight and highly persuasive, and Alito speaks from experience in the field of criminal law. This was ‘only’ a unanimous opinion, but I take it as a sign of good things to come from Justice Alito.