AUTRY v. MCKASKLE, ACTING DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
No. 83-6388 (A-718)
C. A. 5th Cir.
MARCH 14, 1984
465 U.S. 1090
In habeas corpus proceedings, the Federal District Court handled the trial court‘s failure to make factual findings by assuming all of petitioner‘s allegations to be true. Assuming that petitioner had been beaten into signing the written confession, the District Court found that his oral declarations were “voluntary and ‘sufficiently an act of free will to purge the primary taint’ of the physically coerced written confessions.” App. B to Pet. for Cert. 11. The Court of Appeals affirmed, emphasizing the following facts: six hours, during which petitioner was allowed to sleep in his cell, elapsed between the putative beatings and petitioner‘s call to his mother; petitioner himself requested to make the call; and the overheard statements were directed not to any agent of the State but rather to a private party of petitioner‘s own choosing. Autry v. Estelle, 706 F. 2d, at 1403.
Assuming, as did the District Court and Court of Appeals, that petitioner‘s allegations were true, I cannot accept the lower courts’ conclusion that the overheard statements were voluntary. Petitioner made these statements in a telephone conversation conducted in the booking room of the jail while in close proximity to an officer who had recently participated in beating a confession out of him. To my mind, these circumstances raise sufficient doubt regarding the voluntariness of the statements to require suppression of the policeman‘s account of the conversation. I find it implausible that six hours of sleep could erase from petitioner‘s consciousness the fear that the earlier beatings must have engendered. Nor does the fact that he initiated the call negate the possibility that he wanted to make contact with a source of outside support and at the same time to avoid a new round of beatings for contradicting his earlier coerced confession. Assuming, as we must, that petitioner was subjected to beatings, the burden was upon the State to show that the telephone conversation was untainted by continued coercion. The State failed to sustain that burden.
For these reasons, I dissent.
Application for stay of execution of sentence of death, presented
JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom JUSTICE MARSHALL joins, dissenting.
As I have recently explained, see Pulley v. Harris, ante, at 60 (BRENNAN, J., dissenting), there has been no change over the past 10 years in the manner in which capital punishment is administered in this country that has in any way shaken my conviction that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, see Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 227 (1976) (BRENNAN, J., dissenting). I would, therefore, grant the application for a stay of execution, grant certiorari, and vacate the death sentence.
Indeed, the particular circumstances of this case only serve to reinforce my conviction that the imposition of the death penalty in our society inevitably amounts to an inexcusable affront to “the dignity of man.” Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86, 100 (1958). Mr. Autry has already endured the profound psychological torment of lying strapped to a gurney for over an hour with an intravenous needle in his arm, waiting to be put to death. That wait was brought to an end by the grant of a last-minute stay permitting him time to vindicate his constitutional rights. Following today‘s decision, however, he will again have to undergo the same indignity and psychological anguish, knowing that this time will probably be the last. Faced with such circumstances, I for one refuse to accept the notion implicit in today‘s decision that we have kept faith with the dual promise of the Eighth Amendment that the State‘s power to punish is “exercised within the limits of civilized standards,” and that we keep pace with the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” in carrying out criminal punishments. Id., at 100-101.
I dissent.