Supreme Court Turns Down Challenges to Victim Impact Videos
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear two cases that ask whether jurors considering the death penalty can consider emotional videos as victim impact evidence.
Justices David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer voted to hear the cases. The number was one vote shy of the number needed to grant certiorari, SCOTUSblog reports.
Stevens and Breyer both released statements dissenting from the cert denial. At issue is whether the videos were so prejudicial as to violate the murder defendants’ rights to due process.
In the case of convicted murderer Douglas Kelly, the prosecution played a 20-minute video of still photographs and video footage depicting the life of murder victim Sara Weir, including scenes of her swimming and horseback riding. The video, accompanied by music, ended with the victim’s grave marker and footage of people riding horseback, the kind of heaven where Weir’s mother said her daughter belonged.
The Supreme Court posted the Kelly video on its website.
A video played in the sentencing for Samuel Zamudio, convicted of murdering a husband and wife, included photos of the victims raising their children, serving in the military, hunting, fishing, vacationing and celebrating holidays. It also ended with grave markers.
Breyer said the videos have a powerful emotional impact that may call due process protections into play. “The film’s personal, emotional, and artistic attributes themselves create the legal problem,” he said in his statement (PDF posted by SCOTUSblog). “They render the film’s purely emotional impact strong, perhaps unusually so.”
Stevens wrote in his statement (PDF posted by SCOTUSblog) that the videos were “especially prejudicial.”
Stevens said changes in the Supreme Court’s capital jurisprudence since the 1980s have weakened safeguards for capital murder defendants. Since the Supreme Court approved victim impact evidence in Payne v. Tennessee in 1991, courts have done little to set boundaries between permissible impact evidence and the kind that is unduly prejudicial.
“As these cases demonstrate, when victim impact evidence is enhanced with music, photographs, or video footage, the risk of unfair prejudice quickly becomes overwhelming,” he wrote.
