Citing Racist Testimony, Justices Call for New Sentencing in Texas Death Penalty Case

Testimony laced with “a particularly noxious strain of racial prejudice” in a Texas death penalty case required a new sentencing for the defendant, Duane Buck, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

The testimony came from a psychologist who said black defendants were more dangerous than white ones. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in a 6-to-2 decision, said the psychologist’s report “said, in effect, that the color of Buck’s skin made him more deserving of execution.”

“Our law punishes people for what they do, not who they are,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Dispensing punishment on the basis of an immutable characteristic flatly contravenes this guiding principle.”

Mr. Buck was convicted of the 1995 murders of a former girlfriend, Debra Gardner, and one of her friends, Kenneth Butler, while Ms. Gardner’s young children watched. Texas law allows death sentences only if prosecutors can show the defendant poses a future danger to society.

During the trial’s sentencing phase in 1997, Mr. Buck’s lawyers presented a report from the psychologist, Walter Quijano, who said race was one of the factors associated with future dangerousness.

At the trial, a lawyer for Mr. Buck asked Dr. Quijano to elaborate.

“It’s a sad commentary that minorities, Hispanics and black people, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system,” Dr. Quijano testified.

A prosecutor followed up: “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons — is that correct?”

Dr. Quijano answered, “Yes.”

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the testimony “appealed to a powerful racial stereotype — that of black men as ‘violence prone.’”

Other evidence suggested that Mr. Buck did not pose a threat of future danger, Chief Justice Roberts wrote.

“Buck’s prior violent acts had occurred outside of prison, and within the context of romantic relationships with women,” the chief justice wrote. “If the jury did not impose a death sentence, Buck would be sentenced to life in prison, and no such romantic relationship would be likely to arise. A jury could conclude that those changes would minimize the prospect of future dangerousness.”

“But one thing would never change: the color of Buck’s skin,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Buck would always be black.”

Texas argued that Dr. Quijano’s testimony was brief and was overwhelmed by other evidence that Mr. Buck continued to pose a threat.

Chief Justice Roberts rejected that argument. “When a jury hears expert testimony that expressly makes a defendant’s race directly pertinent on the question of life or death, the impact of that evidence cannot be measured simply by how much airtime it received at trial or how many pages it occupies in the record,” he wrote. “Some toxins can be deadly in small doses.”

In 2000, John Cornyn, then Texas’ attorney general and now a United States senator, disavowed Dr. Quijano’s testimony in six cases, including that of Mr. Buck. “It is inappropriate to allow race to be considered as a factor in our criminal justice system,” he said in a public statement. The state later consented to new sentencing proceedings in the five other cases.

After Mr. Cornyn left office, the state continued to seek to execute Mr. Buck. His case was different, prosecutors said, because Mr. Buck’s own lawyer — rather than prosecutors — had presented Dr. Quijano’s testimony.

But Chief Justice Roberts said that only made the problem worse. “No competent defense attorney would introduce such evidence about his own client,” he wrote, noting that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. had said much the same thing in a 2011 opinion at an earlier stage of the case. Back then, Justice Alito wrote that the case “concerns bizarre and objectionable testimony.”

In dissent on Wednesday, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Alito, said, “Texas had good reason for treating this case differently from the others.”

“This is the only one” of the six cases, Justice Thomas wrote, quoting from Justice Alito’s 2011 opinion, “where ‘it can be said that the responsibility for eliciting the offensive testimony lay squarely with the defense.’”

But Chief Justice Roberts wrote that an expert presented by the defense had special force. “When a defendant’s own lawyer puts in the offending evidence, it is in the nature of an admission against interest, more likely to be taken at face value,” he wrote.

One of Mr. Buck’s trial lawyers, Jerry Guerinot, has a dismal record in death penalty cases, having represented 20 people sentenced to death in Texas, more than are awaiting execution in about half of the states that have the death penalty.

The case reached the Supreme Court on the narrow question of whether a federal appeals court should have allowed Mr. Buck to appeal a challenge to his death sentence. But Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion answered larger questions, too, ruling that Mr. Buck’s lawyers had been ineffective and had prejudiced him, making him entitled to a new sentencing hearing.

In his dissent, Justice Thomas said the majority had been so eager to reach its “desired outcome” that it had bulldozed procedural obstacles and misapplied settled law. As a consequence, the decision in the case, Buck v. Davis, No. 15-8049, “has few ramifications, if any beyond the highly unusual facts presented here,” Justice Thomas wrote.

Justice Thomas described Mr. Buck’s murders in detail, suggesting that they were proof enough that he remained dangerous and saying that Chief Justice Roberts had relied “on rhetoric and speculation to craft a finding of prejudice.”