Dawson v. Delaware: Membership in the Prison Gang and Due Process

Dawson v. Delaware, 503 U.S. 159 (1992), was a United States Supreme Court decision that ruled that a person’s rights of association and due process, as granted under the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, cannot be infringed upon if such an association has no bearing on the case at hand.

Facts

Early in the morning of December 1, 1986, David Dawson and three other inmates escaped from the Delaware Correctional Center at Smyrna.

Dawson stole a car and headed south, while the other escapees stole another car and headed north. After burglarizing one home in Kenton, Dawson entered the home of Richard and Madeline Kisner. Dawson tied up Mrs. Kisner, who was at home alone preparing for work, and stabbed her 12 times before taking her car and some money. He was found the next day sleeping in a different stolen car in Milford.

The Delaware Superior Court found Dawson guilty of first-degree murder and several other crimes on June 24, 1988.

During the penalty phase, the prosecution planned to present evidence that Dawson belonged to the prison’s chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood, including expert testimony about that group, to prove that Dawson’s membership was relevant to his crimes.

Eventually, Dawson agreed to a stipulation that the Aryan Brotherhood was a white racist group that had its roots in a California prison gang of the same name, in return for the exclusion of expert testimony about the group.

The jury concluded that the aggravating factors in the case, including Dawson’s prison record, his escape from prison, the fact that he committed the murder adjunct to a second felony, and his association with the Aryan Brotherhood outweighed the mitigating factors and sentenced him to death.

The Supreme Court of Delaware upheld the death sentence.

Opinion of the Court

In writing the Court’s opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquist noted that the Constitution does not erect a barrier to the admission of evidence of a person’s beliefs and associations during sentencing simply because those beliefs and associations are protected by the First Amendment.

Chief Justice Rehnquist cited Barclay v. Florida, 463 U.S. 939 (1983), for which he had written the Court’s opinion as an Associate Justice, as a case where such beliefs were material in establishing the murderers’ motives.

In Barclay, Elwood Barclay and four other black men, looking to start a race war, killed white hitchhiker in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, in 1974. The Supreme Court of Florida imposed the death penalty on Barclay and co-defendant Jacob John Dougan. In 1985, however, the court reversed itself by ordering that Barclay’s sentence be commuted to life in prison with eligibility for parole in 25 years and that Dougan be re-sentenced. Dougan was sentenced to death again in 1987 and remains on Florida’s Death Row.

Chief Justice Rehnquist noted that because of the narrowness of the stipulation regarding the Aryan Brotherhood that the Delaware trial court agreed to – that is, because the trial court did not seek to provide evidence that the chapter Dawson was associated with was engaged in or endorsed racist activities, or was engaged in or endorsed any other violent or unlawful acts – it violated Dawson’s rights under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Chief Justice Rehnquist also noted that even if the Aryan Brotherhood chapter did hold racist beliefs, elements of racial hatred were absent in this case. Both Dawson and Kisner, the woman he murdered, were white. The Court vacated the sentence against Dawson and remanded the case.

Justice Thomas, concurring

In his dissent, Justice Thomas declared that he believed the Aryan Brotherhood stipulation spoke directly to Dawson’s character, and as such the stipulation had relevance at sentencing as an aggravating factor.

Justice Thomas noted that even if the prosecution did not introduce specific evidence of the Aryan Brotherhood chapter’s activities, the jury could reasonably conclude that Dawson had engaged in some sort of illegal or forbidden activities during his membership in the gang.

Justice Thomas cited a 1985 report from the U.S. Department of Justice about prison gangs to illustrate their deviant nature, and the U.S. Court of Appeals case Jones v. Hamelman (7th Cir. 1989) to illustrate that expert testimony was unnecessary to describe a prison gang once its existence was noted.

Justice Thomas believed that the Court was imposing a double standard on the prosecution in this case and future cases by allowing Dawson to present mitigating character evidence during sentencing without explaining such evidence explicitly while not allowing the prosecution to do the same.

Extracts

The Aryan Brotherhood refers to a white racist prison gang that began in California in response to other gangs of racial minorities.

Separate gangs calling themselves the Aryan Brotherhood now exist in many state prisons including Delaware.

The brief stipulation proved only that an Aryan Brotherhood prison gang originated in California in the 1960’s, that it entertains white racist beliefs, and that a separate gang in the Delaware prison system calls itself the Aryan Brotherhood.

Justice Thomas, concurring

The description of the Aryan Brotherhood as a “racist” prison gang conveyed additional information about Dawson’s character. In Barclay v. fflorida, 463 U. S. 939 (1983), the plurality found it relevant that a black gang conspired not merely to commit crimes, but to commit them against white persons out of racial hatred.

The stipulation itself makes clear that the Aryan Brotherhood does not exist merely to facilitate formulation of abstract racist thoughts, but to respond to gangs of racial minorities.

Indeed, in the case of an organization claiming to be part of the Aryan Brotherhood, the jury very well may not have needed even the explanation that the stipulation provided.

Courts regularly have noticed that the Aryan Brotherhood is a singularly vicious prison gang that it has a hostility to black inmates, and that it originated during the prison racial violence of the 1960’s.

The Aryan Brotherhood gangs also have received substantial attention in both popular and scholarly writings.

See, e.g., Matthee, Stronger Prison Gang Influence Cited, L. A. Times, July 10, 1987, part 1, p. 34, col. 1 (describing members of the Aryan Brotherhood as “among the most violent prisoners”); Goodgame, Mayhem in the Cellblocks, Time, Aug. 12, 1985, p. 20 (describing the Aryan Brotherhood’s “inflexible ethic of vengeance”); J. Fox, Organizational and Racial Conflict in Maximum-Security Prisons 136 (1982) (identifying the Aryan Brotherhood as an “extremist” organization like the Ku Klux Klan); United States Dept. of Justice, Prison Gangs: Their Extent, Nature and Impact on Prisons 650190 (1985) (discussing the activities of the Aryan Brotherhood in the prisons of 14 States).

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