Bullington v. Missouri

delivered the opinion of the Court.

Stroud v. United States, 251 U. S. 15 (1919), concerned a defendant who was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, and who then obtained, upon confession of error by the Solicitor General, a reversal of his conviction and a new trial. This Court, by a unanimous vote in that case, held that the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment1 did not bar the imposition of the death penalty when Stroud at his new trial was again convicted.

The issue in the present case is whether the reasoning of Stroud is also to apply under a system where a jury’s sentencing decision is made at a bifurcated proceeding’s second stage at which the prosecution has the burden of proving certain elements beyond a reasonable doubt before the death penalty may be imposed.

I

Missouri law provides two, and only two, possible sentences for a defendant convicted of capital murder: 2 (a) death, or (b) life imprisonment without eligibility for probation or parole for 50 years. Mo. Rev. Stat. § 565.008.1 (1978).3

Like most death penalty legislation enacted after this Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238 (1972), the Missouri statutes contain substantive standards to guide the discretion of the sentencer. The statutes also afford procedural safeguards to the convicted defendant. Section 565.006 provides that the trial court shall conduct a separate presentence hearing for the defendant who is convicted by a jury of capital murder.4 The hearing must be held before the same jury5 that found the defendant guilty, and “additional evidence in extenuation, mitigation, and aggravation of punishment” shall be heard. “Only such evidence in aggravation as the prosecution has made known to the defendant prior to his trial shall be admissible.” The jury must consider whether the evidence shows that there exist any of the 106 aggravating circumstances or the 7 mitigating circumstances specified by the statute, see §§ 565.012.2 and 565.012.3; whether any other mitigating or aggravating circumstances authorized by law exist; whether any aggravating circumstances that do exist are sufficient to warrant the imposition of the death penalty; and whether any mitigating circumstances that exist outweigh the aggravating circumstances. § 565.012.1. A jury that imposes the death penalty must designate in writing the aggravating circumstance or circumstances that it finds beyond a reasonable doubt. § 565.012.4. It also must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that any aggravating circumstance or circumstances that it finds to exist are sufficient to warrant the imposition of the death penalty. Missouri Approved Instructions — Criminal (MAI-Cr) § 15.42 (1979). A Missouri jury is instructed that it is not compelled to impose the death penalty, even if it decides that a sufficient aggravating circumstance or circumstances exist and that it or they are not outweighed by any mitigating circumstance or circumstances. MAI-Cr. § 15.46. A jury’s decision to impose the death penalty must be unanimous. If the jury is unable to agree, the defendant receives the alternative sentence of life imprisonment described above. § 565.006.2; MAI-Cr. § 15.48.

II

In December 1977, petitioner Robert Bullington was indicted in St. Louis County, Mo., for capital murder and other crimes arising out of the abduction of a young woman and her subsequent death by drowning.7

The Circuit Court of St. Louis County granted petitioner’s pretrial motion for a change of venue to Jackson County in the western part of the State. The prosecution, by letter, informed the defense that the State would seek the death penalty if the jury convicted the defendant of capital murder. App. 12. The letter-notice stated that the prosecution would present evidence of two aggravating circumstances specified by the statute: that “[t]he offense was committed by a person . . . who has a substantial history of serious assaultive criminal convictions,” § 565.012.2 (1), and that “[t]he offense was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman in that it involved torture, or depravity of mind,” § 565.012.2 (7).

At the guilt-or-innocence phase of petitioner’s trial, the jury returned a verdict of guilty of capital murder. App. 21. On the following day, the trial court proceeded to hold the presentence hearing required by § 565.006.2. Evidence submitted by the prosecution was received. None was offered by the defense. After argument by counsel, instructions from the judge, and deliberation, the jury returned its additional verdict fixing petitioner’s punishment not at death, but at imprisonment for life without eligibility for probation or parole for 50 years. App. 27.

Petitioner then moved, on various grounds, for judgment of acquittal or in the alternative for a new trial. While that motion was pending, Duren v. Missouri, 439 U. S. 357 (1979), was decided. In that case this Court held that Missouri’s constitutional and statutory provisions allowing women to claim automatic exemption from jury service deprived a defendant of his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments right to a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. The trial court overruled petitioner’s motion for acquittal but, relying upon Duren, granted his motion for a new trial. App. 44.

Soon thereafter, the prosecution served and filed a formal “Notice of Evidence in Aggravation,” stating that it intended again to seek the death penalty. The notice specified the same aggravating circumstances the State sought to prove at the first trial, see also Tr. of Oral Arg. 36, and asserted that it would introduce the evidence that was previously disclosed to defense counsel. App. 45-46. The defense moved to strike the notice, id., at 47, arguing that the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment (as made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, Benton v. Maryland, 395 U. S. 784, 794 (1969)) barred the imposition of the penalty of death when the first jury had declined to impose the death sentence.

The trial court announced that it would grant that motion and would not permit the State to seek the death penalty. Before the court issued a formal order to this effect, the prosecution sought a writ of prohibition or mandamus from the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District. After granting a temporary “stop order,” App. 56, the Court of Appeals without opinion denied the State’s request and dissolved the stop order. Id., at 57. The Supreme Court of Missouri, however, granted the prosecution’s motion for transfer of the case to that court and issued a preliminary-writ of prohibition. After argument, the court, sitting en banc and by a divided vote, sustained the State’s position and made the writ absolute. State ex rel. Westfall v. Mason, 594 S. W. 2d 908 (1980). It held that neither the Double Jeopardy Clause, nor the Eighth Amendment, nor the Due Process Clause barred the imposition of the death penalty upon petitioner at his new trial, and that allowing the prosecution to seek capital punishment would not impermissibly chill a defendant’s effort to seek redress for any constitutional violation committed at his initial trial.

We granted certiorari, 449 U. S. 819 (1980),8 in order to consider the important issues raised by petitioner regarding the administration of the death penalty.99

Ill

It is well established that the Double Jeopardy Clause forbids the . retrial of a defendant who has been acquitted of the crime charged. United States v. DiFrancesco, 449 U. S. 117, 129-130 (1980); Burks v. United States, 437 U. S. 1, 16 (1978) ; United States v. Martin Linen Supply Co., 430 U. S. 564, 571 (1977); Fong Foo v. United States, 369 U. S. 141, 143 (1962); Green v. United States, 355 U. S. 184 (1957). This Court, however, has resisted attempts to extend that principle to sentencing. The imposition of a particular sentence usually is not regarded as an “acquittal” of any more severe sentence that could have been imposed. The Court generally has concluded, therefore, that the Double Jeopardy Clause imposes no absolute prohibition against the imposition of a harsher sentence at retrial after a defendant has succeeded in having his original conviction set aside. See North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U. S. 711 (1969). See also United States v. DiFrancesco, 449 U. S., at 133, 137-138; Chaffin v. Stynchcombe, 412 U. S. 17, 23-24 (1973); Stroud v. United States, 251 U. S. 15 (1919).

The procedure that resulted in the imposition of the sentence of life imprisonment upon petitioner Bullington at his first trial, however, differs significantly from those employed in any of the Court’s-cases where the Double Jeopardy Clause has been held inapplicable to sentencing. The jury in this case was not given unbounded discretion to select an appropriate punishment from a wide range authorized by statute. Rather, a separate hearing was required and was held, and the jury was presented both a choice between two alternatives and standards to guide the making of that choice. Nor did the prosecution simply recommend what it felt to be an appropriate punishment. It undertook the burden of establishing certain facts beyond a reasonable doubt in its quest to obtain the harsher of the two alternative verdicts. The presentence hearing resembled and, indeed, in all relevant respects was like the immediately preceding trial on the issue of guilt or innocence. It was itself a trial on the issue of punishment so precisely defined by the Missouri statutes.10

In contrasty the sentencing procedures considered in the Court’s previous cases did not have the hallmarks of the trial on guilt or innocence. In Pearce, Chaffin, and Stroud, there was no separate sentencing proceeding at which the prosecution was required to prove — beyond a reasonable doubt or otherwise — additional facts in order to justify the particular sentence. In each of those cases, moreover, the sentencer’s discretion was essentially unfettered. In Stroud, no standards had been enacted to guide the jury’s discretion.11 In Pearce, the judge had a wide range of punishments from which to choose with no explicit standards imposed to guide him.12 And in Chaffin, the discretion given to the jury was extremely broad. That defendant, convicted in Georgia of robbery, could have been sentenced to death, to life imprisonment, or to a prison term of between 4 and 20 years. 412 U. S., at 18, and n. 1. The statute contained no standards to guide the jury's exercise of its discretion.13

In only one prior case, United States v. DiFrancesco, has this Court considered a separate or bifurcated sentencing procedure at which it was necessary for the prosecution to prove additional facts. The federal statute under consideration there, the "dangerous special offender” provision of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, 18 U. S. C. §§ 3575 and 3576, requires a separate presentence hearing. The Government must prove the additional fact that the defendant is a “dangerous special offender,” as defined in the statute, in order for the court to impose an enhanced sentence. But there are highly pertinent differences between the Missouri procedures controlling the present case and those found constitutional in DiFrancesco. The federal procedures at issue in DiFrancesco include appellate review of a sentence “on the record of the sentencing court,” § 3576, not a de novo proceeding that gives the Government the opportunity to convince a second factfinder of its view of the facts.14 Moreover, the choice presented to the federal judge under § 3575 is far broader than that faced by the state jury at the present petitioner’s trial. Bullington’s Missouri jury was given— and under the State’s statutes could be given — only two choices, death or life imprisonment. On the other hand, if the Federal Government proves that a person convicted of a felony is a dangerous special offender, the judge may sentence that person to “an appropriate term not to exceed twenty-five years and not disproportionate in severity to the maximum term otherwise authorized by law for such felony.” §3575 (b). Finally, although the statute requires the Government to prove the additional fact that the defendant is a “dangerous special offender,” it need do so only by a preponderance of the evidence. Ibid. This stands in contrast to the reasonable-doubt standard of the Missouri statute, the same standard required to be used at the trial on the issue of guilt or innocence. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307 (1979); In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970). The State’s use of this standard indicates that, as has been said generally of the criminal case, “the interests of the defendant are of such magnitude that . . . they have been protected by standards of proof designed to exclude as nearly as possible the likelihood of an erroneous judgment. . . . [O]ur society imposes almost the entire risk of error upon itself.” Addington v. Texas, 441 U. S. 418, 423-424 (1979).

IV

These procedural differences become important when the underlying rationale of the cases is considered. The State here relies principally upon North Carolina v. Pearce.15The Court’s starting point in that case, 395 U. S., at 719-720, was the established rule that there is no double jeopardy bar to retrying a defendant who has succeeded in overturning his conviction. See, e. g., United States v. Tateo, 377 U. S. 463 (1964); United States v. Ball, 163 U. S. 662, 672 (1896). The Court stated that this rule rests on the premise that the original conviction has been nullified and “the slate wiped clean.” 395 U. S., at 721. Therefore, if the defendant is convicted again, he constitutionally may be subjected to whatever punishment is lawful, subject only to the limitation that he receive credit for time served.

There is an important exception, however, to the rule recognized in Pearce. A defendant may not be retried if he obtains a reversal of his conviction on the ground that the evidence was insufficient to convict. Burks v. United States, 437 U. S. 1 (1978). The reasons for this exception are relevant here:

“[RJeversal for trial error, as distinguished from evi-dentiary insufficiency, does not constitute a decision to the effect that the government has failed to prove its cases. As such, it implies nothing with respect to the guilt or innocence of the defendant. .. . .

“The same cannot be said when a defendant’s conviction has been overturned due to a failure of proof at trial, in which case the prosecution cannot complain of prejudice, for it has been given one fair opportunity to offer whatever proof it can assemble. .. .. . Since we necessarily accord absolute finality to a jury’s verdict of acquittal — no matter how erroneous its decision — it is difficult to conceive how society has any greater interest in retrying a defendant when, on review, it is decided as a matter of law that the jury could not properly have returned a verdict of guilty.” Id., at 15-16 (emphasis in original).

The decision in Burks was foreshadowed by Green v. United States, 355 U. S. 184 (1957). In that case, the defendant had been indicted for first-degree murder, and the trial court instructed the jury that it could convict him either of that crime or of the lesser included offense of second-degree murder. The juiy convicted him of second-degree murder, but the conviction was reversed on appeal. The Court held that a retrial on the first-degree murder charge was barred by the Double Jeopardy Clause, because the defendant “was forced to run the gantlet once on that charge and the jury refused to convict him.” Id., at 190. See also Price v. Georgia, 398 U. S. 323 (1970).

Thus, the “clean slate” rationale recognized in Pearce is inapplicable whenever a jury agrees or an appellate court decides that the prosecution has not proved its case.

In the usual sentencing proceeding, however, it is impossible to conclude that a sentence less than the statutory maximum “constitute [s] a decision to the effect that the government has failed to prove its case.” 16 In the normal process of sentencing, “there are virtually no rules or tests or standards — and thus no issues to resolve . .. . M. Frankel, Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order 38 (1973). Thus, “[t]he discretion of the judge ... in [sentencing] matters is virtually free of substantive control or guidance. Where the judge has power to select a term of imprisonment within a range the exercise of that authority is left fairly at large.” Kadish, Legal Norm and Discretion in the Police and Sentencing Processes, 75 Harv. L. Rev. 904, 916 (1962).

The Court’s cases that have considered the role of the Double Jeopardy Clause in sentencing have noted this absence of sentencing standards. In DiFrancesco, for example, we observed: “[A] sentence is characteristically determined in large part on the basis of information, such as the presen-tence report, developed outside the courtroom. It is purely a judicial determination, and much that goes into it is the result of inquiry that is nonadversary in nature.” 449 U. S., at 136-137. And even if it is the jury that imposes the sentence, “[n]ormally, there would be no way for the jury to place on the record the reasons for its collective sentencing determination .. . . .” Chaffin v. Stynchcombe, 412 U. S., at 28, n. 15.

By enacting a capital sentencing procedure that resembles a trial on the issue of guilt or innocence, however, Missouri explicitly requires the jury to determine whether the prosecution has “proved its case.” Both Burks and Green, as has been noted, state an exception to the general rule relied upon in North Carolina v. Pearce. That exception is applicable here, and we therefore refrain from extending the rationale of Pearce to the very different facts of the present case. Chief Justice Bardgett, in his dissent from the ruling of the Missouri Supreme Court majority, observed that the sentence of life imprisonment which petitioner received at his first trial meant that “the jury has already acquitted the defendant of whatever was necessary to impose the death sentence.” 594 S. W. 2d, at 922. We agree.

A verdict of acquittal on the issue of guilt or innocence is, of course, absolutely final. The values that underlie this principle, stated for the Court by Justice Black, are equally applicable when a jury has rejected the State’s claim that the defendant deserves to die:

“The underlying idea, one that is deeply ingrained in at least the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence, is that the State with all its resources and power should not be allowed to make repeated attempts to convict an individual for an alleged offense, thereby subjecting him to embarrassment, expense and ordeal and compelling him to live in a continuing state of anxiety and insecurity, as well as enhancing the possibility that even though innocent he may be found guilty.” Creen v. United States, 355 U. S., at 187-188.

See also United States v. DiFrancesco, 449 U. S., at 136. The “embarrassment, expense and ordeal” and the “anxiety and insecurity” faced by a defendant at the penalty phase of a Missouri capital murder trial surely are at least equivalent to that faced by any defendant at the guilt phase of a criminal trial. The “unacceptably high risk that the [prosecution], with its superior resources, would wear down a defendant,” id., at 130, thereby leading to an erroneously imposed death sentence, would exist if the State were to have a further opportunity to convince a jury to impose the ultimate punishment. Missouri’s use of the reasonable-doubt standard indicates that in a capital sentencing proceeding, it is the State, not the defendant, that should bear “almost the entire risk of error.” Addington v. Texas, 441 U. S., at 424. Given these considerations, our decision today does not at all depend upon the State’s announced intention to rely only upon the same aggravating circumstances it sought to prove at petitioner’s first trial or upon its statement that it would introduce no new evidence in support of its contention that petitioner deserves the death penalty. Having received “one fair opportunity to offer whatever proof it could assemble,” Burks v. United States, 437 U. S., at 16, the State is not entitled to another.

V

The Court already has held that many of the protections available to a defendant at a criminal trial also are available at a sentencing hearing similar to that required by Missouri in a capital case. See, e. g., Specht v. Patterson, 386 U. S. 605 (1967) (due process protections such as right to counsel, right to confront witnesses, and right to present favorable evidence are available at hearing at which sentence may be imposed based upon “a new finding of fact . . . that was not an ingredient of the offense charged,” id., at 608). Because the sentencing proceeding at petitioner’s first trial was like the trial on the question of guilt or innocence, the protection afforded by the Double Jeopardy Clause to one acquitted by a jury also is available to him, with respect to the death penalty, at his retrial.17 We therefore refrain from extending the reasoning of Stroud v. United States, 251 U. S. 15 (1919), to this very different situation.

The judgment of the Supreme Court of Missouri is reversed, and the case is remanded to that court for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.