Christopher John Spreitz v. Arizona

Twenty-two-year-old Christopher Spreitz was sentenced to death in 1994 by a trial judge who heard only cursory mitigating evidence and refused to consider or give effect to Mr. Spreitz’s lifelong struggle with alcohol because it lacked a causal relationship to his crime. The Arizona Supreme Court, independently reviewing the sentence, similarly excluded that evidence from its review in agreeing a death sentence was appropriate. The lawyer appointed to represent Mr. Spreitz in post-conviction review (PCR) identified significant mitigation evidence his trial counsel had failed to discover, including dozens of witnesses, but the PCR Court ruled that none of that evidence would have affected the sentence, largely because it, too, lacked a causal nexus with the crime. In federal habeas proceedings, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Arizona Supreme Court had unconstitutionally excluded non-nexus evidence from its review and ordered Arizona to resentence Mr. Spreitz or cure the error. The Arizona Supreme Court undertook to cure the error by itself re-weighing the evidence, but in doing so it restricted itself to the facts and the law in the trial record. While the court recited the rule that mitigating evidence need not be causally connected to the crime, it repeatedly stated that non-nexus evidence was inherently entitled to little weight. This petition presents the following questions:

1. Whether in conducting independent sentencing review to cure a constitutional error in a capital case, a court must consider all of the evidence in the record in light of contemporary knowledge and standards;

2. Whether the constitution forbids creating categories of mitigating evidence entitled only to minimal weight absent an undefined “causal nexus” to the offense.