Nature of the Case
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Facts
D called 911 to report that his stepdaughter, referred to here as L. H., had been raped. He told the 911 operator that L.H. had been in the garage while he readied his son for school. Upon hearing loud screaming, D said, he ran outside and found L.H. in the side yard. Two neighborhood boys, D told the operator, had dragged L.H. from the garage to the yard, pushed her down, and raped her. D claimed he saw one of the boys riding away on a blue 10-speed bicycle. Police found L.H. on her bed, wearing a T-shirt and wrapped in a bloody blanket. D told police he had carried her from the yard to the bathtub and then to the bed. Consistent with this explanation, police found a thin line of blood drops in the garage on the way to the house and then up the stairs. D had used a basin of water and a cloth to wipe blood from the victim. This later prevented medical personnel from collecting a reliable DNA sample. L. H.'s injuries were the most severe the medical examiner had seen from a sexual assault in his four years of practice. A laceration to the left wall of the vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, causing her rectum to protrude into the vaginal structure. Her entire perineum was torn from the posterior fourchette to the anus. The injuries required emergency surgery. L.H. and D maintained in their accounts to investigators. During a taped interview by a psychologist, L.H. said: 'I'm going to tell the same story. They just want me to change it. ... They want me to say my Dad did it. ... I don't want to say it. ... I tell them the same, same story.' She told the psychologist that she had been playing in the garage when a boy came over and asked her about Girl Scout cookies she was selling; and that the boy 'pulled [her by the legs to] the backyard,' id., at 01:47:41-:52, where he placed his hand over her mouth, 'pulled down [her] shorts.' Eight days after the crime, and despite L. H.'s insistence that D was not the offender, petitioner was arrested for the rape. An inspection of the side yard immediately after the assault was inconsistent with a rape having occurred there, the grass having been found mostly undisturbed but for a small patch of coagulated blood. Petitioner said that one of the perpetrators fled the crime scene on a blue 10-speed bicycle but gave inconsistent descriptions of the bicycle's features, such as its handlebars. Investigators found a bicycle matching D and L. H.'s description in tall grass behind a nearby apartment, and D identified it as the bicycle one of the perpetrators was riding. Yet its tires were flat, it did not have gears, and it was covered in spider webs. In addition, police found blood on the underside of L. H.'s mattress. This convinced them the rape took place in her bedroom, not outside the house. About 21 months after the rape, L.H. recorded her accusation in a videotaped interview with the Child Advocacy Center. D was charged with aggravated rape of a child under, and the State (P) sought the death penalty. The jury unanimously determined that D should be sentenced to death. The court rejected petitioner's reliance on Coker v. Georgia noting that, while Coker bars the use of the death penalty as punishment for the rape of an adult woman, it left open the question which, if any, other nonhomicide crimes can be punished by death consistent with the Eighth Amendment. Because '`children are a class that needs special protection,'' the state court reasoned, the rape of a child is unique in terms of the harm it inflicts upon the victim and our society. The Supreme Court of Louisiana affirmed. The court noted that since 1993, four more States-Oklahoma, South Carolina, Montana, and Georgia-had capitalized the crime of child rape and at least eight States had authorized capital punishment for other nonhomicide crimes. By its count, 14 of the then-38 States permitting capital punishment, plus the Federal Government, allowed the death penalty for nonhomicide crimes and 5 allowed the death penalty for the crime of child rape. It noted the severity of the crime; that the execution of child rapists would serve the goals of deterrence and retribution; and that, unlike in Atkins and Roper, there were no characteristics of D that tended to mitigate his moral culpability. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.
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