Cooper v. State

739 So. 2d 82, 1999 WL 459249
CourtSupreme Court of Florida
DecidedJuly 8, 1999
Docket86,133
StatusPublished
Cited by30 cases

This text of 739 So. 2d 82 (Cooper v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Florida primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Cooper v. State, 739 So. 2d 82, 1999 WL 459249 (Fla. 1999).

Opinion

739 So.2d 82 (1999)

Albert COOPER, Appellant,
v.
STATE of Florida, Appellee.

No. 86,133.

Supreme Court of Florida.

July 8, 1999.
Rehearing Denied September 13, 1999.

*83 Scott W. Sakin, Special Assistant Public Defender, Miami, Florida, for Appellant.

Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General, and Randall Sutton, Assistant Attorney General, Miami, Florida, for Appellee.

PER CURIAM.

We have on appeal the judgment and sentence of the trial court imposing the death penalty on Albert Cooper. We have jurisdiction. Art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla. Const. We affirm the conviction but vacate the death sentence and remand for imposition of a life sentence without possibility of parole for twenty-five years.

On May 25, 1991, Albert Cooper and Tivan Johnson robbed a pawnshop owned by Charles Barker and shot Barker to death. Both men were later arrested and confessed to the crime. Cooper was charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery with a firearm, and armed burglary with a firearm, and was convicted as charged following a joint trial.

During the penalty phase of the trial, the defense presented testimony of two mental health experts, Drs. Eisenstein and Schwartz, and several relatives. Dr. Eisenstein testified that Cooper is brain-damaged, has a history of seizures, and suffers from frontal lobe dysfunction, which causes him to have impaired judgment and poor impulse control.[1] Dr. Eisenstein *84 further stated that at the time of the crime Cooper was under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance and was under extreme duress or under substantial dominion of another person. The other defense mental health expert, Dr. Schwartz, testified that Cooper scored high on tests for both paranoia and schizophrenia and is borderline retarded.[2]

Relatives attested to the brutality Cooper suffered as a young child at the hands of his father (his mother divorced the man when Cooper was six or seven years old). One of Cooper's sisters testified that their father was an alcoholic who frequently beat the children and who on one occasion rammed Cooper's head into the refrigerator. Cooper's aunt testified that the father frequently whipped and beat Cooper and threatened the children with a gun. And a second sister testified that the father would frequently pull out his gun and threaten the children and that on one occasion he actually put the gun to young Cooper's head.[3]

The jury recommended death by an eight-to-four vote, and the court imposed a sentence of death based on three aggravating circumstances,[4] two statutory mitigating circumstances,[5] and several nonstatutory mitigating circumstances.[6] The court additionally imposed consecutive life sentences on the armed robbery and armed burglary convictions, with consecutive mandatory minimum terms for the firearm violations.

Cooper raises ten claims on appeal[7] but we find a single issue dispositive.[8] Our review of the record shows that *85 Cooper's death sentence is disproportionate when compared to other capital cases. This Court in Almeida v. State, No. 89,432, ___ So.2d ___, 1999 WL 506965 (Fla. July 8, 1999), explained the parameters of our proportionality review:

Almeida next claims that his death sentence is disproportionate. We agree. The Court in State v. Dixon, 283 So.2d 1 (Fla.1973), held that the death penalty is reserved for only the most indefensible of crimes:
Review of a sentence of death by this Court ... is the final step within the State judicial system. Again, the sole purpose of the step is to provide the convicted defendant with one final hearing before death is imposed. Thus, it again presents evidence of legislative intent to extract the penalty of death for only the most aggravated, the most indefensible of crimes.

Id. at 8. We later explained: "Our law reserves the death penalty only for the most aggravated and least mitigated murders." Kramer v. State, 619 So.2d 274, 278 (Fla.1993). Thus, our inquiry when conducting proportionality review is two-pronged: We compare the case under review to others to determine if the crime falls within the category of both (1) the most aggravated, and (2) the least mitigated of murders.

Almeida, slip op. at 21-22, ___ So.2d at ___.

In the present case, as noted above, the trial court found that three aggravators had been established, i.e., commission of a prior capital or violent felony (based on a robbery-murder Cooper committed several days after the present crime), commission during a robbery and for pecuniary gain, and CCP. This Court in other capital cases has affirmed the death penalty where comparable or less aggravation was present.[9] Thus, the first prong of the above standard appears to be satisfied.

The trial court additionally found that two statutory and several nonstatutory mitigators were established, including Cooper's low intelligence (i.e., Dr. Schwartz testified that Cooper's test results placed him in the borderline retarded category) and his abusive childhood. This Court has reversed the death penalty in cases where multiple aggravators were posed against comparable mitigation.[10] In addition to *86 the evidence of brutal childhood, brain damage, mental retardation, and mental illness (i.e., paranoid schizophrenia) in the present case, the defendant was eighteen years old at the time of the crime and had no criminal record prior to the present offense. We note that the jury vote was eight-to-four. On this record, we cannot conclude that the present crime is one of the least mitigated murders this Court has reviewed. In fact, the record shows just the opposite—i.e., that this is one of the most mitigated killings we have reviewed. Accordingly, Cooper's death sentence is disproportionate.

Based on the foregoing, we affirm Cooper's convictions and sentences with the following exceptions. We vacate his death sentence and remand for imposition of a life sentence without possibility of parole for twenty-five years on the first-degree murder count. We reverse the imposition of consecutive mandatory minimum terms on the firearm counts and remand for imposition of concurrent mandatory minimum terms on those counts.[11]

It is so ordered.

SHAW, ANSTEAD and PARIENTE, JJ., and KOGAN, Senior Justice, concur.

WELLS, J., concurs in part and dissents in part with an opinion, in which HARDING, C.J., and OVERTON, Senior Justice, concur.

WELLS, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I concur with the majority's decision to affirm appellant's conviction. I also concur that we must reverse the consecutive mandatory minimum terms on the firearm counts in favor of concurrent mandatory minimum terms. I dissent, however, from the majority's analysis of proportionality, and therefore also from the reversal of appellant's death sentence. I conclude that the majority's proportionality analysis is contrary to this Court's role in reviewing capital cases.

The majority's proportionality analysis erroneously assumes a sentencing role for this Court in this capital case by improperly dismissing in summary fashion the trial judge's in-the-courtroom evaluation of the penalty phase evidence. The fact of this assumption is made clear when the trial judge's evaluation of appellant's mitigation evidence is compared with this Court's characterization of the trial judge's evaluation.

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Bluebook (online)
739 So. 2d 82, 1999 WL 459249, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/cooper-v-state-fla-1999.