Sandoval

California state prisoner Alfred Arthur Sandoval was convicted of four murders and one attempted murder. He was sentenced to death for one of the murders and to life imprisonment without possibility of parole on the other murder charges. The California Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and, over the dissent of Justice Mosk, the sentences. See People v. Sandoval, 4 Cal.4th 155 , 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 342 , 841 P.2d 862 (Cal.1992). Justice Mosk would have vacated the death sentence and held that the prosecutor’s penalty phase summation by its heavy reliance on religious authority in arguing to the jury that the death penalty was sanctioned by God, was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. See id. at 205 , 14 Cal.Rptr.2d 342 , 841 P.2d 862 (Mosk, J., concurring and dissenting).

After the California Supreme Court denied Sandoval’s petitions for collateral review, the district court granted habeas relief on the ground that the trial for the single murder count on which the death penalty was imposed should have been severed from the trial on the other crimes. The court reasoned that the victim in the former was more innocent than the other victims. The district court otherwise denied…

dissenting in part:

I agree with all of the majority opinion, except its resolution of Sandoval’s self-representation claim. I, too, believe that, by necessity, the Sixth Amendment right to self-representation is looked upon as the weaker corollary of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. In this case, however, we are not called upon to determine whether this somewhat disfavored right was asserted in the first instance (thereby foregoing the all-important right to counsel); rather, we must decide whether Sandoval ivaived his constitutionally protected right of self-representation once it was asserted.

Even if waiver under such circumstances is accomplished more easily than is waiver of the otherwise self-executing right to counsel, a finding of waiver calls for 8, fact-specific inquiry. The cases relied upon by the majority teach us this lesson. For example, in Brown v. Wainwright, 665 F.2d 607 (Former 5th Cir.1982) (en banc), the defendant’s Sixth Amendment claim was denied after an evidentiary hearing had been held and all of the facts had been considered by the district court. See id. at 616 (Garwood, J., concurring) (“I wish ... to emphasize that following an evidentiary…