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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The U.S. Supreme Court lifted the death sentence on more than 100 cases, but some critics say court conservatives may only be trying to fine-tune the machinery of capital punishment.
Jun 25, 2002 | It's not the 1960s-era Warren Court, but in two remarkable decisions in the past week, the U.S. Supreme Court has lifted the death penalty from more than 370 formerly doomed prisoners -- 10 percent of the total death row population -- and opened the door to new appeals by hundreds more.
The decisions Monday and last Thursday stunned both sides in the contentious debate over capital punishment. Opponents cheered the unexpected victories, saying the rulings made over the opposition of Chief Justice William Rehnquist marked the most significant turn in the debate in 25 years. Advocates were left to wonder what has happened to a court that had been widely considered the most conservative in half a century.
Some analysts, however, suggested that the court's fundamental support for capital punishment likely remains intact, and that conservative justices who joined Monday's ruling may have been trying to pare away cases that are most vulnerable to criticism at a time when pointed questions have arisen about the overall integrity and fairness of the death penalty.
The latest decision on Monday overturned the death sentence of Timothy Ring, a man convicted in Arizona seven years ago of participating in the fatal 1994 robbery of an armored car, and simultaneously overturned all the death sentences currently on appeal in five states, including Arizona.
At issue was Arizona's practice of having judges, instead of jurors, deciding whether a convicted person deserved death or life in prison without parole. While a jury had found Ring guilty because he had helped plan the robbery, trial testimony had not placed him at the scene of the crime, and thus they did not find evidence of premeditation. At a sentencing hearing before a judge, there was further testimony from an accomplice in the crime who claimed Ring had not only been at the scene but had been the shooter of the driver of the armored car. On that basis the judge sentenced him to die.
In its 7-2 decision, the high court decided that any facts that lead to an increased sentence, including the sentence of death, must be made by a jury, not by a judge. Court watchers had expected the Ring case to have the support of the four most liberal justices -- David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens and Justice Stephen Breyer -- but were doubtful about whether there would be any support from any of the court's five more conservative members.
Much attention was focused on Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the court's most staunch supporter of capital punishment, because two years ago he had written a strong opinion in support of the court's 5-4 ruling in a case called Apprendi v. New Jersey. That case had established that juries had to determine the facts that affected sentencing in noncapital cases.
During the hearing on Ring last April, Scalia had suggested, with some of his questions to the attorneys in the case, that the Apprendi decision would not apply to death penalty issues because the Supreme Court's requirement that all capital trials be separated into two parts -- a guilt phase and a sentencing phase -- was just a technical matter, not something rooted in constitutional or common law principles.
In the end, however, Scalia bowed to the new precedent he had helped set by Apprendi. As he wrote in his opinion supporting the majority decision in Ring: "I believe that the fundamental meaning of the jury-trial guarantee of the Sixth Amendment is that all facts essential to imposition of the level of punishment must be found by the jury beyond a reasonable doubt."
Scalia was joined by two other conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, who had also supported the earlier Apprendi decision, and Anthony Kennedy, who had opposed Apprendi but who now said he felt bound by the court's earlier decision on jury primacy.
In dissent in the Ring case were Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Conner.
The Ring decision immediately means that some 168 death row prisoners whose cases are still on direct appeal in the states of Arizona, Nebraska, Idaho, Colorado and Nebraska, where judges do all the capital sentencing, will have their sentences lifted. Before a court can decide whether those people's sentences default to life in prison or whether they should be retried before a new jury to consider resentencing them to death, the legislatures in those states would have to pass new sentencing legislation.
