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History > 2016 > USA > Death penalty (I)
Supreme Court Rules in Capital Cases,
Overturning a Death Sentence
MAY 31, 2016
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday took action in two
death penalty cases, rejecting a broad constitutional challenge to capital
punishment from Louisiana and reversing a death sentence from Arizona.
The moves were in keeping with the court’s general approach in this area. It has
been open to cutting back on the availability of the death penalty but not
inclined to test its constitutionality.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, dissenting in Glossip v. Gross last year, urged his
colleagues to consider the larger question. “Rather than try to patch up the
death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” he wrote, “I would ask for full
briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the
Constitution.”
The case from Louisiana asked the justices to consider that question, but the
court turned down the appeal without comment. Justice Breyer dissented and, as
in Glossip, only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined him.
The case concerned Lamondre Tucker, who was 18 in 2008 when he shot and killed
his pregnant girlfriend. Echoing points Justice Breyer made in his Glossip
dissent, Mr. Tucker’s lawyers said the death penalty violated the Eighth
Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.
Mr. Tucker was sentenced to death in Caddo Parish, La., which his lawyers said
“imposes more death sentences per capita than any other parish or county in the
nation.”
That disparity was emblematic, they said, of a capital justice system in which
death sentences are imposed arbitrarily in fairly few counties around the
nation, with prosecutions warped by racial discrimination and politics.
Justice Breyer said the court should have heard the case, Tucker v. Louisiana,
No. 15-946. Mr. Tucker, he suggested, barely qualified for the death penalty in
the first place, as he was 18 at the time of the killing and had an I.Q. of 74.
The Supreme Court has banned the execution of juvenile offenders and of the
intellectually disabled.
“Tucker was sentenced to death in a Louisiana county (Caddo Parish) that imposes
almost half the death sentences in Louisiana, even though it accounts for only 5
percent of that state’s population and 5 percent of its homicides,” Justice
Breyer wrote, citing Mr. Tucker’s brief.
“Given these facts, Tucker may well have received the death penalty not because
of the comparative egregiousness of his crime, but because of an arbitrary
feature of his case, namely, geography,” Justice Breyer added. “One could
reasonably believe that if Tucker had committed the same crime but been tried
and sentenced just across the Red River in, say, Bossier Parish, he would not
now be on death row.”
In the second case, Lynch v. Arizona, No. 15-8366, the court reversed a death
sentence in an unsigned opinion, saying the jury had not been told an important
fact: that the only alternative to a death sentence was life without the
possibility of parole.
The case concerned Shawn P. Lynch, who was convicted of the 2001 kidnapping and
killing of James Panzarella, whom he met at a bar in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Prosecutors argued that the death penalty was warranted because Mr. Lynch posed
a risk of future dangerousness. But they blocked defense lawyers from telling
the jury that the only alternative sentence would have kept Mr. Lynch in prison
for life.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that a 1994 decision required the judge to
tell the jury about the alternative or let defense lawyers do so. The unsigned
opinion rejected the state’s argument that such statements were not required
because executive clemency remained available and because the state Legislature
may someday allow parole.
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said
the 1994 decision was wrong. Justice Thomas accused the majority of
micromanaging state sentencing procedures and imposing “a magic-words
requirement.”
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Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter at @adamliptak.
A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2016,
on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Supreme Court Rules in
Capital Cases, Overturning an Arizona Death Sentence.
Supreme Court Rules in Capital Cases, Overturning a Death
Sentence,
NYT,
May 31, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/
supreme-court-rules-in-capital-cases-overturning-a-death-sentence.html
The Death Penalty Endgame
JAN. 16, 2016
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
How does the death penalty in America end?
For decades that has been an abstract question. Now there may be an answer in
the case of Shonda Walter, a 36-year-old black woman on Pennsylvania’s death
row. On Friday, the Supreme Court met to discuss whether to hear a petition from
Ms. Walter, who is asking the justices to rule that in all cases, including
hers, the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual
punishments.
Ever since 1976, when the court allowed executions to resume after a four-year
moratorium, the abolition movement has avoided bringing a broad constitutional
challenge against the practice, believing that it would not succeed. In that
time, 1,423 people have been put to death.
Yet there is no question that the national trend is moving away from capital
punishment. Since the late 1990s, almost every year has seen fewer executions,
fewer new death sentences and fewer states involved in the repugnant business of
killing their citizens.
In 2015, there were 28 executions and 49 new death sentences, the lowest numbers
in decades. Seven states have abandoned the practice entirely since 2004, for a
total of 19 that no longer have the death penalty. Many others have not executed
anyone for years. And only three states — Texas, Georgia and Missouri — were
responsible for almost all of last year’s executions.
A majority of Americans still support capital punishment, but the percentage
favoring it has dropped from around 80 percent in the 1990s to about 60 percent
now. When polls offer a choice between death and life without parole, people
roughly split evenly.
In the past 14 years alone, the Supreme Court has barred the execution of
several categories of people: minors, the intellectually disabled, and those
convicted of a crime other than murder. In that last case, decided in 2008,
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court, “When the law punishes by death, it
risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional
commitment to decency and restraint.”
Taken together, these signs have led some abolitionists to conclude that the
conditions for ending capital punishment entirely are now as favorable as they
might ever be. That argument got a major boost last June, when Justice Stephen
Breyer, in a long dissent from a 5-to-4 ruling that allowed Oklahoma to proceed
with its inhumane lethal-injection drug protocol, suggested he would be open to
a case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.
In his dissent, which was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer
explained in detail how the death penalty was unreliable, arbitrary and racially
discriminatory. He said it was no longer sufficient simply “to patch up the
death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” because the practice as a whole
“most likely” violates the Eighth Amendment.
Shonda Walter’s case is the first to take up Justice Breyer’s challenge. Ms.
Walter was convicted of murdering an 83-year-old man named James Sementelli. Her
appointed lawyers put on no defense and offered no argument that might have
spared her from a death sentence. Pennsylvania appeals courts agreed that she
had inexcusably bad representation, but they still upheld her conviction and
sentence. Since Ms. Walter does not fit the special categories of defendants who
are shielded from the death penalty, her appeal is based on the claim that all
executions violate the Constitution.
The justices may not grant Ms. Walter’s petition (others are also expected to be
filed in the coming weeks), but they can no longer ignore the clear movement of
history. They already have all the evidence they need to join the rest of the
civilized world and end the death penalty once and for all.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on January 17, 2016, on page SR10
of the New York edition with the headline: The Death Penalty Endgame.
The Death Penalty Endgame,
NYT, JAN. 16, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/
opinion/sunday/the-death-penalty-endgame.html
Florida’s Death Machine Loses Again
JAN. 12, 2016
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
For the second time in three Supreme Court terms, the justices
have struck down a Florida law that treated the Constitution as little more than
a speed bump on the road to quicker and easier death sentences.
In 2014, the justices invalidated the state’s rigid, unscientific rule that
skirted the court’s clear 2002 ban on executing intellectually disabled people.
On Tuesday, in an 8-to-1 decision written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court
rejected a Florida law that required a trial judge, and not the jury, to decide
whether to impose the death penalty.
While Florida jurors first had to recommend a sentence, the final life-or-death
decision was the judge’s alone. This violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of
a jury trial — specifically, that any fact that makes a person eligible for
death must be determined by a jury. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not
enough,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
The defendant in the case, Timothy Lee Hurst, was convicted of murdering a
co-worker, Cynthia Harrison, in 1998. After his original sentence was thrown out
for unrelated reasons, a second jury recommended death by a 7-to-5 vote in 2012.
Justice Samuel Alito Jr. dissented from the decision, arguing that Florida
juries play “a critically important role” in recommending a sentence to the
judge. But this doesn’t change the fact that under state law, the judge’s
decision was the only one that mattered.
Of course, Florida is a death-penalty factory: The state has 390 people on death
row, more than one in 10 of the nationwide total, and sentences more people to
death than any other state but California. Duval County, which includes
Jacksonville, currently has the highest per-capita rate of death sentences in
America.
But Florida isn’t alone in conferring these powers on judges. In Delaware and
Alabama, judges may override a jury’s sentence of life in prison and
unilaterally impose death — a power Alabama judges have exercised more than 100
times (Delaware judges have not been using the authority). Florida and Alabama
continued their practices even after the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Ring v.
Arizona, which held that only juries may make the factual findings that expose a
person to execution. The logic of Tuesday’s decision should call into doubt many
of the death sentences in both states.
The jury’s role in sentencing — particularly in capital cases — is central, as
the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed over the last two decades. In a 1999
case, the court called trials by jury “the grand bulwark” of liberty, quoting
William Blackstone, the 18th-century British jurist whose treatises are a
foundation of American law. Blackstone warned that “delays, and little
inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must
pay for their liberty in more substantial matters.”
Tuesday’s decision was the right one, but it is also a reminder of how
shamelessly some governors and lawmakers will work to undercut core
constitutional protections in their crusade for more state-sponsored killing.
A version of this editorial appears in print on January 13, 2016,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Florida’s Death Machine
Loses Again.
Florida’s Death Machine Loses Again,
NYT, JAN. 12, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/
opinion/floridas-death-machine-loses-again.html
America and Its Fellow Executioners
JAN. 9, 2016
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Aside from the barbarism and injustice of Saudi Arabia’s
execution of 47 men on Jan. 2, the state-sponsored killings — some by beheading
— bucked a strong trend against capital punishment in most of the world.
According to the annual report of Amnesty International, executions were carried
out in 22 countries in 2014, the year covered; there were 25 in 2004. The total
number of people known to have been executed also fell. To its disgrace, the
United States was still among the five countries that most often used capital
punishment — alongside China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq — but the number of
executions in America continued to decline.
Amnesty’s report said an “alarming number” of countries that carried out the
death penalty in 2014 were responding to perceived threats to state security,
the major factor in most of the Saudi executions. Pakistan resumed the execution
of civilians after an attack by the Taliban on a Peshawar school, and China —
which is thought to have the most executions of any country but keeps the number
secret — used the death penalty in response to ethnic violence in the Xinjiang
region. In Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and in Shiite-ruled Iran, death sentences
often derive from a stern interpretation of Islamic law.
Photo
Iranians protested the execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Tehran, Iran.
Credit Abedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency
But there is no compelling evidence that the death penalty deters crime, whether
murder or terrorism. And absent deterrence, what remains is just vengeance.
In the United States, that is rendered all the more absurd by efforts to make
death seem humane through lethal injections. There is considerable evidence in
America, moreover, that racism, unscrupulous prosecutors and shoddy public
defenders account for a large number of dubious or blatantly unjust impositions
of capital punishment. More than 150 wrongfully convicted people have been freed
since 1973. As the case against capital punishment builds, the numbers of
executions and death sentences have steadily declined, reaching their lowest
level in at least two decades in 2015, according to the Death Penalty
Information Center, with 93 percent of the executions carried out in only four
states — Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Florida.
What that suggests, as does the Amnesty report, is that in the end, it may not
be the debates about whether capital punishment is legal, effective, just, moral
or, in the case of the United States, constitutional, that determine how long it
persists. It is the fact that the people of the world, including Americans, are
increasingly coming to recognize the death penalty for what it is: morally
unacceptable, inhuman, barbaric, unjust and useless.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook
and
Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this editorial appears in print on January 10, 2016, on page SR10
of the New York edition with the headline: America and Its Fellow Executioners.
America and Its Fellow Executioners,
NYT,
JAN 9., 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/
opinion/america-and-its-fellow-executioners.html
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