Court decision could take 89 off death row By Joseph Barrios and Rhonda Bodfield, ARIZONA DAILY STAR, September 3, 2003: ighty-nine Arizona death row inmates have new grounds to appeal their sentences after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the death sentence of a man in a Maricopa County case. With Tuesday's ruling and earlier decisions, all 125 inmates on Arizona's death row now appear to have grounds to appeal their sentences. But prosecutors said it would be a long time before those defendants make it back to the courtroom and that Tuesday's ruling will be appealed. [...] In a worst-case scenario for prosecutors, all 34 inmates from Pima County who were sentenced to death could be sent back to local courts for new trials. "We'd be talking about 34 defendants coming back. The economic impact, the resource impact is huge. It would be very difficult to handle those cases," said Rick Unklesbay, chief criminal deputy Pima County attorney.
Judges' Rulings Imposing Death Are Overturned (NY Times, September 3, 2003): The federal appeals court in San Francisco yesterday overturned the death sentences of more than 100 prisoners in three states because judges rather than juries had made the crucial factual determinations in sentencing them to death. The court ruled that a Supreme Court decision last year striking down the capital sentencing laws in the three states and two others because they allowed judges to make those factual findings must be applied retroactively even to those inmates who had exhausted all of their appeals. The affected prisoners will be entitled, at a minimum, to a new sentencing proceeding, unless the United States Supreme Court reverses the appeals court's decision. The decision of the appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, affects death row inmates in Arizona, Idaho and Montana. The other two states that had had unconstitutional sentencing laws, Colorado and Nebraska, are not directly affected by the decision because they are not in the Ninth Circuit, which covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, along with Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Two other federal appeals courts have decided that last year's Supreme Court decision, known as Ring, does not apply retroactively. That split, coupled with the significance of the yesterday's decision, makes Supreme Court review fairly likely.
You know, I'd have thought that the Ring decision had to apply retroactively, appeal pending or no. It doesn't make logical sense to say, "OK, you guys who were convicted by a judge in violation of the Constitution: because your appeals were exhausted, your sentence is valid. You guys who have pending appeals, your death sentence is vacated and you're going to be resentenced." Either the original sentence was valid, or it wasn't, and since the rule under which the sentence was imposed was invalid, it does rather seem that they have to go through and do it all over again.
Judge Stephen Reinhardt joined in the decision and wrote separately to say that the technical doctrines it discussed obscured how straightforward he found the case. "Executing people because their cases came too early — because their appeals ended before the Supreme Court belatedly came to the realization that it had made a grievous constitutional error in its interpretation of death penalty law, that it had erred when it failed to recognize that the United States Constitution prohibits judges, rather than jurors, from making critical factual decisions regarding life and death in capital cases — is surely arbitrariness that surpasses all bounds," Judge Reinhardt wrote.
I suspect in the less egregious cases -- however you can determine that when the death penalty is involved -- many prosecutors will simply go for some sort of plea bargain to have the sentence commuted to life without parole. Especially for years-old cases, they'll essentially have to retry the cases in front of an entirely new jury, purely to have them find the aggravating factors necessary for sentencing. Some of the witnesses may be unlocatable after a certain amount of time, some of the witnesses and victims may have died or moved out of the jurisdiction. Judges normally get back cases where only the sentence is reversed, and not the finding of guilt, but for cases that are old enough, even some of the judges may have retired or died. In addition, how will cash-strapped district attorneys' offices and public defenders' offices ever manage to handle all this? In almost every state, their budgets have been cut due to the various states' budget crises. Now they're going to have to handle this on top of their normal heavy workloads. That said, relatively recent cases -- especially those which were for some reason locally notorious -- are more likely to get another go-round.
The specific case at issue would seem to have been ripe to have a sentence reversed in any event.
The appeals court noted that Judge Marquardt had admitted to heavy marijuana use around the time he sentenced Mr. Summerlin to death. "If the allegations concerning Judge Marquardt are true, Summerlin's fate was determined by a drug-impaired judge, habituated to treating penalty-phase trials the same as noncapital sentencing," Judge Thomas wrote.
At the very least, legal habituation aside, surely Summerlin was at least entitled to be sentenced by a judge who was "unimpaired". Somehow, Summerlin wound up with a second death sentence imposed for killing the same person, which is the sort of thing that makes you scratch your head. If you commit several felony murders, than an individual death sentence for each one is understandable, but how do you get sentenced to death twice for killing the same person? (The Times may be lacking a certain amount of information in the article, one suspects.)
It will be interesting to see what happens whtn this reaches the Court. As the Daily Star article notes, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is quite literally the only court in the land to have ruled this way. That a circuit court of appeals did so, in opposition to the other three circuit courts that have ruled on the matter, makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will accept the case.
One wonders why the Court didn't originally specify whether or not this particular rule would apply retroactively. It does seem logical, on the face of it, that the rule would be required to apply retroactively, but clearly, the courts of appeals seem to feel differently. (One wonders whether or not the courts of appeal had decided somehow that they didn't want to take the heat for overturning huge volumes of death sentences.) Given that Ring was a 7-2 decision in favor of this rule in the first place, it might well produce an equally decisive majority for retroactivity.
Posted by iain at September 03, 2003 11:10 AMComments
