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News and Developments 2006: U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court 2007

Posted: November 30, 2006
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Supreme Court and the Death Penalty
The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing four death penalty cases in January 2007:

SCHRIRO V. LANDRIGAN, No. 05-1575

Texas Court Rejects Presidential Order in Death Penalty Case

Posted: November 16, 2006
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The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rebuffed President Bush's order that Texas courts review the cases of Mexican foreign nationals who were sentenced to death without the benefit of their rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.  Writing for the court, Judge Michael Keasler, stated: "We hold that the President has exceeded his constitutional authority by intruding into the independent powers of the judiciary."  Judge Sharon Keller concurred, writing: "this unprecedented, unnnecessary, and intrusive exercise of power over the Texas court

Supreme Court Justices Raise Issue of Time on Death Row

Posted: November 13, 2006
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The U.S. Supreme Court upheld California's death penalty law in a 5-4 decision on Nov. 13 in Ayers v. Belmontes. The majority held that the state's law allowed the jury to consider all appropriate mitigating evidence. The decision reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which had overturned Belmontes death sentence. The dissent, consisting of Justices Stephens, Breyer, Ginsburg and Souter, however, disagreed, contending that the jury would have to disregard the judge's instructions in order to consider mitigating evidence about the defendant's future prospects for reform. The dissent argued for a more appropriate balancing of state's need for its law to be carried out with the defendant's right to have all the evidence that might save his life considered by the jury. The dissent stated that the state's need for an execution was greatly diminished by the fact that this case was now 25 years old, and, hence, the people would gain little by having an execution carried out now, whereas the defendant had everything to lose by an unfair decision:

Supreme Court Takes Two More Cases Regarding Texas' Faulty Jury Instructions

Posted: October 16, 2006
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On October 13, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear two capital cases from Texas in which the defendant was sentenced to death after the jury was given instructions that the Court has since found unconstitutional. Unlike in most states where the jury considers a range of aggravating and mitigating circumstances about the crime and the defendant before choosing a sentence of life or death, in Texas the jury was (the law has since been modified) given a series of yes-or-no questions about the crime and the future dangerousness of the defendant. In prior cases, the Supreme Court has said that such a mechanism does not allow full consideration of a person's mental disabilities, which should be counted as a mitigating factor. In the cases recently accepted, the trial judges instructed the jury that they could simply answer "no" to one of the factual questions if they did not want to sentence the person to death, even though the proper answer based on the facts should be "yes." In both of the new cases taken by the Court, the defendants were sentenced to death using this "nullification" instruction, and their appeals were denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Texas Death Case a Second Time

Posted: October 13, 2006
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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from Texas death row inmate LaRoyce Smith even though they had reviewed his case once before.  On October 6, 2006, the Court granted certiorari to decide whether the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had applied the wrong standard after the Supreme Court had sent Smith's case back to them earlier.

Supreme Court Denies Stay of Execution to Clarence Hill, 5-4

Posted: September 20, 2006
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The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution to Clarence Hill who is scheduled to be executed at 6 pm on September 20 in Florida.  Four Justices would have granted the stay.  Hill had raised a civil rights challenge to Florida's lethal injection law after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in June in his favor that such a challenge was proper.  However, the lower courts stated that his claim was filed too late and they denied him an evidentiary hearing on the merits of his lethal injection challenge.  (Associated Press, Sept.

Supreme Court Denies Remedies Under International Treaty

Posted: June 29, 2006
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On June 28, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two consolidated cases involving the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In both cases, the foreign nationals were arrested but not informed by police officers of their consular rights under the Convention to ask that their respective consulates be notified of their detention. The Court concluded that statements made by foreign nationals do not need to be suppressed, even though the defendants were not informed of their consular rights.

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Kansas Death Penalty Law

Posted: June 27, 2006
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In a 5-4 decision that revealed a deep division among the Justices over the fairness of capital punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Kansas's death penalty statute on June 26. In Kansas v. Marsh, the Court held that juries may be required to sentence a defendant to die when there is an equal weight of mitigating and aggravating evidence. The ruling overturns a Kansas Supreme Court decision that found the practice unconstitutional because it violated the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

NEW RESOURCE: DPIC Resources Available as 30th Anniversary of Gregg v. Georgia Approaches

Posted: June 15, 2006
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July 2, 2006 will mark the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, an historic ruling that upheld newly crafted death penalty statutes and signaled the beginning of the modern era of capital punishment. This milestone presents the public with an opportunity to examine the application of the death penalty over the past three decades and to test whether the Court’s expectation of a fairer and less arbitrary system of capital punishment has been fulfilled.

Supreme Court Grants Tennessee Death Row Inmate New Hearing Based on DNA Evidence

Posted: June 12, 2006
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The U.S. Supreme has expanded the ability of death row inmates to challenge their convictions in federal court based on DNA evidence produced long after their trials. The ruling marks the first time that the Justices have considered the new evidentiary technology of DNA evidence when re-examining a death sentence. In its 5-3 decision, the Court held that new evidence, including DNA test results, raised sufficient doubt to merit a new hearing in federal court for Tennessee death row inmate Paul House, who was sentenced to death two decades ago for the rape and murder of his neighbor.