News and Developments 2012: U.S. Supreme Court

UPDATE: Execution stayed by Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (May 14).  Steven Staley (pictured) is scheduled to be executed in Texas on May 16, despite the likelihood that he would be deemed incompetent for execution if he was not being forcibly medicated under court order.  The U.S. Supreme Court has held that it is unconstitutional to execute an inmate who is mentally incompetent.  In a non-death penalty context, the Court has also held that it is permissilble to forcibly medicate an inmate if if he is dangerous to himself or others, the treatment is medically appropriate and in his medical interest, and there is no less intrusive alternative.  In this instance, the forced medication will likely lead to his death.  Staley's lawyer, John Stickels, said, “The whole reason he’s been medicated is to make him competent to be executed.” Staley has a long history of paranoid schizophrenia and depression. On death row, he has given himself black eyes and self-inflicted lacerations. He has been found spreading feces and covered with urine. If Staley is executed, he will probably be the first inmate executed while being forcibly medicated for mental incompetency. In a similar case in Arkansas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled that Charles Singleton could be forcibly medicated to make him sane enough for execution, but Singleton began taking his medication voluntarily several weeks before he was executed in 2004.

April 22 will mark the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp in which the Court rejected (5-4) a claim of racial bias based on a sophisticated statistical study of the death penalty in Georgia.  Warren McCleskey, an African-American death row inmate convicted of killing a white police officer, presented the Court with analysis showing that defendants charged with killing white victims had odds of receiving a death sentence that were 4.3 times higher than defendants charged with killing black victims. McCleskey argued that his death sentence was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held, however, that the defendant had to show he was personally discriminated against in the course of the prosecution, and merely showing a disturbing pattern of racial disparities in Georgia over a long period of time was not sufficient to prove racial bias in his case. McCleskey also argued that when race is a factor in selecting who will die, the death penalty is unconstitutional under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment, but the Court decided the study offered was insufficient to prove that the death penalty was being applied in an arbitrary manner. 

A new book by law professor Kenneth Williams of South Texas College of Law, titled Most Deserving of Death? An Analysis of the Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Jurisprudence, examines whether the death penalty system really punishes the worst offenders, as intended by the Supreme Court's approval of state laws.  The book looks at issues such as jury selection, ineffective assistance of counsel, innocence, and race, and how these issues reflect on who is sentenced to death. Prof. Williams concludes that that application of the death penalty is inconsistent and incoherent, partly because of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, and this leads to a lack of public confidence in the system. Prof. Susan D. Rozelle, of the Stetson University College of Law, said of the book, “Williams shines light into the dark corners of the capital punishment debate by focusing on the procedural nightmare. He takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the system’s failures, showing starkly how bad lawyering, racial discrimination, and shoddy science, for example, can mean the difference between life and death.”