Death Penalty Concerns Under Supreme Court Scrutiny

Feature Story by Ilana Herring - 2/24/2002

The Supreme Court has recently agreed to rule on three lower court decisions, in what may prove to be to be the biggest challenge to the nation’s death penalty laws in 30 years. In two of the cases the court will reconsider its own earlier rulings.

The death penalty has long been a hotly debated topic in the United States. Evidence clearly points to severe racial disparities in how courts decide between life imprisonment and the death penalty.

Another troubling statistic concerns the guilt of those condemned to death. According to the Innocence Project, “Since the advent of forensic DNA testing in the late 1980's, at least sixty-three people in the United States have been exonerated through DNA testing of their evidence and set free.”

Yet there are those who have been exonerated, but have not been set free. Joseph Amrine still sits on Missouri's death row, even though all the witnesses against him have now said they lied and that he didn’t commit the murder.

The three cases that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear concern racist jury selection, executing the mentally ill, and the right to a jury of one’s peers.

The Supreme Court agreed on February 15th to review the conviction and sentencing of Thomas Miller-El who sits on death row in Texas. Mr. Miller-El is African-American; at his trial in 1986 there was only 1 African-American jurist.

The Dallas County District Attorney’s office who prosecuted Miller-El, used preemptory strikes to remove 10 out of the 11 prospective African-American jurors. (During jury selection, an attorney may use their power of preemptory strike to remove prospective jurors). Mr. Miller-El’s clemency petition contains testimony from four former Dallas County prosecutors who said that the office had a policy to exclude blacks from juries.

Mr. Miller-El was convicted and sentenced one month before the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that peremptory strikes in jury selection cannot be based on race. Mr. Miller-Els’ attorneys contend that the trial violated their client’s sixth Amendment right to a jury of one’s peers.

“What’s at stake in this case is the fundamental right of citizens of all races to participate in the justice system,” said his lawyer, Jim Marcus, the executive director of the Texas Defender Service.

A second case before the Supreme Court, Atkins v. Virginia is concerned with whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to apply the death penalty to mentally retarded individuals.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty notes, “Generally, people suffering from mental retardation are eager to please others. This means that they will often answer yes to questions even when they don’t fully understand what they are being asked.” Over the past thirty years the number of mentally incompetent people being executed has increased steadily.

“This is one of the most important death penalty cases to come to the Supreme Court in the last quarter century,” said Steven Hawkins, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. There are 32 states with the death penalty and currently 18 of them outlaw executing mentally retarded inmates.

The third case before the Supreme Court, Arizona v. Ring is concerned with whether a judge (instead of a jury) can decide if a convicted killer deserves the death penalty. The question addresses the sixth Amendment right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers.

The court will review the sentencing of Timothy Ring, the defendant in the Arizona case, who was found guilty for the 1994 killing of an armored van driver in Phoenix.

Under Arizona law, the trial judge decides whether a particular case involves “aggravating circumstances” that justify a death sentence. After the jury had reached a guilty verdict in Ring’s case, the judge held a sentencing hearing. During this hearing the judge heard new testimony and determined that such an aggravating circumstance existed. The end result: the death penalty for Ring. The jury did not hear the testimony that led the judge to opt for the death penalty instead of life in prison.

In the case of Aprendi v. New Jersey, the Supreme Court ruled that the judge cannot rule on facts that were not put before a jury because it violates the Constitution’s guarantee of trial by jury. The Aprendi case involved a judge lengthening a sentence in a case involving a hate crime. The Supreme Court will now take up how to reconcile the cases.

The issue of the judge’s power to decide a death sentence is of great importance to the guarantees outlined in the Bill of Rights.

Decisions for all of the cases before the Supreme Court are expected by summer.