Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Troy Davis Update: Appeals in Supreme Court Filed

January 28, 2011 at 3:54 PM

Troy Davis with his family

 

On Friday, January 21, 2011, Troy Davis’ lawyers filed an appeal and a cert. petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.  The appeals are available via ScotusBlog here and here.  These two documents challenge the ruling of a federal district court in Savannah, Georgia that Davis did not meet an extraordinarily high standard required to prove his innocence.  The federal district court held an evidentiary hearing, ordered by the Supreme Court, on Davis’ innocence claim in June, 2010 and ruled against him in September, thus denying Davis relief from his death sentence.

What is Davis arguing in his appeal?

First, Davis believes he ought to be able to appeal the district court’s ruling to the 11th circuit federal court (the court above the district court and below the Supreme Court).  Davis holds that his case is clearly quite consequential as it involves an actual innocence claim and major, unresolved legal questions that could impact future cases; therefore, it is important that the case have access to full federal appellate review, including that of the intermediate court – the 11th Circuit.

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Arizona Ignores Trial Judge, Kills Prisoner

October 27, 2010 at 9:54 AM

“The death penalty in this case is not appropriate and never has been.”

That’s what former judge Cheryl Hendrix told Arizona’s Board of Executive Clemency in support of Jeffrey Landrigan’s effort to have his death sentence commuted.  What’s important about judge Hendrix is that she is the one who sentenced him to death.  New information that Landrigan’s lawyer failed to present at the trial convinced her that the death sentence she issued had been wrong.  

Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, had already ruled that this new information would NOT have made a difference.  That turned out to be flat wrong, but an erroneous Supreme Court ruling that still trumps everything else. The Arizona Board split 2-2 vote, but that, and Governor Jan Brewer, was enough to keep the execution process rolling. 

Landrigan’s attorneys also attempted to shine a light on the secretive practices of Arizona’s execution team (which now apparently includes an un-named British pharmaceutical company).  Had they been successful, this would have been a great public service.  Why should a public agency with the power to kill people be allowed to operate in the dark?

But that effort was not successful, thanks to another 5-4 US Supreme Court vote.  The non-FDA approved drugs acquired from Great Britain appeared to work as the executioners wanted, and, late last night, Arizona carried out a death sentence that “is not appropriate and never has been.”

Arizona: Execution Drugs Came From Great Britain

October 26, 2010 at 11:44 AM

Arizona’s Attorney General Terry Goddard has reportedly confirmed that his state’s stash of non-FDA approved sodium thiopental came from Great Britain.  The state continues to try to kill Jeffrey Landrigan with this drug, and continues to try to keep details of their supplier a secret, using a law that shields the Arizona’s execution team from public scrutiny.  So an as yet unnamed British pharmaceutical company is now a member of Arizona’s execution team. 

As our allies in Europe are dragged into this sordid execution mess, Arizona soldiers on with its attempt to carry out this execution (in defiance of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights).  The full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court are likely to weigh in later today.

But whatever the outcome, two important points are worth mentioning.  First, many people are now ashamed to be associated with the death penalty, and that includes those charged with carrying it out.  Though ostensibly for the purpose of protecting execution team members from harassment by death penalty opponents (who rarely do anything more than deliver petitions and sternly worded letters), the real purpose of the Arizona law (and similar laws in others states, and an even more extreme effort in Texas), is to drive capital punishment into the shadows.  The death penalty is not as popular as it used to be, because people are realizing that it involves things like states acquiring non-approved pharmaceuticals in shady and secretive ways and then using those drugs to kill people.  Of course such efforts to hide these ugly realities only draw more attention to them.

It also bears mentioning that the judge who passed the death sentence on Jeffrey Landrigan now says she was wrong.  When the US Supreme Court rejected Landrigan’s bid for a hearing on his lawyer’s failure to present important mitigating evidence, Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, asserted that the mitigating evidence would have made no difference.  The judge who was actually there has said the exact opposite – that the mitigating evidence would have made all the difference. 

Even our highest courts don’t always get things right, especially when they try to predict the future.  All supporters of fairness in our justice system, whether opposing capital punishment or not, should be disturbed by the slipshod way this case has been handled, and by the ongoing collateral damage our death penalty continues to do.

9 Out of 10 Counties, Zero Death Sentences Since 2004

October 18, 2010 at 3:28 PM

What makes a punishment “unusual?” The 8th Amendment to the Constitution bans “cruel and unusual” punishments, and the Supreme Court in recent years has suggested that a punishment becomes unusual when few states have it in their laws, or, if laws are still on the books, when few jurisdictions choose to actually use the punishment. 

So what do we make of the fact that since 2004, only 10% of US counties have actually passed a death sentence?  That’s the bottom line of a new set of maps (presented on the Second Class Justice blog) which illustrate US death sentences by county from the years 2004-2009.  Counties are where US death sentencing happens (aside from federal death sentences).  If 9 out of 10 counties have not issued a death sentence in 5 years, does that make the death penalty unusual?

Death Penalty Usage Maps 2004-2009

One of the reasons the high Court struck down capital punishment as “cruel and unusual” back in 1972 was its inconsistent and arbitrary application.  “…[C]ruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,” the Court said.  In reinstating the death penalty, the Court insisted that death sentences be limited to the “worst of the worst.”  But that hasn’t happened.  Instead, death sentences, like real estate, are all about location, location, location.

And the maps reveal that the prime real estate for death sentences is no longer in Texas or other parts of the Old South.  In recent years, the most enthusiastic death sentencing counties have been further west, in California and Arizona.  (These same states, incidentally, are currently embroiled in a controversy over whether or not they acquired execution drugs illegally.)

Three Supreme Court Justices Later Regretted Supporting the Death Penalty

October 8, 2010 at 11:11 AM

Three out of the seven Supreme Court justices who voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1976 have since said they regretted those votes and, if given a do over, would have supported abolition of the death penalty.

That means there would have been 5 votes to retain the 1970s era ban on capital punishment, and the USA could have become one of the world leaders in the global movement towards abolition, rather than one of its primary obstacles.  And 1,229 men and women would not have been killed by US states.

“I would vote the other way in any capital case. … I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.” –Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, to his biographer in 1991.

“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death … the basic question – does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants ‘deserve’ to die? – cannot be answered in the affirmative.” – Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, in a dissent in Callins v. Collins (1994)

“I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes … such negligible returns to the State is patently excessive and cruel” – Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in a concurrence in Baze v. Rees (2008)

“I think there is one vote that I would change and that’s one – was upholding the capital punishment statute.  I think that we did not foresee how it would be interpreted. I think that was an incorrect decision.” – Justice Stevens to NPR this Monday

Sunday, October 10, is World Day Against the Death Penalty.  This year, the focus is on the USA, and Amnesty International has just released a short document surveying where the USA is on this issue, and what these Supreme Court Justices and the rest of us have learned.

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What's Changed?

August 10, 2010 at 4:18 PM

It was the early summer doldrums of late June.  The year was 1972.  The number one song was Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue (really??), and the movies that came out that weekend were The Candidate and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (not exactly blockbusters like The Godfather).  But there was some relatively big news – bigger, at least, than the news from twelve days earlier that five men had been arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.  The bigger news was that the US Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, had banned the death penalty.

It was clear at the time that the Court’s slim majority was not stable.  They all had their own different reasons for voting to nullify the nation’s capital punishment laws.  Two wrote that the death penalty was “cruel and unusual punishment”; another wrote that it was discriminatory; another wrote that it was arbitrary (his exact words were, “freakish and wanton”), and still another doubted that executions met any general need for retribution.

It’s almost 40 years later, and the death penalty continues to discriminate, largely on the basis of the race of the victim.  It also continues to be arbitrary – the vast majority of murders do NOT result in a death sentence, and the limited success of capital prosecutions is often determined, not by the heinousness of the crime, but by where the crime is committed and whether the defendant can hire his own lawyer.  The value of retribution in a punishment carried out so rarely and randomly remains doubtful.  And, as more states abolish the penalty or restrict its use (only 11 states carried out executions last year), and as death sentences continue to decline, the “cruel and unusual” argument carries greater weight. 

When the death penalty in the US is abolished again (and permanently), the movies may be different (then again they may not), the songs may be different (we can only hope), but the arguments will be pretty much the same.

Paying for a Lawyer's Mistake with Your Life

August 3, 2010 at 5:35 PM

Should a client suffer the consequences because his lawyers screwed up?  Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times, wrote an interesting piece today about a new petition that asks this rather basic question.  In this case, the consequences are plenty severe, since the client in question – Cory R. Maples – is facing execution in Alabama.

Bad lawyering is one of the main reasons people end up on death row, rather than serving lesser sentences, but the bad lawyering in this case extended into the appeals process, when the high-priced law firm handling Mr. Maples’ appeal failed to meet a filing deadline due to a mailroom snafu. Should someone facing death be denied his chance to appeal because of poor communication in the bowels of some law firm’s New York offices?

There will always be a conflict in our justice system between the need to respect processes and procedures like filing deadlines, and the need for flexibility to ensure that verdicts and sentences are fair and accurate.   But lately, process and procedure have been getting the upper hand.

Our system’s rigid obsession with process may have reached its zenith in 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled that an appeal could not be heard, even though it was only late because a judge had given attorneys the wrong deadline.   This was not a death penalty case, but in the ruling Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that didn’t matter.   He noted that a man (Ryan Heath Dickson) had been executed earlier that year without the Supreme Court ever looking at his petition, because it had been filed one day late.  “The rejected certiorari petition was Dickson’s first in this Court, and one can only speculate as to whether denial of that petition would have been a foregone conclusion,” Justice Thomas observed remorselessly.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court seemed to show a little more heart, giving Florida death row inmate Albert Holland the chance to show that extraordinary circumstances out of his control (lawyer negligence) caused a filing deadline to be missed.  We will see this Fall what the Supreme Court decides to do with this latest case.

Justice has to be more than mindlessly following a set of inflexible bureaucratic procedures, and inflicting death on someone because his lawyer committed some procedural error is not justice at all.

Starvin’ for Justice: Reflections of the Four Day Fast and Vigil

July 8, 2010 at 3:43 PM

By Andrea Finuccio

For the last 17 years, the Abolitionist Action Committee has been holding a four-day fast and vigil outside of the Supreme Court from June 29-July 2, and it is aptly named “Starvin’ for Justice.”  The vigil starts on the day Furman v. Georgia was decided in 1972 (temporarily banning the death penalty) and ends on the day in 1976 that Gregg v. Georgia overturned Furman, and its purpose is to protest and petition for the abolition of the death penalty. Three weeks prior to this event, I got an email from another intern asking me about information about it to put into a newsletter, and once I was done doing some research I was so intrigued I signed up. I participated fully – I only drank liquids, I slept in front of the Supreme Court, and I tabled and handed out pamphlets in the DC heat, while still going to work and school. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever partaken in. Below is a summary of my experiences, and I hope that by reading this you will be inspired to sacrifice something small for a cause you love.

On the night of June 28, I walked into a private room at the Capital Brewing Company to enjoy my last meal before four days of fasting. I came alone as I knew no one, and slowly realized that most of these people had been coming for years – they had friends, connections, stories and inside jokes – something I lacked. But as I enjoyed my black-bean burger and French fries, people noticed I was a newcomer and introduced themselves to me, and I began to ease up. As the clock slowly closed in towards midnight, the group began their walk to the Supreme Court for the vigil’s kick off.

Some of the abolitionists and me (far left with white shirt) in front of the Supreme Court on the last day.

At 12:01am, the anniversary of the decision of Furman v. Georgia, the fast officially began. As we stood in a circle in front of the Supreme Court, we went around one by one and said whom we are and why we were there. People were from all over – Washington, California, Connecticut, South Dakota, France, Sweden, and London – and each had their own personal reason for participating. It was then I knew that this week was going to be something to remember.

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Atenco: Getting Closer…But We Still Need Justice!

July 6, 2010 at 6:13 PM

After over four years of detention based on unjust convictions, twelve Mexican activists were ordered released last week following a ruling by Mexico’s Supreme Court that admitted that the activists had never been granted a fair trial.  They had been arrested for allegedly kidnapping police officers during protests in San Salvador Atenco in May 2006 during which police officers violently abused both men and women for their activism.  While it is wonderful that Mexico’s judiciary has freed these twelve activists, much more still needs to be done for justice to be served in the events surrounding the Atenco protests.

“This welcome move by the Supreme Court shows that state prosecutors and judges in Mexico State relied on the denial of due process as well as illegal and fabricated evidence to secure the conviction and imprisonment of the accused,” said Rupert Knox, Amnesty International’s Mexico researcher.

Simply releasing the activists is not enough: Mexican authorities need to take their actions a step further and end impunity in their country by prosecuting the officers responsible for committing crimes against protestors in May 2006 along with those who misused the justice system to secure convictions of the twelve protestors.

One of Amnesty International USA’s Special Focus cases is centered around the female victims of police abuse during the Atenco protests (see the Women of Atenco case page).  Federal authorities actually conducted an investigation that resulted in a list of 34 names of police officers who were suspected of being responsible for the sexual assault and torture of the women in the aftermath of the protests, but more than four years after the events, neither these officers, nor any of the senior officials who failed to stop or prevent the abuses, have been held accountable.

Hopefully, the release of the twelve activists is just the beginning of the government’s acceptance of responsibility for the case, and the beginning of the end for the impunity that has pervaded Mexico’s justice system.  Amnesty International will continue to pressure the federal government of Mexico to protect the human rights of its citizens, and this necessarily includes that Mexico ends impunity for police officers.

Comings and Goings at the Supreme Court

June 28, 2010 at 10:20 AM

Today marks the last open session of the US Supreme Court for this term.  It also marks the last session for Justice John Paul Stevens, who resigned earlier this year, and whose proposed successor, Elena Kagan appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee today to begin her confirmation process.  As noted in an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution by former Georgia Supreme Court Justice Norman Fletcher, Justice Stevens’ career covers the entire span of the “modern” US death penalty, from its re-instatement in 1976 (which Stevens supported) to more recent decisions restricting capital punishment by banning executions for those with mental retardation (Atkins v. Virginia, 2002) and for juvenile offenders (Roper v. Simmons, 2005).

In 2008, while upholding the legality of lethal injection, Stevens wrote that he no longer felt the death penalty could be justified on constitutional grounds.  He called capital punishment “pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purpose” and argued that as a result it is “patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment.”

His last major act involving the death penalty was to pen the concurring opinion in support of an extraordinary evidentiary hearing for Troy Davis, a hearing that took place last week.

Tomorrow, June 29th, will mark the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision, in 1972, that all capital punishment statutes were unconstitutional.  4 years and 4 days later came the decision that ruled states’ new death penalty laws to be constitutional.  Every year at this time, activists come to the US Supreme Court, braving the heat, for a 4-day Fast and Vigil, marking this unfortunately brief period of death penalty pseudo-abolition in the 1970s.  Those in the DC area should join them.