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| Court to Decide How Death Penalty Ruling Applies |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 12/02/2003 |
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The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it would decide whether to apply retroactively its ruling that juries and not judges must impose death sentences, an issue that could affect hundreds of death row inmates in 10 states. The high court agreed to hear an appeal by Arizona to clarify whether the precedent-setting ruling in 2002 should be applied retroactively to pending cases under review. Arizona appealed after a U.S. appeals court in San Francisco ruled by an 8-3 vote that the decision should be applied retroactively to inmates who are awaiting execution. Arizona said the ruling affected 88 of its inmates who face execution. It said the ruling created uncertainty in Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada, states where judges used to make some or all of the sentencing decisions in death penalty cases. Those 10 states have about 880 of the more than 3,500 inmates on death row in prisons across the United States . It was unclear how many of those inmates would be affected by the Supreme Court's decision on the retroactivity question. The high court agreed to decide the issue after conflicting appellate decisions on how the 2002 decision should be applied. The high court said only juries, and not judges, must consider aggravating factors and weigh them against any mitigating circumstances in deciding whether to impose a death sentence. The appeals court said the ruling should apply retroactively because the 2002 decision involved a substantive criminal rule, rather than a procedural one, that transformed the constitutional framework governing the imposition of death sentences. The case about retroactivity involved Warren Summerlin, who was convicted and sentenced to death for a 1981 murder. Arizona in its appeal told the high court the case "merits review to settle issues important to the administration of the death penalty." Arizona said the appeals court ruling "opens the door to untold litigation" and urged the justices to decide the retroactivity issue "in the interest of fairness to the parties and to homicide victims." Thirteen states -- Colorado, Delaware, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota , Tennessee, Texas and Utah -- supported Arizona's appeal. The justices will hear arguments in the case in the spring, with a decision due by the end of June. |
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