Court - Only juries may vote for death sentences

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a jury, not a judge, must determine whether a capital defendant gets the death penalty, a decision that could ultimately take more people off death row than any other ruling by the court in three decades.

By a vote of 7 to 2, the court ruled that Arizona's death-sentencing law violates the constitutional guarantee of a jury trial. Under that law, judges alone decide whether the crime included "aggravating" factors, such as extreme brutality, that call for capital punishment. Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska have similar laws and with Arizona have a combined death-row population of 168.

The decision also casts serious doubt on laws in four other states -- Alabama, Delaware, Florida and Indiana -- where the judge decides between life and death after hearing a jury's recommendation. In those states, there are 629 people on death row.

"This is the first time in 30 years the court has issued a ruling that automatically invalidates a state's overall mechanism for imposing the death penalty," said Prof. Michael Mello, a specialist in capital-punishment law at Vermont Law School. In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down all state death penalty laws but reauthorized capital punishment through court decisions in 1976.

Monday's ruling in Ring vs. Arizona was perhaps the most dramatic consequence yet of a landmark 2000 case in which the court ruled the criminal justice system by holding that a jury, not a judge, must find beyond a reasonable doubt any fact that would increase the jail time a defendant faces for a crime.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court Monday that, in view of that ruling, known as Apprendi, the right to a jury trial "would be senselessly diminished if it encompassed the fact-finding necessary to increase a defendant's sentence by two years, but not the fact-finding necessary to put him to death."

No longer viable

The court acknowledged that it was repudiating its 1990 decision upholding Arizona's death penalty law -- an about-face of the kind the court tries to avoid lest it undermine confidence in the law. But, Ginsburg wrote, that 12-year-old ruling was no longer viable in light of Apprendi.

It was the second time in as many weeks that the court had changed its position on a major issue affecting capital punishment. Last week, the court banned executing the mildly mentally retarded, which the court had conditionally approved in 1989.

As in the mental-retardation case, the immediate impact of Monday's ruling will be more litigation, as death-row inmates in the affected states scramble to get their sentences reduced to life imprisonment.

That was precisely what concerned the two dissenting justices in the case, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- who also happen to be the court's two Arizonans. O'Connor was a prosecutor and judge in the state.

Both opposed Apprendi, and O'Connor's dissenting opinion Monday, which Rehnquist joined, depicted the new ruling as more proof of Apprendi's "severely destabilizing effect on the criminal justice system."

Noting that Apprendi has spawned thousands of criminal appeals, overwhelming the courts, including the Supreme Court, O'Connor said the decision "is only going to add to these already serious effects."

O'Connor predicted, however, that most death-row inmates who fight their sentences based on Monday's ruling will eventually lose.

Another 7.5 years

But that could depend on how lower courts and, perhaps, the justices themselves decide the highly technical question of whether the ruling creates such a fundamental shift in constitutional rights that prisoners who have exhausted previous appeals should get a chance to take advantage of it.

"At a minimum," law professor Mello said, "what the Supreme Court did today is to buy everyone on death row in these five states another 7.5 years of life. That's the average length of time it takes to go from imposition of a death sentence to execution."