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The Ring Decision And What It Means
On Monday, June 24, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Timothy Ring case. In its simplest terms, this landmark decision has overturned all the death penalty sentences in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and Colorado. This is approximately 160 death sentences. Four other states will be partially affected.
The Ring case is based on Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000). The Ring case challenged Arizona's sentencing scheme claiming it violated the Sixth Amendment's jury trial guarantee by entrusting to a judge the finding of a fact that raises the defendant's maximum penalty. In Arizona, the law allowing a judge rather than a jury to do the sentencing had been upheld in Walton v. Arizona 497 U.S. 637 (1990). The Supreme Court has now declared that they erred in Walton, and overturned the death penalty sentencing law because it allowed a sentencing judge, sitting without a jury, to find an aggravating circumstance necessary for the imposition of the death penalty. It is now clear that the jury must find any such aggravating circumstance rather than the judge, if the death penalty is to be imposed.
Arizona will now call a special session of the legislature to rewrite the sentencing laws so that the death penalty can once again be imposed on criminal defendants. State Attorney General Janet Napolitano, who unsuccessfully argued the Ring case before the U.S. Supreme Court, has come forward in an attempt at damage control and political spin to declare that this decision will affect only 30 of the 127 prisoners on death row who are in the first stages of appeals in the state court. She does not envision any relief for those whose appeals have proceeded past the state court into the federal courts. Her interpretation is that there is no retroactivity available to the rest of us. It should be noted that Ms. Napolitano is running for governor of Arizona.
Federal Public Defender Dale Baich believes all 127 of the state's death row inmates should now be eligible for resentencing.
As with so many major court decisions, often more questions are raised than answered. The issue of retroactivity, whether the majority of Arizona's death row population who are past the initial stages of the state court appeals will prevail and be allowed a jury sentencing will have to be litigated in the courts. The state does not wish to acknowledge all of its previous mistakes in applying the death penalty, and the politicians certainly don't want to appear weak on crime by acquiescing to the dictates of the U.S. Supreme Court without some grandstanding. There are not many in the state government who will step forward and do what is politically unpopular. The sound bites keep saying that the public should notfear that these dangerous killers will be released back into society.
Even if the state made the decision that we were all to beresentenced by a jury, how can this be accomplished? How do you reconstitute old juries, many from decades past? What do you do about witnesses and jurors you can't find or who have died? To empanel new juries would be very expensive. An alternative that would have a jury listen to testimony read from a transcript seems an inadequate remedy. Perhaps the state will do as they did back in the 1970s when the death penalty was declared unconstitutional and simply sentence all the death row prisoners to a life sentence.
Therefore, at this point
in time, a clear answer as to what this all means cannot be given. We are
certainly in limbo. But what can be said is that for the first time since
the 1970s the state of Arizona's death penalty sentencing scheme is in
complete ruins and the laws need to be rewritten. And for the first time
in many years there is reason to smile, and hope is in the air for a better
life.
For without hope, there
is no life.
Richard Michael Rossi
50337
PO Box 3400
Florence, AZ 85232
Death Row - June 27,
2002
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