Stacking The Prosecutor's Deck
Last Monday, the US Supreme Court decided the case of Uttecht v. Brown making it easier to exclude jurors who have reservations about the death penalty from capital cases. There are serious consequences to this holding, according to an article published in the June 9, 2007 NY Times:
A decision by the Supreme Court on Monday that made it easier for prosecutors to exclude people who express reservations about the death penalty from capital juries will make the panels whiter and more conviction-prone, experts in law and psychology said this week. ...
The jurors who remain after people with moral objections to imposing the death penalty are weeded out, studies uniformly show, are significantly more likely to vote to find defendants guilty than jurors as a whole.
Prosecutors fear that those who are unalterably opposed to the death penalty will engage in "jury nullification," that is, the jurors will ignore the law and vote against conviction even if the evidence establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to make certain the death sentence is not carried out. As a result, those states with the death penalty also have laws specifically excluding from juries those who are not prepared to follow the law and apply that ultimate penalty.
This case, however, wasn't that clear cut because there was an alternative sentence available after conviction: life without parole. In other words, the juror who was excluded by this holding could still apply the law in the guilt phase, and could still fairly apply the law in the penalty phase. The majority of the Supreme Court didn't think that was sufficient.
The potential effect of this holding is pretty startling:
“It could give judges the authority to exclude about half the population from service in death penalty cases,” said Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan. That is because support for the death penalty drops from more than 60 percent to about half when life in prison is the alternative. [Emphasis added]
By the way, this was a 5-4 holding. We can thank the Democrats in the 109th Congress for this decision as well.
A decision by the Supreme Court on Monday that made it easier for prosecutors to exclude people who express reservations about the death penalty from capital juries will make the panels whiter and more conviction-prone, experts in law and psychology said this week. ...
The jurors who remain after people with moral objections to imposing the death penalty are weeded out, studies uniformly show, are significantly more likely to vote to find defendants guilty than jurors as a whole.
Prosecutors fear that those who are unalterably opposed to the death penalty will engage in "jury nullification," that is, the jurors will ignore the law and vote against conviction even if the evidence establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to make certain the death sentence is not carried out. As a result, those states with the death penalty also have laws specifically excluding from juries those who are not prepared to follow the law and apply that ultimate penalty.
This case, however, wasn't that clear cut because there was an alternative sentence available after conviction: life without parole. In other words, the juror who was excluded by this holding could still apply the law in the guilt phase, and could still fairly apply the law in the penalty phase. The majority of the Supreme Court didn't think that was sufficient.
The potential effect of this holding is pretty startling:
“It could give judges the authority to exclude about half the population from service in death penalty cases,” said Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan. That is because support for the death penalty drops from more than 60 percent to about half when life in prison is the alternative. [Emphasis added]
By the way, this was a 5-4 holding. We can thank the Democrats in the 109th Congress for this decision as well.
Labels: Supreme Court
posted by Diane at 5:06 AM
2 Comments:
What do you mean about the Dems in the 109th Congress also being responsible for this decision? Thanks!
jawbone
They could have stopped the confirmation of Alito and or Roberts to the Supreme Court and didn't even try.
They preferred to keep their powder dry, and now we can expect these kinds of decisions for the next fifteen to twenty years.
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