WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Sets October 13th as Date to Hear Arguments Regarding Juvenile Death Penalty

The United State Supremes Court has announced that they will hear arguments in the case of Roper v. Simmons on Wednesday, October 13.

Christopher Simmons was 17-years-old when he committed the murder of Shirley Cook.  He was convicted of first degree murder.  Simmons' case was reviewed by the Missouri Supreme Court. The court determined that juvenile executions violate Eighth Amendment's provision against cruel and unusual punishment because of "evolving standards of decency." He is currently serving a sentence of life without parole.

The State of Missouri has appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court.
  
(Washington State courts have been involved in the "evolving standard of decency" with rulings against the executions of the mentally retarded and against the executions of juveniles.) 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Canada, Mexico and other US allies, along with Nobel Peace Prize winners, former American diplomats and the largest US doctors' group asked the Supreme Court yesterday to end the execution of killers who committed their crimes as young teenagers.

The Supreme Court will reconsider this fall whether the practice is unconstitutionally cruel. At the same time, the court will continue a recent pattern of placing itself at the center of international debates over American laws and practices.

The United States is among only a handful of countries that allow execution for crimes committed before age 18, and friend-of-the-court filings yesterday said the practice leaves America diplomatically isolated and vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy on human rights issues.

"Countries whose human rights records are criticised by the United States have no incentive to improve their records when the United States fails to meet the most fundamental, baseline standards," said a filing on behalf of Nobel laureates including former President Jimmy Carter and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

The 25-nation European Union, plus 23 other countries, argued that execution of juvenile killers "violates widely accepted human rights norms and the minimum standards of human rights set forth by the United Nations."

Mexico noted separately that three of the 73 current death row inmates condemned for killings that took place before they were 18 are Mexican nationals.

Diplomats including former undersecretary of state Thomas Pickering and former ambassador to France Felix Rohatyn argued there is a growing international consensus against such executions.

The United States executed more juvenile offenders than the rest of the world combined between 1990 and 2003, the diplomats' filing said.

In the past four years, only five nations have executed juveniles, the diplomats said: Congo, China, Iran, Pakistan and the United States.

"In no other area of human rights does the United States consider these nations to be our equals," the filing said.

The death penalty in general is a sticking point between the United States and many of its allies, some of which will not extradite wanted killers who might face execution in the United States. The execution of those who killed as minors is a particular irritant to death penalty opponents abroad.

Friend-of-the-court filings only offer advice, and the justices can heed or ignore them. If recent history is a guide, however, the Supreme Court will pay attention to the views of well-known outsiders.

International views and the experience of other nations are increasingly important in Supreme Court cases, and friend-of-the-court filings citing international law earned mention in some of the court's most prominent rulings over the past three terms.

One such case is a parallel to the current death penalty issue. In 2002, the court noted national as well as international opposition in ruling that the death penalty cannot be applied to mentally retarded killers.

That ruling and the general trend of internationalism is rued by the court's most vocal conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia.

"International notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people," Scalia wrote in a dissent in the mental retardation case.

Both the retardation and juvenile execution issues turn on the culpability of a particular class of defendants, and on society's notions of what punishment is appropriate. Neither issue questions the fundamental fairness or constitutionality of the death penalty.

By ANNE GEARAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
25 June 2004

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court closed off appeals for more than 100 death row inmates, blunting the effect of an earlier ruling that judges cannot determine by themselves whether a convicted killer should die.

By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday refused to make its 2002 ruling, which stipulated that juries impose death sentences, retroactive to condemned inmates who had already exhausted all their direct appeals. The ruling means at least four states - Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska - won't have to hold new sentencing hearings or allow death sentences to be reduced to life in prison.

In a separate ruling Thursday, the high court opened the door to new death row challenges on other grounds in Texas, which leads the nation in the number of executions. A third capital punishment ruling preserved a death sentence for a Pennsylvania serial killer.

The most significant of the day's death penalty rulings answered a question left from the court's unexpectedly forceful statement two years ago that the constitutional right to a jury trial extends to the then-unremarkable practice of allowing a judge to have the final say in death cases.

That ruling overturned the death sentencing laws of five states in which a jury or judge determined an accused killer's guilt but judges alone determined if circumstances such as multiple victims or particular brutality made a convicted killer eligible for the death penalty.

The 2002 ruling applied to some death row inmates and to new cases moving through the courts. But a conservative-led Supreme Court majority said Thursday that the principles at stake in the case do not rise to the level that force a wholesale reexamination of convictions that already have run their course.

"The right to jury trial is fundamental to our system of criminal procedure, and states are bound to enforce the Sixth Amendment's guarantees as we interpret them," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority.

It does not follow, however, that when a defendant has had a full trial and has lost on appeal "he may nonetheless continue to litigate his claims indefinitely on hopes that we will one day have a change of heart," Scalia wrote.

Scalia said there is no proof that juries are so much better at making the right choice about a sentence that the accuracy of judge-only sentences is in doubt.

Chief Justice H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas agreed with Scalia.

On the other side were the court's more liberal justices: John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

The circumstances that elevate a given killing to a crime worthy of the death penalty are rooted in a community's understanding of terms like "heinous," "cruel," or "depraved," Breyer wrote in dissent.

"A jury is better equipped than a judge to identify and apply those standards accurately," Breyer wrote.

The justices ruled against Arizona prisoner Warren Wesley Summerlin, sentenced to die more than 20 years ago by a judge who later lost his job because of a drug problem. Summerlin was convicted of raping and bludgeoning to death a bill collector who came to his house in 1981 to collect a payment for a piano.

"So many aspects of the death penalty are arbitrary, and in this case the court is saying that constitutional rights can be deprived and you can be executed depending simply on the date you filed your appeal," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center and a capital punishment opponent.

But Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said the ruling should stop needless reconsideration of sentences that were properly applied the first time.

The Summerlin case was the most widely watched death penalty issue before the justices this term, which is expected to end next week. Like many death row cases the court agrees to hear, the case was a procedural question that did not address the fundamental fairness or constitutionality of capital punishment itself.

Attention now turns to a more emotional question facing the justices when they return from their summer break. The court has agreed to revisit the question of whether very young killers may be sentenced to death. Several states currently allow execution of 16- and 17-year-old killers, a practice almost unique around the world.

In the Texas case decided Thursday, the high court allowed Texas death row inmate Robert Tennard another chance to challenge his sentence. The case could affect several dozen condemned men in Texas who claim they have very low IQs and were not given enough chance to present mitigating evidence to a jury.

Nationwide, about 3,400 inmates await execution in the 38 states that allow capital punishment.

The Arizona case is Schriro v. Summerlin, 03-526. The Texas case is Tennard v. Dretke, 02-10038.

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On the Net:

Link to ruling in Schriro v. Summerlin:

http://wid.ap.org/documents/scotus/040624summerlin.pdf

Link to ruling in Tennard v. Dretke:

http://wid.ap.org/documents/scotus/040624tennard.pdf

Washington State Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Behalf of Davya Cross

Additionally, defense counsel raised various issues surrounding the administration of Washington Death Penalty. The justices, in perhaps the first time since the enactment of WA death penalty statute, actually were forced to reevaluate their methodology in administering the proportionality review. The Justices' questions posed to the parties, illustrated the Justices acknowledgment or awareness of the concern that the death penalty is applied "wanton and freakish".
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/179131_cross23.html