US Supreme Court rejects Kansas Court’s reprieve of Death Row inmates
By Tony Mauro, From The National Law Journal
Justice Sotomayor, writing lone dissent, said court should have left Kansas ruling alone.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a pair of Kansas Supreme Court rulings that reversed the death sentences of three convicted murderers.
The 8-1 ruling in Kansas v. Carr and two related cases was written by Justice Antonin Scalia and did not bear the earmarks of a court that is ready to re-examine the constitutionality of the death penalty—as some had hoped after the court’s ruling last term in an Oklahoma case.
Instead, the opinion Wednesday indicated the court’s continued willingness to strike down state capital punishment procedures and court decisions in ways that favor the death penalty.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the lone dissenter, argued that her colleagues should have left the Kansas Supreme Court’s rulings against the death penalty intact. “I see no reason to intervene in cases like these—and plenty of reasons not to,” Sotomayor wrote.
The cases involved separate murders by Sidney Gleason and by brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in both cases that the jury instructions should have made it clear that mitigating circumstances do not have to be proven by the defense beyond a reasonable doubt. In the Carr brothers’ case, the Kansas high court said they were entitled to have separate sentencing hearings, and that failure to give them such proceedings violated the Eight Amendment.
The consolidated cases were argued by Supreme Court veterans: former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal representing Reginald Carr and Sidley Austin’s Jeffrey Green representing Jonathan Carr and Gleason. Kansas Solicitor General Steve McAllister represented Kansas in seeking reversal of the state high court decisions.
Scalia rejected Sotomayor’s contention that the high court should not have second-guessed the decisions of the Kansas Supreme Court, because in both instances the Kansas tribunal invoked the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“It generally would have been ‘none of our business’ had the Kansas Supreme Court vacated Gleason’s and the Carrs’ death sentences on state-law grounds,” Scalia wrote. “But it decidedly did not.”
On the merits, Scalia wrote that if the jury instructions the Kansas court required were given, “we doubt whether that would produce anything but jury confusion.”
As for the issue of separate sentencing proceedings for the Carrs, Scalia wrote, “Whatever the merits of defendants’ procedural objections, we will not shoehorn them into the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishments.’ ”
Sotomayor objected to the majority’s intrusion into Kansas matters as a matter of federalism. “State experimentation with how best to guarantee a fair trial to criminal defendants is an essential aspect of our federalism scheme,” she wrote.
She also asserted that the court took up the cases because of the brutality of the murders involved and that “the majority is understandably anxious to ensure they receive their just deserts.” But, Sotomayor added, “The standard adage teaches that hard cases make bad law. … I fear that these cases suggest a corollary: Shocking cases make too much law.”
IMAGE: Sonia Sotomayor. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/NLJ
