New York Times

Supreme Court Rules in Capital Cases, Overturning an Arizona Death Sentence

June 1, 2016

by Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday took action in two death penalty cases, rejecting a broad constitutional challenge to capital punishment from Louisiana and reversing a death sentence from Arizona.

The moves were in keeping with the court’s general approach in this area. It has been open to cutting back on the availability of the death penalty but not inclined to test its constitutionality.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, dissenting in Glossip v. Gross last year, urged his colleagues to consider the larger question. “Rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” he wrote, “I would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.”

The case from Louisiana asked the justices to consider that question, but the court turned down the appeal without comment. Justice Breyer dissented and, as in Glossip, only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined him.

The case concerned Lamondre Tucker, who was 18 in 2008 when he shot and killed his pregnant girlfriend. Echoing points Justice Breyer made in his Glossip dissent, Mr. Tucker’s lawyers said the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.

Mr. Tucker was sentenced to death in Caddo Parish, La., which his lawyers said “imposes more death sentences per capita than any other parish or county in the nation.”

That disparity was emblematic, they said, of a capital justice system in which death sentences are imposed arbitrarily in fairly few counties around the nation, with prosecutions warped by racial discrimination and politics.

Justice Breyer said the court should have heard the case, Tucker v. Louisiana, No. 15-946. Mr. Tucker, he suggested, barely qualified for the death penalty in the first place, as he was 18 at the time of the killing and had an I.Q. of 74. The Supreme Court has banned the execution of juvenile offenders and of the intellectually disabled.

“Tucker was sentenced to death in a Louisiana county (Caddo Parish) that imposes almost half the death sentences in Louisiana, even though it accounts for only 5 percent of that state’s population and 5 percent of its homicides,” Justice Breyer wrote, citing Mr. Tucker’s brief.

“Given these facts, Tucker may well have received the death penalty not because of the comparative egregiousness of his crime, but because of an arbitrary feature of his case, namely, geography,” Justice Breyer added. “One could reasonably believe that if Tucker had committed the same crime but been tried and sentenced just across the Red River in, say, Bossier Parish, he would not now be on death row.”

In the second case, Lynch v. Arizona, No. 15-8366, the court reversed a death sentence in an unsigned opinion, saying the jury had not been told an important fact: that the only alternative to a death sentence was life without the possibility of parole.

The case concerned Shawn P. Lynch, who was convicted of the 2001 kidnapping and killing of James Panzarella, whom he met at a bar in Scottsdale, Ariz. Prosecutors argued that the death penalty was warranted because Mr. Lynch posed a risk of future dangerousness. But they blocked defense lawyers from telling the jury that the only alternative sentence would have kept Mr. Lynch in prison for life.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that a 1994 decision required the judge to tell the jury about the alternative or let defense lawyers do so. The unsigned opinion rejected the state’s argument that such statements were not required because executive clemency remained available and because the state Legislature may someday allow parole.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the 1994 decision was wrong. Justice Thomas accused the majority of micromanaging state sentencing procedures and imposing “a magic-words requirement.”