WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court split Wednesday in reinstating a California inmate's death sentence, a decision that came down to the vote of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Justices voted 5-4 to overturn an appeals court ruling that declared Ronald Sanders' sentence unconstitutional.
It was the first capital punishment decision under newly installed Chief Justice John Roberts and probably will be one of the last cases in which O'Connor is an influential vote.
Senators are considering President Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito to succeed O'Connor. Alito's views track those in the ruling against Sanders.
''Replacing O'Connor with Alito in this opinion would not have made a difference,'' said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty group that backed California in the case.
Sanders was put on death row in 1982 for killing a woman a year earlier during a drug-related robbery in Bakersfield, Calif. Janice Allen was bound with a vacuum cleaner electrical cord, blindfolded and beaten to death.
Two of the four special circumstances used by prosecutors in their case against Sanders -- that the crime was committed during a burglary and was cruel or heinous -- were later found invalid.
California argued that Sanders would have been eligible for a death sentence even without those factors. The Supreme Court's five conservative members agreed.
''The erroneous factor could not have `skewed' the sentence, and no constitutional violation occurred,'' Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an opinion joined by Roberts, O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter said ''this decision is more likely to complicate than to clarify our capital sentencing jurisprudence.'' Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a separate dissent, complaining that the court's finding could ''deprive a defendant of a fair and reliable sentencing proceeding.''
Without O'Connor, the court would have been split 4-4, which would have left in place the lower court ruling in Sanders' favor. The moderate conservative sometimes sides with liberal members in death penalty cases.
The decision was announced as senators were in the third day of Alito's confirmation hearing. Alito has been a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the past 15 years.
Scalia referred in his opinion to a 3rd Circuit opinion by Alito in a similar case. In the 1995 case, Flamer v. Delaware, Alito said that Delaware death row inmates William Flamer and Billie Bailey did not deserve new sentences despite problems with factors considered by jurors. Both were executed a few months later.
Some opponents of Alito have criticized him for that decision, but Scheidegger said that the Supreme Court ruling vindicates the nominee.
The case is Brown v. Sanders, 04-980.