SCOTUS to look at Texas Justice

The Supremes have a very long history of dealing with the Death Penalty in Texas. The Fifth Circuit, in my estimation, is pretty much a hot bed of extrajudicial judgment, if not out right insanity.

With that in mind, the SCOTUS has had to engage the Circuit in a very long debate on how to handle the death penalty which continues to this day.

As Linda Greenhouse in the NYT’s points out:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday resumed its long-running effort to monitor the use of the death penalty in Texas, hearing arguments in three cases that put the strains and internal contradictions of the court’s capital punishment jurisprudence fully on display.

One case was familiar, at least to the seven justices who were on the court when LaRoyce L. Smith’s previous appeal of his death sentence came before them in 2004. At that time, the court voted 7 to 2 to overturn the sentence, only to see it promptly reinstated by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the ground that the constitutional error the justices had identified was “harmless.” The question now is whether that was an acceptable response by the state court to the Supreme Court’s mandate.

The other two cases, while unfamiliar in their particulars, were very familiar in what they represented: the latest, but almost certainly not the last round in a fitful dialogue between the Supreme Court and the federal appeals court that oversees habeas corpus cases filed in federal court by Texas inmates.

All three cases offer a window on the recent history of capital punishment in the United States, which to a large degree is the history of capital punishment in Texas. Since 1976, when the Supreme Court permitted states to resume executions, Texas has put to death 380 people, far more than any other state. (The next highest, Virginia, has executed 98.)

In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that the jury instructions that Texas was using were constitutionally deficient because they failed to ensure that jurors could give meaningful consideration to a defendant’s mitigating evidence. Under the Texas system, jurors were instructed to respond to only two questions: whether the killing was deliberate, and whether the defendant posed a continuing threat to society. If the answers to both were yes, a death sentence was automatic.

The Texas Legislature addressed the problem two years later by instructing jurors to take “all of the evidence” into consideration, including the defendant’s character and background. But in the interim, during which Mr. Smith was sentenced to death for murdering a former co-worker at a Taco Bell in Dallas, judges tried to address the problem by telling jurors that if they thought the mitigating evidence warranted a sentence of life in prison rather than death, they should simply answer no to one of the two questions, even if they believed that the proper answer was yes.

Eventually, the Supreme Court held that this “nullification instruction” was constitutionally inadequate as well. It applied that ruling to Mr. Smith’s earlier appeal, overturning his sentence in 2004 and sending it back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which in turn reinstated it, finding the error “harmless” because Mr. Smith had failed to show that the nullification instruction had caused him “grievous harm.”

In his new appeal, Mr. Smith, represented by a University of Texas Law School professor, Jordan M. Steiker, is arguing that the state court’s resolution of the case flew in the face of the Supreme Court’s analysis. The state court, having failed in the first round to apply its “harmless error” rule, should not be permitted to introduce it after the fact, Mr. Steiker said.

Now, everyone knows that I am opposed to the death penalty. I am opposed not because the judicial system makes so many mistakes, but because I believe that Murder whether executed by the private sector or the public sector is wrong and a crime.

That said, for all those out there who oppose it because we can’t get it right, this other story from Dallas should finally be the last nail in the coffin. I say this knowing that there have been so many stories that should have been the last nail in the coffin.

A 50-year-old Dallas man whose conviction of raping a boy in 1982 cost him nearly half his life in prison and on parole won a court ruling Wednesday declaring him innocent. He said he was not angry, “because the Lord has given me so much.”

The parolee, James Waller, was exonerated by DNA testing, the 12th person since 2001 whose conviction in Dallas County has been overturned long after the fact as a result of genetic evidence, lawyers said.

“Nowhere else in the nation have so many individual wrongful convictions been proven in one county in such a short span,” said Barry C. Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that championed Mr. Waller’s case. In fact, Mr. Scheck said, those 12 such instances are more than have occurred anywhere else except the entire states of New York and Illinois since the nation’s first DNA exoneration, in 1989.

In the aftermath of the new evidence, prosecutors had joined defense lawyers in calling for the clearing of Mr. Waller, who spent more than 10 years behind bars before he was paroled in 1993.

If this is the track record in Texas then it is clear that the death penalty should be abolished now! Wrongful convictions are far too common in our judicial system and this gives the death penalty its lack of moral and judicial authority. Wrongful convictions are endemic to our system of “justice.” And keep in mind folks that these exonerations only happen if there is actual DNA evidence. What do you think happens when it is only eyewitness testimony that convicts someone?

Do the Justices of the SCOTUS read the papers? If they did they would know the answer to the Texas cases before them.