I'm back in Austin from travels and catching up. The big news is the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to grant cert in two more Texas death penalty cases. Patty Reinert's story in the Saturday Houston Chronicle is here.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear two more Texas death penalty cases to decide whether lower courts are complying with its previous rulings on faulty jury instructions.
The instructions, which guide Texas jurors as they decide between life sentences and death penalties, were rejected by the Supreme Court in 1989 and corrected by the Texas Legislature in 1991.
However, decisions in the two cases accepted Friday — and in a similar case the court accepted earlier this month — could eventually help determine whether dozens of death row inmates tried under the old rules will live or die.
SCOTUS Blog's extensive coverage is here, including the specific questions the Court is asking in the cases.
A week ago, the Court agreed to hear for a second time one of the cases in which it had required Texas to do more to assure that mitigating factors are analyzed fully by juries -- Smith v. Texas (05-11304). But that case involved the Texas state courts' response on this question, while the newly granted cases involve the Fifth Circuit's response. The Court did not set a date for oral argument on the consolidated case (an earlier post regarding the Court's grant in the Smith case is here).
Smith v. Texas, the Court's decision in 2004, was the fourth the Justices had issued on Texas' capital procedures and the mitigation question. The first was Penry v. Lynaugh (Penry I) in 1989, then came Penry v. Johnson (Penry II) in 2001 and Tennard v. Dretke in 2004 prior to the ruling in Smith.
A group of death row inmates in Texas, supporting the new appeals, argued that "Contrary to the decisions of this Court, the Fifth Circuit has once again adopted a reading of Penry I that does violence to this Court's rulings and has and will result in an unconstitutional resolution of Penry claims....The Fifth Circuit has continued to apply an unconstitutionally narrow reading of Penry I and its progeny."
As noted last week when the Court accepted Smith (here and here), a majority of the Supreme Court Justices have become increasingly critical of the CCA and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for failing to provide proper review of Texas death penalty cases. Rob Owen of the University of Texas School of Law's Death Penalty Clinic represents the two death row inmates whose cases have just been accepted.
Doug Berman has this commentary at Sentencing Law and Policy.
Comments