Linda Greenhouse at the New York Times has, "Justices, 5 to 4, Overturn 3 Texas Death Sentences."
Because all three decisions dealt with an idiosyncratic provision of the Texas death penalty law that is no longer in effect, their practical significance may be limited to requiring the resentencing of several dozen inmates on that state’s death row.
And:
With at least two months to go before the current term ends, the court appears to have entered a particularly contentious period. Of the 10 decisions handed down so far this month, eight were decided by a majority of just five justices. (Underscoring his position at the center of the court, Justice Kennedy was in the majority in all 10, while Chief Justice Roberts was in the majority in five.)
The three decisions on Wednesday provided the latest chapter in the Supreme Court’s dialogue with the two lower courts, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which handle appeals from the Texas death row, the country’s most active. As an exasperated Supreme Court majority has seen it, these courts have found repeated and unpersuasive reasons to evade the Supreme Court’s evolving death penalty jurisprudence.
The Washington Post carries the AP report as, "Death sentences rejected."
The Los Angeles Times has, "High court overturns 3 death sentences in Texas."
Until Texas was forced to revise its law in 1991, jurors were given only two questions when deciding whether a convicted killer would receive a sentence of death or life in prison. Was the murder deliberate, and did the killer represent a "continuing threat" to society? If the jury agreed on a "yes" answer to both, the defendant received a death sentence.
In the late 1970s, however, the Supreme Court had said jurors must be permitted to weigh any "mitigating factor" in a defendant's life or character as a reason to spare him from a death sentence. Nonetheless, the justices upheld the Texas system at the time, even though it left little or no room for jurors to weigh mitigating evidence.
For a time, Texas judges tried to get around the problem by telling jurors they could falsely answer "no" when they were asked whether the murderer presented a continuing threat to society, even though they thought the right answer to the question was yes.
Not surprisingly, the justices in the majority Wednesday described that approach as "fatally flawed" because it depended on jurors giving an answer they knew to be untrue.
Yesterday's posts, here and here, had links to the opinions.
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