A hat tip to Howard Bashman at How Appealing. He located reporting in the Amarillo Globe-News, "Death Ruling Tossed."
The Austin American-Statesman has, "U.S. court tosses 3 Texas death sentences."
An additional 44 death row inmates were sentenced under the faulty jury instruction, which hasn't been used since 1991.
However, it will probably take months to determine how many of the cases will be affected by Wednesday's ruling. At least 22 cases, already rejected by the federal courts, could be exempt from further review, and other cases could depend on the evidence presented at trial and other factors, lawyers said.
University of Texas law professors Jordan Steiker and Rob Owen, who represented the three inmates, hailed the decisions for clarifying a murky and oft-litigated corner of death penalty law.
"It's a terrific vindication of the principle we have been fighting for many years about," Steiker said. "But it is bittersweet because so many inmates have been executed with the identical claim."
The Dallas Morning News has, "Three Texas death sentences tossed."
All three involved jury instructions used in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during an evolution in Supreme Court capital cases.
Texas juries at the time faced a two-part test in sentencing. Was the conduct deliberate, and did the defendant still pose a threat? Two "yes" answers meant death.
Mr. Smith's judge told the jury to provide a "no" answer if they felt he deserved to be spared. The defense argued that wasn't enough to let jurors genuinely consider his IQ of 78, and that he was a 19-year-old ninth-grader.
The state Legislature resolved the problem by adding a third question in 1991, explicitly letting jurors consider mitigating evidence.
But in 2004, the Supreme Court threw out the Smith sentence on a 7-2 vote and ordered the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to fix the problem. Then, in what was widely seen as an act of defiance, the state appeals court voted 8-1 in March 2006 to uphold the death sentence again.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in the Smith case, repeatedly tweaked the lower court for its "confusion" and inability to follow directions.
The implication that the lower court "doesn't understand some fairly basic principle of death penalty law, that's ... insulting," said David Dow, a University of Houston law school professor who specializes in capital cases. "If I were a judge on the [Texas] court, I would be embarrassed."
Roberts' dissent
But Chief Justice John Roberts, the lead dissenter, defended the lower courts and blamed his own court for the conflicts. Instead of providing clear guidance, it had given lower courts "a dog's breakfast of divided, conflicting, and ever-changing analyses."
The court's guidance on whether Texas' jury instructions allowed "sufficient consideration of mitigating evidence," he wrote, boiled down to a vague: "it depends."
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has, "Supreme Court voids death sentences for three."
State Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, said the high court’s ruling, as well as several other rulings in recent years that found fault with Texas’ application of the death penalty, underscores his call for at least a temporary halt on executions in the state.
Texas leads the nation with 391 executions since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976.
“We need a moratorium to review the flaws in each of the cases on file,” said Shapleigh, whose legislation that would suspend executions pending a thorough study of the death penalty remains bottled up in committee.
The Houston Chronicle has, "High Court tosses 3 Texas death sentences."
The Texas Attorney General's Office estimates the number of cases that could be affected by Wednesday's ruling at close to 50, while defense attorneys say the number could total 70 or more.
Those inmates could eventually see their death sentences thrown out and new sentencing trials ordered. But those decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether the killers actually presented mitigating evidence at their sentencing trials and what exact instructions jurors received, verbally and in writing, in each case.
"This is a very fact-specific analysis lower courts are going to have to undertake," said Rob Owen, a University of Texas law professor who, along with UT Professor Jordan Steiker, represented the inmates. "There will be many cases that will need resentencing."
It would be up to individual prosecutors to decide whether to seek the death penalty again in any new sentencing trials, Owen said. The murder convictions themselves are untouched by Wednesday's rulings and would stand.
The San Antonio Express-News has, " Ruling for 3 Texas inmates offers hope to 47 on death row."
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday opened the door for three Texas death row inmates — and perhaps more — to possibly avoid execution, saying the lower courts that previously reviewed the cases ignored or misunderstood the law.
The immediate reach of the decisions is relatively limited because all three focused on a flawed model of jury instructions that haven't been used in Texas since 1991.
Even so, the state's death row still holds, by one tally, 47 inmates whose trials were governed by the old instructions that typically failed to inform jurors they could spare a defendant if they were moved by various factors, such as his appallingly abusive childhood.
"The conclusion to be drawn from these (three) cases is that the number of people entitled to resentencing is far larger than the state has consistently maintained over the last several years," said Robert C. Owen, a University of Texas law professor who argued on behalf of two of the inmates, Brent Ray Brewer and Jalil Abdul-Kabir, formerly known as Ted Cole.
Owen's colleague, Jordan Steiker, argued on behalf of the third inmate, LaRoyce Smith. Together, the three rulings represented an unusual trifecta for the professors and students at the law school's Capital Punishment Clinic, which represented the inmates.
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