The Court today rejected petitions to examine two death penalty cases. In the Kevin Keith case from Ohio, the AP reports, "Court won't hear inmate's claim of innocence," via Google News.
The Supreme Court won't hear an Ohio man's arguments that he will be wrongfully executed for fatally shooting three people.
The high court on Tuesday refused to hear Kevin Keith's appeal. Keith is scheduled to be executed in September.
Keith's lawyers wanted justices to review the evidence in the killing of three people in a 1994 shooting in northern Ohio.
They say courts have never heard evidence that could exonerate him. That includes an alternate suspect who boasted he was going to carry out the killings, an enlarged photo of Keith used during a picture lineup and witnesses who say Keith was elsewhere.
Keith's attorneys have issued the following statement:
"We are disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear Mr. Keith's appeal. However, the Court's denial is not an indication of how strong the facts are supporting Mr. Keith's innocence claim involving faulty eyewitness identification and an alternative suspect. Less than 1% of all petitions are accepted, and as the Supreme Court rules state, a petition is rarely granted when the problem is that the lower court decided the facts wrong. Indeed, no court has ever had the entirety of the new evidence of Mr. Keith's innocence before it, nor has it ever been presented to a jury. Since Mr. Keith's execution is scheduled for this September 15th, his fate may rest in the hands of the Ohio Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Strickland, who we trust will do everything they can to ensure that an innocent person is not executed in our State."
Earlier coverage of the Kevin Keith case begins with this post.
The Court also refused to review a federal death sentence. The AP report is, "High Court Turns Down Appeal In Rogue Juror Case," via WJZ-TV
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal from a federal death row inmate who said his death sentence should have been thrown out because of a juror's misconduct.
The justices did not comment in turning down Brandon Basham, who was sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing 44-year-old Alice Donovan in 2002. The foreman on Basham's jury was held in contempt of court by the trial judge after it was learned that she called five news organizations and made 71 other calls to two fellow jurors, despite repeated warnings from the judge to refrain from discussing the case with anyone.
In the case from South Carolina, U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. found that the behavior of juror Cynthia Wilson, was so outrageous that he held her in contempt of court, ordering her to return $2,500 of her juror's pay and perform 120 hours of community service. Anderson said he would have put Wilson in jail for six months if she did not have four children at home.
But when Basham asked for his death sentence to be thrown out as a result of Wilson's conduct, Anderson refused, and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., backed him up.
The case had attracted some attention lately because Solicitor General Elena Kagan -- now the nominee to replace Justice John Paul Stevens -- opposed Supreme Court review. An earlier AP report was titled, "Kagan: No need for court review of rogue juror," via Google News.
And when Basham took his plea to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan agreed that the judge had made the correct call. The high court, to which Kagan has since been nominated, could say as early as Tuesday whether it will hear Basham's case.
It is no surprise that the government is seeking to preserve what it already has won, especially after the time and expense of a capital punishment trial.
Basham's guilt in a brutal, senseless crime is not in dispute, as even his lawyers concede. Basham was convicted by a jury and Chadrick Fulks pleaded guilty to kidnapping and killing 44-year-old Alice Donovan during a two-week crime spree after the pair escaped from a Hopkins County, Ky., jail in 2002. Fulks also has been sentenced to death.
They also have pleaded guilty to killing 19-year-old Marshall University student Samantha Burns in West Virginia.
The claim that Basham is raising at the Supreme Court deals only with the actions of juror Wilson, a nurse from Lyman, S.C., in the penalty phase of his trial.
The court has previously ruled that the presence of a biased juror is so serious that it requires a verdict to be thrown out.
Basham and the government disagree over whether Wilson actually was biased and tried improperly to sway other jurors who might not have favored a death sentence.
Wilson testified that her calls to the media were intended to spur stories that women shopping alone should be careful, since Donovan was abducted from a Wal-Mart parking lot and Burns from a mall in Huntington, W.Va.
But Basham said the testimony from Wilson, her husband and a television news producer Wilson called suggested that she was interested in publicity for herself and was also worried that some jurors might not vote for a death sentence.
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