"The Supreme Court Loves Juries, Except When It Doesn't," is Andrew Cohen's just-posted essay at the Atlantic.
The United States Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the case of a man who was spared the death penalty by an Alabama jury only to be subsequently sentenced to death anyway by the trial judge in the case—an official who was elected to his post by the citizens of his state. The result in Woodward v. Alabama is that the state may continue to be one of only three in the nation that permits "judicial overrides" of jury decisions in capital cases.
Only two justices—Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer—dissented from the denial of certiorari, and only Justice Sotomayor was willing to lay bare the extent of the hypocrisy that accompanies the Court's resolution of this case. As she wrote, there were at least two excellent reasons why the Court should have accepted this case for review and then ended Alabama's dubious mix of law and politics in death penalty cases. That there were not five votes for either reason (0r both) reminds us how hostile this court is to reform of even the worst excesses of capital punishment in America.
And:
I do not see how Justice Scalia squares his eloquence in Ring with his silence in Woodward. And I do not know how to explain or justify the meek acceptance of this dubious result by the other members of the Court. Judicial elections in Alabama create all sorts of perversions of justice—I spoke about some of them just last week with Sue Bell Cobb, the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama—but nowhere are those perversions more pronounced than when a state judge begging for votes condemns a man to death whom a jury had voted to spare.
Earlier coverage of Justice Sotomayor's dissent in the Alabama case is at the link.
There is much more from Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic.
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