The Supreme Court is generally a hostile place for death row prisoners, but they picked up a rare win on Wednesday — barely.
To be clear, there’s no anti-death penalty revolution underway at the court that helped carry out Donald Trump’s execution spree in the waning days of his presidency. Instead, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 5-4 opinion in Cruz v. Arizona shows that, if a state makes a ridiculous enough argument, then sometimes, maybe, they’ll lose by razor-thin margin.
Here’s how it happened, with apologies for some brief background that’s necessary to understanding the decision.
The 1994 Supreme Court ruling in Simmons v. South Carolina said that when future dangerousness is at issue — whether a defendant will continue to pose a threat to society — that defendant can tell the jury they’re ineligible for parole if the jury doesn’t sentence them to death. That can make a difference to jurors who might not want to sentence someone to death but are concerned that a seemingly dangerous defendant could be released in the future.
Arizona, however, resisted applying the Simmons precedent for years, to the point that the Supreme Court in 2016 had to issue a ruling that essentially told the state: “Hey, you have to abide by the law.“ (Naturally, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from that 2016 ruling in Lynch v. Arizona.)
Then we get to the case of John Montenegro Cruz. He was sentenced to death after being blocked from telling the jury that he couldn’t be paroled, and he lost an initial appeal before the Lynch decision of 2016. After Lynch, he cited a state procedural rule that allows a challenge when there’s been “a significant change in the law that, if applicable to the defendant’s case, would probably overturn the defendant’s judgment or sentence.”
Yet, somehow, the Arizona Supreme Court said that the 2016 ruling in Lynch wasn’t a “significant change.” Pointing out how ridiculous that is, Justice Elena Kagan at oral…
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