Capital Punishment: Supreme Court Decisions of the 2005-2006 Term (CRS Report for Congress)
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| Release Date |
Aug. 23, 2006 |
| Report Number |
RL33621 |
| Report Type |
Report |
| Authors |
Paul S. Wallace, Jr., American Law Division |
| Source Agency |
Congressional Research Service |
Summary:
During the 2005-2006 Term, the Supreme Court gave favorable decisions to the defendants in three out of the six death penalty cases it announced. In Hill v. McDonough, the Court ruled unanimously that the method-of-lethal injection claims can be brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 rather than under the habeas corpus statute (28 U.S.C. §2254). In House v. Bell, a case involving a death row inmate who claimed that DNA evidence proved he did not commit the crime for which he was found guilty, the Court found in a 5 -3 ruling that the petitioner had satisfied the "gateway" standard for habeas review, but left open the question of whether the Constitution precludes execution of an "innocent" defendant found guilty and sentenced following a constitutionally adequate trial. In Holmes v. South Carolina, the Court unanimously held that a capital defendant cannot be denied the right to introduce evidence of third party guilt. The other cases, in which the Court upheld application of state death penalty statutes, appear to reveal a greater division among the justices over the fairness of capital punishment. The 5-4 decision in Kansas v. Marsh centered around a debate concerning capital punishment as much as it did a ruling on the unusual statute in Kansas which provided that juries should sentence a defendant to die â rather than serve life in prison â when the evidence for and against imposing death is equal. In Brown v. Sanders, a second 5-4 decision, the Court upheld the petitioner's death sentence even though two of the sentencing factors presented to the jury were declared invalid. In Oregon v. Guzek, the Court held that states may reasonably refuse to allow convicted capital defendants to offer alibi evidence for the first time at the sentencing phase of their trials; two Justices would have permitted the exclusion of any evidence at sentencing that cast doubt upon the jury's guilty verdict, but the majority were obviously unwilling to go that far.
