Legal News

Is High Court Gearing Up to Review Discrimination in Capital Punishment?

By Dan Slater

It seems that the High Court’s denials of cert have been as notable as its grants. Yesterday, Justices Stevens and Thomas squared off over the Court’s denial of cert in Walker v. Georgia, a capital case.

At issue: To what extent must a court, in a capital case, carry out a proportionality review to ensure that arbitrariness and discrimination don’t figure in a sentence of death.

“Rather than perform a thorough proportionality review to mitigate the heightened risks of arbitrariness and discrimination in this case, the Georgia Supreme Court carried out an utterly perfunctory review,” wrote Stevens, who did not dissent from the denial of cert, in a statement. In Walker’s case, Stevens noted, the Georgia Supreme Court cited 21 similar death sentences in a one-paragraph appendix, but made no mention of the details of those cases and did not note that several of them involved double murders, unlike Walker’s. Stevens said he found the case “troubling” because it “involves a black defendant and a white victim.”

Justice Thomas disagreed: “To the extent that Justice Stevens suggests that the Court’s precedent requires consideration of cases where the death penalty was not imposed, he is simply wrong,” Thomas wrote in a statement concurring with the denial of cert. (Go to Scotus blog to find the justices’ statements. Here are stories from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the WaPo.)

“You have one justice saying Georgia has done everything fine and another saying they have been very derelict in their duties. These are not just shades of difference,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the WaPo. He said the justices might be preparing to review whether the death penalty is being applied in a discriminatory way, an issue the court has not taken up for two decades.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 21, 2008 (boomark / email).