{"id":6637,"date":"2022-05-24T13:51:18","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T20:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=6637"},"modified":"2022-05-24T13:52:29","modified_gmt":"2022-05-24T20:52:29","slug":"delay-and-failure-to-accept-responsibility-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=6637","title":{"rendered":"Delay and Failure to Accept Responsibility For It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Along with the two Arizona capital cases decided yesterday (see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=6619\">this post<\/a>), the Supreme Court turned down another, the case of one of the longest-term residents of death row.<\/p>\n<p>Justice Breyer penned another of his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.supremecourt.gov\/opinions\/21pdf\/21-1268_0pm1.pdf\">opinions<\/a> lamenting how awful it is for these murderers to have death sentences hanging over their heads so long. And once again he failed to acknowledge how much the Supreme Court itself is at fault for this situation.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The opinion begins with this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Joe Clarence Smith was first sentenced to death in 1977, more than 44 years ago. Pet. for Cert. 2. The Arizona Supreme Court vacated that sentence as unconstitutional and remanded for resentencing in 1979.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From that truncated description, you might think that Arizona had grievously wronged Smith by violating some fundamental rule of capital trials written in to the Constitution when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 or when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868. You would be wrong.<\/p>\n<p>The supposed unconstitutionality of Smith&#8217;s 1977 sentence is not based on anything actually in the Constitution. In the 1977 trial, the state court &#8220;violated&#8221; a pseudo-constitutional rule that the Supreme Court conjured up out of thin air <strong><em>the following year<\/em><\/strong> in its disastrous decision in <em>Lockett<\/em> v. <em>Ohio<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>After <em>Furman<\/em> v. <em>Georgia<\/em> in 1972, the Arizona Legislature adopted a capital sentencing system in which the jury was limited to defined lists of both aggravating and mitigating circumstance. It did so in the well-grounded belief that that was what <em>Furman<\/em> required. The judgment seemed vindicated when the Supreme Court approved a similar law in 1976 in <em>Proffitt<\/em> v. <em>Florida<\/em>. But no. The Court flipped yet again and banned the kind of law it had apparently approved.<\/p>\n<p>For the long version of this history, see my article, <a href=\"https:\/\/cjlf.org\/publications\/ScheideggerTinkeringActivismPublished.pdf\">Tinkering with the Machinery of Death: Lessons from a Failure of Judicial Activism<\/a>, 17 Ohio St.J.Crim.L. 131 (2019).<\/p>\n<p>But Justice Breyer goes on and on. He writes again and again on this issue and never once addresses the degree to which the Court itself has caused it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Along with the two Arizona capital cases decided yesterday (see this post), the Supreme Court turned down another, the case of one of the longest-term residents of death row. Justice Breyer penned another of his opinions lamenting how awful it is for these murderers to have death sentences hanging over their heads so long. And once again he failed to acknowledge how much the Supreme Court itself is at fault for this situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death-penalty","category-u-s-supreme-court"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Delay and Failure to Accept Responsibility For It - Crime &amp; Consequences<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=6637\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Delay and Failure to Accept Responsibility For It - Crime &amp; Consequences\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Along with the two Arizona capital cases decided yesterday (see this post), the Supreme Court turned down another, the case of one of the longest-term residents of death row. 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