Delaware’s rules for imposing the death penalty are
unconstitutional, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, a decision that
could mean an effective end to capital punishment in Delaware.
In a 148-page opinion, the court held that Delaware’s
death penalty law gave judges, rather than juries, too great a role in imposing
death sentences, violating constitutional requirements that the United States
Supreme Court laid out in a January decision that has brought executions in
Florida to a temporary halt.
The Delaware legislature came close to
abolishing the death penalty directly this year, but the debate
was put on hold to await the ruling by the state’s highest court.
Delaware’s attorney general said in a statement
Tuesday that he was reviewing the court’s decision and could not comment on
whether Delaware would appeal to the federal Supreme Court.
But there appeared to be little chance, in any case,
that the Supreme Court would overturn the decision, said Eric M. Freedman, an
expert on capital punishment at Hofstra University’s law school. “This probably
means, as a practical matter, the end of the death penalty in Delaware,” he said.
Delaware carried out its
last execution in 2012 and has 14 prisoners on death row. The death penalty has
been abolished in 18 other states, and executions have been delayed in many
others because of a scarcity of lethal injection drugs and disputes over
execution procedures.
In the case decided Tuesday, Delaware officials had
said they would seek the execution of Benjamin Rauf, a New Yorker who is
charged with murdering a fellow law school classmate last year during a drug
deal in Delaware. But Mr. Rauf’s lawyers argued that Delaware’s procedures
violated Supreme Court requirements for the primacy of jury decisions in
capital cases.
Until recently, Delaware was one of three states,
along with Florida and Alabama, that allowed judges to decide if the circumstances
of a crime warranted the death penalty. Judges in those three states were also
allowed to override a jury decision and impose such a penalty.
In January, the federal Supreme Court ruled, in Hurst
v. Florida, that Florida’s capital sentencing law was unconstitutional because
“the Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary
to impose a sentence of death.”
Florida’s subsequent effort to revise its law,
allowing imposition of the death penalty by a jury vote of 10 to 2, rather than
a unanimous vote, is also under challenge.
The new decision by the Delaware justices is
significant and could have national repercussions because it accepts the
principles in the Hurst decision and takes them to their logical conclusion,
clarifying issues that the federal Supreme Court did not address, said Robert
Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a
private research group.
The Delaware court found that a jury not only must
decide whether there were “aggravating circumstances” that could justify a
death penalty, but also must find, “unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt,”
that such aggravating factors outweigh any mitigating circumstances — the
critical determination in imposing a death sentence.
In Tuesday’s decision, issued unsigned by a majority,
the Delaware Supreme Court said the General Assembly would have to decide
whether to reinstate the death penalty and to draft new legal procedures.
The State Senate voted this year to end capital
punishment, and the governor said he would sign such a bill. Abolition was
contested in the House, with final resolution delayed pending the state’s
Supreme Court decision in the Rauf case. A new drive to revive the death
penalty in Delaware, experts said, would clearly face an uphill battle.
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