Legal Research

"U.S. Supreme Court Reinstates Death Penalty in Ohio Case"

This post was written by Chuck Kallendorf: "The United States Supreme Court Tuesday reinstated the death penalty sentence for Frank Spisak's 1982 shooting spree at Cleveland State University, overturning a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in October 2006. ( Decision )

"(The Sixth Circuit)," the Court said, "erred in holding that the instructions and forms contravened Mills v. Maryland, in which this Court held that the jury instructions and verdict forms at issue violated the Constitution because, read naturally, they told the jury that it could not find a particular circumstance to be mitigating unless all 12 jurors agreed that the mitigating circumstance had been proved to exist... (and) Even assuming that Mills sets forth the pertinent 'clearly established Federal law' for reviewing the state-court decision in this case, the instructions and forms used here differ significantly from those in Mills: They made clear that, to recommend a death sentence, the jury had to find unanimously that each of the aggravating factors outweighed any mitigating circumstances, but they did not say that the jury had to determine the existence of each individual mitigating factor unanimously. Nor did they say anything about how--or even whether--the jury should make individual determinations that each particular mitigating circumstance existed. They focused only on the overall question of balancing the aggravating and mitigating factors, and they repeatedly told the jury to consider all relevant evidence. Thus, the instructions and verdict forms did not clearly bring about, either through what they said or what they implied, the constitutional error in the Mills instructions."

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Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Hamilton Law Library Blog, 14 January 2010

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on January 15, 2010 (boomark / email).