Rulings in Texas Capital Cases Try Supreme Court's Patience
Sunday, December 5, 2004 at 01:37AM
TheSpook
In the past year, the Supreme Court has heard
three appeals from inmates on death row in Texas, and in each case the
prosecutors and the lower courts suffered stinging reversals. In a case
to be argued on Monday, the court appears poised to deliver another
rebuke. Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, will
appear before the justices for the second time in two years. To legal
experts, the Supreme Court's decision to hear his case yet again is a
sign of its growing impatience with two of the courts that handle death
penalty cases from Texas: its highest criminal court, the Court of
Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth
Circuit, in New Orleans. Perhaps as telling is the exasperated language
in decisions this year from a Supreme Court that includes no
categorical opponent of the death penalty. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
wrote in June that the Fifth Circuit was "paying lip service to
principles" of appellate law in issuing death penalty rulings with "no
foundation in the decisions of this court." In an unsigned decision in
another case last month, the Supreme Court said the Court of Criminal
Appeals "relied on a test we never countenanced and now have
unequivocally rejected." The decision was made without hearing
argument, a move that ordinarily signals that the error in the decision
under review was glaring. The actions of the two appeals courts that
hear capital cases from Texas help explain why the state leads the
nation in executions, with 336 since 1976, when the death penalty was
reinstated, more than the next five states combined.
Pictured above: In
the Miller-El case, appellate lawyers and legal
scholars are buzzing over what they say is the insolence of the Fifth
Circuit.
