Ariz. Case Could Affect Death Penalty

April 21, 2002

FLORENCE, Ariz. - Timothy Ring believes he wouldn't be living in a cell on Arizona's death row if a jury, not a judge, had decided his fate.

  Ring, a former state corrections officer sentenced to death  for killing an armored truck guard during a 1994 robbery,said the jury that convicted him never heard the evidence a state judge later used to condemn him.

 ``I was essentially given two trials,'' Ring said recently as he sat in an interview cell. ``One before a jury and then one before a judge.''

Ring's argument has advanced his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices will hear arguments Monday.

 The high court's decision on the case, which is expected by early summer, could change the way the death penalty is handed down in nine states where judges, not juries, determine capital murder sentences.

  A narrow ruling might only affect a handful of inmates. But some death penalty experts believe a broad court decision could pave the way for the resentencing of as many as 800 people on death row in the nine states.

``This has the potential to be major,'' said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a death penalty research group. ``What's being fought for is the right to have a jury decide who lives and who dies.''

 Currently, juries in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska have no role in sentencing the people they convict in capital cases.

  In Florida, Alabama, Delaware and Indiana, juries make sentencing recommendations, but judges make the final decision. Indiana, however, recently passed a law that will require judges to follow a jury's sentencing recommendations.

 Florida leads the nine states with 386 inmates on death row, followed by Alabama with 188, and Arizona with 128, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The issue in Ring's case is whether a judge alone can determine the aggravating factors, such as the heinous nature of a murder or whether it was committed for monetary gain, necessary in some states to turn a murder conviction into a death sentence.

 After the jury in Ring's trial was dismissed, the judge heard testimony at a sentencing hearing from one of Ring's accomplices who said Ring planned the robbery and murdered the guard. The judge then determined that the aggravating factors warranted death.

 ``Our argument is that if you can be sentenced to death by a determining fact, that fact has to be determined by a jury, not a judge finding,'' said Ring's attorney, Andrew Hurwitz.

 Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano, who will argue the case for the state, said judges' experience and legal knowledge often better equips them to make a death sentence determination.

The high court itself has been split on the issue, and some observers hope the Ring case will finally reconcile an apparent inconsistency in two previous rulings.

 In 1990, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona's death sentence law against a challenge that it violated the Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury.

 In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that a judge had inappropriately lengthened a New Jersey man's sentence after the jury was dismissed. The court overturned Charles Apprendi's sentence, ruling that the information the trial judge used to increase the sentence should have been weighed by a jury and proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

 In light of the New Jersey case, scores of inmates have since claimed that their sentences should also be overturned. The Apprendi ruling was also the basis for Ring's case being taken up by the Supreme Court.

``The Apprendi finding opened a Pandora's box of questions about what a judge can do in sentencing someone,'' said Napolitano.

 Recently, the court has granted stays of execution to two Florida inmates and an inmate in Alabama whose lawyers had cited Ring's case.

 Ring, who maintains his innocence, believes the high court will ultimately overturn his own death sentence. 

``If it affects any of the other 800 cases, so much the better,'' he said. ``I don't believe it should ever be easy for the government to kill its citizens.''