GIUDICE ANNULLA CENTO CONDANNE  PERCHE' INFLITTE DA GIUDICI, NON DA GIURIE

 WASHINGTON, 2 SET - Un giudice federale statunitense ha annullato un centinaio di condanne a morte emesse in Arizona e in altri Stati del suo distretto giudiziario perche' le sentenze erano state decise dai giudici e non dalle giurie.

Il giudice della Corte d'appello federale di San Francisco ha applicato una sentenza dell'anno scorso della Corte Suprema degli Stati Uniti, secondo cui le pene di morte possono essere inflitte solo dalle giurie popolari.

Il giudice ha interpretato il verdetto della Corte Suprema in senso retroattivo. 

WASHINGTON, 2 SET - La decisione della Corte d'appello federale si applica a circa cento condannati a morte in Arizona, Idaho e Montana, gli unici tre Stati del nono distretto, con sede, appunto, a San Francisco, che consentiva ai giudici di infliggere la pena capitale.

In una storica decisione accolta come una vittoria dagli oppositori della pena di morte, il 24 giugno 2002 i nove giudici della Corte suprema decretarono, con sette voti favorevoli e due contrari, che solo la giuria popolare puo' infliggere la pena di morte. L'alta corte di Washington non si era pronunciata, pero', sulla questione della retroattivita'.

Oggi a San Francisco i giudici della Corte d'appello del nono distretto federale hanno risolto il dilemma: con un voto di 8 a 3 hanno deciso in favore della commutazione in ergastolo di tutte le condanne a morte decise da un giudice nei tre Stati in questione.

In altri due Stati, Nebraska e Colorado, i giudici hanno avuto la possibilita' di infliggere la pena capitale. Ma la Corte d'appello che fa capo a questi Stati non ha ancora preso una posizione in merito alla retroattivita' della decisione della Corte Suprema.

''Decidendo che la costituzione non permette a un giudice di decidere se la pena di morte sia applicabile a un imputato - si legge nel decreto della corte d'appello di San Francisco - la Corte Suprema ha modificato fondamentalmente i principi di base dei casi di omicidio''.

La procura dell'Arizona non ha diffuso un commento immediato, ma i suoi avvocati considerano molto probabile che l'ufficio ricorrera' in appello presso la Corte Suprema di Washington.

Il caso sul quale il tribunale di San Francisco si e' pronunciato riguarda Warren Summerlin, detenuto nel braccio della morte dell'Arizona per l'omicidio nel 1981 di Brenna Bailey, 36 anni, impiegata di una societa' finanziaria con la quale Summerlin era indebitato. L'imputato fu ritenuto colpevole del delitto nel 1982 e il giudice impose la pena di  morte.

CORTE DI APPELLO ANNULLA CENTO CONDANNE A MORTE IN ARIZONA

Le sentenze erano state emesse dai giudici e non dalla giuria

New York, 2 set. (Ap.Biscom) - La corte di appello di San Francisco ha annullato questo pomeriggio circa cento condanne a morte emesse in Arizona e in altri stati della federazione. Le sentenze, ha motivato la corte, erano state infatti emesse da giudici singoli e non da giurie.

SEPTEMBER 3, 2003:

ARIZONA/IDAHO/MONTANA:

Judges' Rulings in Giving Death Are Overturned

The federal appeals court in San Francisco yesterday overturned the death sentences of more than 100 prisoners in 3 states because judges rather than juries had made the crucial factual determinations in sentencing them to death.

The court ruled that a Supreme Court decision last year striking down the capital sentencing laws in the three states and two others because they allowed judges to make those factual findings must be applied retroactively even to those inmates who had exhausted all of their appeals.

The affected prisoners will be entitled, at a minimum, to a new sentencing proceeding, unless the United States Supreme Court reverses the appeals court's decision.

The decision of the appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, affects death row inmates in Arizona, Idaho and Montana. The other 2 states that had had unconstitutional sentencing laws, Colorado and Nebraska, are not directly affected by the decision because they are not in the Ninth Circuit, which covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, along with Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

2 other federal appeals courts have decided that last year's Supreme Court decision, known as Ring, does not apply retroactively. That split, coupled with the significance of the yesterday's decision, makes Supreme Court review fairly likely.

"It's rare that you get so many sentences affected by one decision," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "It forces the issue to be decided."

Legal experts say that juries in capital cases tend to be more lenient. Only 1 of 12 jurors needs to be convinced to impose a life sentence; jurors typically confront such issues once in a lifetime and are more likely to appreciate their gravity; and elected judges are occasionally swayed by political considerations, experts say.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 124 people are on death row in Arizona, 16 are in Idaho and 6 in Montana. Some of them still have appeals pending and so did not need yesterday's decision to have the benefit of Ring. According to the Federal Public Defender's Office in Arizona, 94 inmates in Arizona and 16 in Idaho had exhausted their direct appeals and had their sentences overturned by yesterday's decision. A breakdown for Montana was not immediately available.

Yesterday's decision turned on the application of complicated and technical doctrines about when newly announced constitutional principles must be applied retroactively. But the majority decision often paused to make the point that procedures for imposing the death penalty must always be considered extraordinary.

New substantive rules announced by the Supreme Court generally apply retroactively. But new procedural principles are retroactive only if they are, as the Supreme Court put it, "watershed rules" that both "alter our understanding of the bedrock procedural elements" and "without which the likelihood of an accurate conviction is seriously diminished." That standard is difficult to satisfy.

Judge Sidney R. Thomas, writing for the majority in the 8-to-3 ruling yesterday, said the Ring decision was substantive because it effectively created a new crime in Arizona in the way it distinguished between ordinary murder and capital murder, by requiring the jury to decide whether certain so-called aggravating factors were present.

Judge Thomas added, in the alternative, that the Ring decision satisfied the exceptions to the ordinary rule that procedural changes do not apply retroactively.

"Depriving a capital defendant of his constitutional right to have a jury decide whether he is eligible for the death penalty is an error that necessarily affects the framework within which the trial proceeds," he wrote, adding that giving jurors a larger role aided in fairness of sentencing.

"Fact-finding by a jury, rather than by a judge, is more likely to heighten the accuracy of capital sentencing proceedings," he wrote.

Yesterday's decision involved Warren Summerlin, who is on death row in Arizona for killing a bill collector and who challenged his death sentence on a number of grounds.

While the penalty phases in most death penalty trials involve extended presentations by expert witnesses, family members and others of aggravating and mitigating evidence for juries to consider, in Arizona, at least, sentencing proceedings before judges were brisk affairs that relied more on legal memorandums than testimony. On the day Mr. Summerlin was sentenced to die, for instance, the judge in the case, Philip Marquardt, imposed a 2nd death sentence as well.

"A reasonable inference from the habituation brought about by imposing capital punishment under near rote conditions," Judge Thomas wrote, "is that a judge may be less likely to reflect the current conscience of the community and more likely to consider imposing a death penalty as just another criminal sentence."

The appeals court noted that Judge Marquardt had admitted to heavy marijuana use around the time he sentenced Mr. Summerlin to death. "If the allegations concerning Judge Marquardt are true, Summerlin's fate was determined by a drug-impaired judge, habituated to treating penalty-phase trials the same as noncapital sentencing," Judge Thomas wrote.

Judge Thomas added that elected judges like Judge Marquardt might be more likely to impose the death penalty for political reasons.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt joined in the decision and wrote separately to say that the technical doctrines it discussed obscured how straightforward he found the case.

"Executing people because their cases came too early - because their appeals ended before the Supreme Court belatedly came to the realization that it had made a grievous constitutional error in its interpretation of death penalty law, that it had erred when it failed to recognize that the United States Constitution prohibits judges, rather than jurors, from making critical factual decisions regarding life and death in capital cases - is surely arbitrariness that surpasses all bounds," Judge Reinhardt wrote.

The 3 dissenting judges said that the Ring decision should not apply retroactively because it announced neither a new substantive rule nor a fundamental alteration of a procedural one.

A lawyer with the Arizona attorney general's office, John Pressley Todd, said the office would ask the Supreme Court to review the case.

U.S. Court Overturns Some 100 Death Sentences

By Michael Kahn

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned the death sentences of about 100 inmates in the Western United States as it applied a recent U.S. Supreme Court  decision that juries and not judges must decide whether convicted criminals should be executed.

The appeals court ruling applies in three states covered by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals -- Arizona, Montana and Idaho -- which in the past have given sole discretion to judges to mete out the death penalty.

The ruling involved whether a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that juries rather than judges should decide the elements required to sentence a convicted criminal to death should apply retroactively to about 100 inmates. They will now have their death sentences commuted to life in prison.

"Depriving a capital defendant of his constitutional rights to have a jury decide whether he is eligible for the death penalty is an error that necessarily affects the framework within which the trial proceeds," the appeals court said in an 8-3 decision.

The ruling stems from the case of Warren Summerlin, an Arizona man convicted of the 1981 murder of Brenna Bailey, an officer from a finance company who had gone to inquire about an overdue account.

It affects just a small fraction of the more than 3,500 inmates now on death row in prisons across the United States.

The Arizona Attorney General's office, which argued the case, said it would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of whether its decision should be applied retroactively.

Kent Cattani, chief counsel with the office, added the Supreme Court will likely hear the case to clear up conflicting appellate decisions over how the high court's decision should be applied.

"If the issue were something to the fundamental fairness of the process it isn't something we would oppose," said Kent Cattani, chief counsel with the attorney general's office.

Dale Blaich, an assistant federal public defender in Arizona, said the 9th Circuit only has jurisdiction over Idaho, Montana and Arizona but the decision could set a precedent in other states where courts have not yet weighed in on the issue.

Nebraska and Colorado have similar sentencing methods while a mixture of inputs from judges and juries help determine whether a convicted criminal should receive the death penalty in Delaware, Indiana, Florida and Alabama.

"Our main argument was that the Supreme Court decision should apply to all inmates in Arizona," Blaich said. "It is a great day for the constitution."

U.S. Court Overturns 100 Death Sentences

 By DAVID KRAVETS, 

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court threw out an estimated 100 death sentences in Arizona and two other states Tuesday because the inmates were sent to death row by judges instead of juries.

The case stems from a 2002 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court , in which the high court found that juries, not judges, must render death sentences. But the Supreme Court left unclear whether the new rules should apply retroactively to inmates awaiting execution.

In an 8-3 vote, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals  said all condemned inmates sentenced by a judge should have their sentences commuted to life in prison.

The ruling applies only to Arizona, Idaho and Montana, the only states in the 9th Circuit that have allowed judges to impose death sentences.

Two other states, Nebraska and Colorado, have also allowed judges to sentence inmates to death. But the federal appeals courts that oversee them have yet to rule on the issue.

"By deciding that judges are not constitutionally permitted to decide whether defendants are eligible for the death penalty, the Supreme Court altered the fundamental bedrock principles applicable to capital murder trials," Circuit Judge Sidney R. Thomas wrote for the court.

Defense attorneys hailed the verdict.

"This is fundamental justice," said Ken Murray, a federal public defender in Phoenix.

Murray estimated that the decision affects at least 100 inmates on Arizona's death row alone.

The Arizona attorney general's office did not immediately return calls seeking comment. But lawyers involved in the case said the ruling is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case the appeals court used to decide the issue concerned Arizona inmate Warren Summerlin, who was found guilty of murder in the 1981 slaying of Brenna Bailey, 36.

The Tempe finance company administrator's body was found in the trunk of her car a day after she visited Summerlin to check on money he owed. Summerlin was convicted in 1982 and a judge sentenced him to death.