PENA MORTE: USA, NO CORTE SUPREMA A SPERANZE 100 CONDANNATI

ANCHE CASO DI ITALO-AMERICANO ROSSI TRA QUELLI BOCCIATI

NEW YORK, 24 GIU - La Corte suprema Usa ha sbarrato la strada alla possibilita' che oltre 100 condannati a morte negli Stati Uniti potessero avere la possibilita' di un nuovo processo o addirittura di un annullamento delle loro sentenze.

Con una decisione presa per 5 a 4 su un caso relativo all'Arizona, il massimo organo giudiziario ha deciso di non considerare retroattiva una sentenza di due anni fa che riconosceva il diritto per gli imputati di essere giudicati da una giuria popolare e non da un giudice singolo.

Il caso era stato sollevato dai legali di due 'veterani' del braccio della morte dell'Arizona, Warren Summerlin e l'italo- americano Richard Rossi, entrambi in attesa di esecuzione da oltre 20 anni. I due erano stati condannati a morte da un giudice singolo che in seguito e' risultato un tossicodipendente e ha perso il lavoro per il proprio rapporto con la marijuana.

E' stato il caso di Summerlin ad arrivare fino alla Corte Suprema, dopo che una Corte federale d'appello di San Francisco aveva annullato la sua condanna a morte, sulla base di una storica sentenza dei giudici supremi che nel 2002 aveva stabilito che siano giurie popolari a decidere la pena capitale.

Quella sentenza pero' non puo' essere considerate retroattiva, hanno detto oggi i giudici di Washington, dividendosi in modo vistoso sulla decisione. La pena di morte

per Summerlin e' stata cosi' riattivata ed e' stata cancellata la possibilita' di riaprire i casi di 85 condannati dell'Arizona (tra cui Rossi), di altri 25 in Idaho, Montana e Nebraska e di rimettere in discussione anche sentenze in Colorado e altri stati.

L'effetto della sentenza, secondo gli oppositori della pena di morte, sara' quello di dare il diritto costituzionale a un giudizio di fronte a una giuria popolare solo a coloro che vengono processati dopo la data della decisione della Corte Suprema del 2002. ''Ci sono cosi' tanti aspetti della pena di morte che sono arbitrari'', commenta Richard Dieter, direttore del Death Penalty Information Center. ''In questo caso - aggiunge Dieter - la Corte ci sta dicendo che si puo' essere privati dei diritti costituzionali ed essere giustiziati semplicemente sulla base della data in cui hai fatto appello. In un tema di tale rilievo, sembra un criterio estremamente grossolano''.

24-GIU-04 

USA: Death Sentences Will Stand -- Supreme Court Says Ruling Does Not Apply Retroactively

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that its 2002 decision requiring juries rather than judges to decide between life imprisonment and the death penalty does not apply retroactively, clearing the way for the eventual execution of more than 100 death row inmates in 4 states.

By a vote of 5 to 4, the court said that its ruling 2 years ago in Ring v. Arizona was not such a fundamentally new rule of law that its benefits should flow to everyone, including those whose death sentences became final before then. In Ring, the court held that state laws assigning judges the power to find "aggravating factors" that warrant capital punishment violated the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a trial by jury.

"The right to jury trial is fundamental to our system of criminal procedure and States are bound to enforce the Sixth Amendment's guarantees as we interpret it," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the opinion for the court. "But it does not follow that, when a criminal defendant has had a full trial and one round of appeals in which the State faithfully applied the Constitution as we understood it at the time, he may nevertheless continue to litigate in hopes that we will one day have a change of heart."

Scalia was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

The case, Schriro v. Summerlin, No. 03-526, had the potential to overturn 111 death sentences in 4 states: 87 in Arizona, 15 in Idaho, 5 in Montana and 4 in Nebraska. That would have eliminated more than 2/3 of those states' total death row population of 161, forcing the states to choose between settling for life imprisonment and spending millions of dollars to conduct new sentencing hearings in front of juries.

It could also have changed 15 Nevada cases in which offenders were sentenced to death under a law that let judges decide sentences when juries deadlocked or defendants pleaded guilty.

Under a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that limited capital defendants' constitutional appeals, only those relatively rare Supreme Court decisions deemed to have revolutionized constitutional law can be applied retroactively.

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, ruled that Ring qualified under this standard. That court also observed that a trial by jury would enhance the fairness and accuracy of the sentencing process.

The defendant in yesterday's case, Warren W. Summerlin, was sentenced to death on July 12, 1982, for the rape and murder of a debt collector. The Arizona judge who sentenced him was later disbarred, after he admitted he had been a habitual marijuana user during the time he decided Summerlin's fate.

Recent research by Cornell University professors John Blume, Theodore Eisenberg and Martin T. Wells found that 4 percent of convicted murderers in single-judge-sentencing states were sentenced to death in recent decades, in contrast to 2 % of convicted murderers in jury-sentencing states.

But Scalia said that Ring was not a "watershed" because it changed the decision maker in capital cases, not the definition of capital murder. He added that "the evidence is simply too equivocal" to conclude that juries are more accurate fact finders than judges.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer dissented, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Breyer lamented the fact that the court's decision permits the execution of some death row inmates sentenced in trials the court would not approve today.

The "ordinary citizen," he wrote, "will simply witness two individuals, both sentenced through the use of unconstitutional procedures, one individual going to his death, the other saved, all through an accident of timing."

But Arizona and the other states whose systems of capital punishment were at issue say they were being whipsawed by changing court rulings.

Arizona enacted its judge-only death-sentencing statute in 1973, in an effort to comply with a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that struck down all state capital punishment laws as arbitrary. It was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1990 before being struck down in Ring.