In U.S. Supreme Court record loaded With Death-Penalty Cases

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WASHINGTON—The death penalty is forming up to be a huge issue for the Supreme Court as it begins a new term Monday, with at least six capital-punishment cases on the docket and a recent wave of executions keeping the justices up late to field last-minute appeals.
In the weeks ahead, the court is set to hear arguments over the constitutionality of capital sentences in Florida, Georgia, Kansas and Pennsylvania. The focus on execution issues follows a 5-4 ruling last term involving a sedative used for lethal injections. The split exposed a growing rift at the court over the death penalty, with dissents, including one by Justice Stephen Breyer, for the first time suggesting executions violated the constitution.
The series of capital-punishment appeals is part of a court term that is still taking shape. The justices’ calendar is backloaded with pending cases involving voting rights, access to abortion, contraceptive coverage and immigration, likely to be heard in 2016 and decided next June—just as the major parties settle on their candidates, heightening the Supreme Court’s importance in a volatile campaign year.
None of the death penalty cases scheduled so far represents a full-on assault on capital punishment. Instead the court has taken cases that give them the opportunity to calibrate capital punishment, as it has done in fits and starts since reaffirming the death penalty as constitutional in 1976.
Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the specific issues before the court “feels to me like business as usual.” But he said the lethal-injection case from the prior term likely marks a new era at the court for the death-penalty debate. “Breyer’s dissent will be looked on in retrospect as a turning-point moment,” he said.
The debate playing out around the country was highlighted Friday when Missouri Gov.Jay Nixon canceled what would have been his state’s seventh execution this year.
Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, commuted Kimber Edwards’s sentence for the murder for hire of his wife to life imprisonment without parole after the principal prosecution witness recanted his testimony.
Recent years have seen some states that rarely inflicted the death penalty, most recently Nebraska, take the formal step of repealing it. At the same time, predominantly Southern states where the practice remains popular have taken steps to fortify capital-punishment laws.
This term’s capital cases begin Wednesday, when the court has scheduled two hours of argument stemming from two Kansas trials. One case involves a December 2000 crime spree in Wichita, Kan., that left five people dead. Two brothers, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, were jointly tried, convicted and sentenced to die for dozens of counts of crimes including robbery, rape and murder.
On appeal, the Kansas Supreme Court reversed the death sentences. The state high court held each brother should have received an individual sentencing hearing. It also said the trial judge erred by failing to inform jurors that mitigating factors raised at sentencing need not be found beyond reasonable doubt.
The latter issue is raised as well in the second Kansas case involving Sidney Gleason, whose death sentence for a 2004 double murder in Great Bend, Kan., also was vacated by the state high court.
Kansas, backed by the Obama administration, wants the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentences and hold neither safeguard found by the state high court is required by the Constitution.
On Oct. 13, the court will weigh whether Florida’s trial procedure assigns the judge too much discretion in imposing capital sentences, instead of allowing the jury to decide whether the crime—in this case, the robbery and murder of a Popeye’s restaurant manager in Escambia County—is sufficiently grave to merit death.
In November the justices will consider whether prosecutors in Floyd County, Ga., violated the rule against racial selection of juries by striking all four black prospective jurors in a case over a 1986 murder. Later in the term, the court will consider whether the elected chief justice of Pennsylvania should have recused himself from hearing an appeal of a capital conviction. The conviction was obtained when he was the Philadelphia district attorney and he personally approved pursuit of the death penalty against the defendant.
Last week, the court saw a flurry of last-minute activity in three high-profile executions, all of which the Supreme Court declined to stop. On Wednesday, Georgia executedKelly Gissendaner, convicted in the murder of her husband. The next day, Virginia put to death Alfredo Prieto, convicted of three murders and suspected in several others.
On Wednesday, Oklahoma canceled the scheduled execution of Richard Glossip, the prisoner at the center of last term’s case on lethal injection, after officials realized they had obtained a drug not authorized by their procedures—potassium acetate rather than potassium chloride. On Friday, at the state’s request, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals indefinitely stayed pending executions of Mr. Glossip and two other inmates.