Justices to Take Fresh Look at Death Penalty

The Supreme Court, having outlawed mandatory death penalties for most murders, today agreed to consider making an exception for murders by prison inmates serving life terms without chance of parole.

The Supreme Court said it will decide whether Nevada’s mandatory death law for such crimes inflicts constitutionally impermissible “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Lower federal courts invalidated the Nevada law.

The case involved Raymond Wallace Shuman, convicted in 1958 of murdering Vernon Stallard in Yerington, Nev., and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Fatally Burned

In 1973, still serving his life term, Shuman doused fellow Nevada State Prison inmate Ruben Bejarno with lighter fluid and set him ablaze. Bejarno died three days later from the burns he suffered.

Shuman was convicted in 1975 of murder in Bejarno’s death and received a mandatory death sentence. The sentence was upheld by the Nevada Supreme Court, but a federal trial judge in 1983 ruled that the state’s mandatory death sentence law is invalid.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed last June 12 that the Nevada death-sentence statute was unconstitutional.

In other cases, the court:

--Let stand a $4.7-million judgment against Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp. for birth defects linked to the use of a contraceptive jelly. The court refused to consider whether there was sufficient evidence that the child’s birth defects were caused by Ortho-Gynol, a vaginal spermicide.

--Agreed to review a decision to strip U.S. citizenship from a New Jersey man accused of helping the Nazis exterminate more than 2,000 Jews in Lithuania during World War II. The court accepted the appeal of Juozas Kungys, a 70-year-old retired dental technician from Clifton, N.J., whose citizenship was stripped last June by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

--Agreed to decide whether states may always disallow the criminal trial testimony of witnesses whose memory is refreshed by hypnosis.

--Agreed to decide whether Montana parole officials may be sued by prison inmates contending they were unlawfully denied parole.