Justices OK Unreviewed Executions : High court: Tribunal throws out appeal filed by convict’s fellow inmate.

The Supreme Court, ruling today in the case of an Arkansas mass murderer, allowed states to execute convicted murderers even if no appeals court has reviewed the validity of their convictions or death sentences.

By a 7-2 vote, the justices threw out an appeal filed for--but not by--R. Gene Simmons, sentenced to death for killing 16 relatives and acquaintances in 1987.

The court said such an appeal cannot be filed by a fellow Death Row inmate.

Simmons says he wants to be executed and refuses to appeal his murder convictions or death sentence.

Lawyers for Arkansas Death Row inmate Jonas H. Whitmore argued that state appeals courts must review all death sentences, even when not asked to do so by the condemned murderer.

Writing for the court today, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said Whitmore lacks the proper legal standing to mount a challenge in Simmons’ behalf.

The court rejected arguments by Whitmore’s lawyers that the uniqueness of the death penalty and society’s interest in its proper imposition justify some kind of relaxed legal-standing standard.

“The short answer to this suggestion is that the requirement of a . . . case or controversy is not merely a traditional rule or practice but rather is imposed directly by the Constitution,” Rehnquist said.

“It is not for this court to employ untethered notions of what might be good public policy to expand our jurisdiction in an appealing case,” he said.

Justices Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan, who oppose capital punishment under all circumstances, dissented.

In what prosecutors called a murderous rampage in the little town of Russellville, Simmons gunned down his wife, three sons, four daughters, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren and two acquaintances within a few days of Christmas, 1987.

Simmons, 49, refused to appeal his convictions and death sentence, saying he wanted to die by lethal injection as quickly as possible.

Three days before Simmons was to die March 16, 1989, Whitmore sought to challenge the state’s death penalty law in Simmons’ behalf.

On the eve of the execution, the nation’s highest court postponed Simmons’ death.