New Curbs Put on Judges’ Power to Halt Executions

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that new evidence raising doubts about a Death Row inmate’s guilt is not reason for a federal judge to stop an execution.

The 6-3 decision further restricts the power of federal judges to stand in the way of state prosecutors seeking to carry out a death sentence.

Only in the “truly extraordinary” case, where new evidence conclusively shows a convicted prisoner is indeed innocent, can a federal judge block an execution, the high court said.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist stressed that juries are given the power to decide the guilt or innocence of a defendant. Once a defendant is convicted of murder, “the presumption of innocence disappears,” he said, and federal judges have no authority to second-guess the jury’s conclusion.

Judges are not empowered “to correct errors of fact,” Rehnquist said, even if a mistake could lead to the execution of an innocent person. Rather, the federal courts should intervene only when state courts violate constitutional procedures, he said.

If Death Row inmates could ask judges to reconsider their guilt based on new evidence, added Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “the federal courts will be deluged with frivolous claims of actual innocence.”

In a harsh dissent that he read from the bench, Justice Harry A. Blackmun called the decision “astonishing” and said that it violates “any standard of decency to execute someone who is actually innocent.” He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter.

Opponents of the death penalty said that they were disappointed but not surprised by the ruling.

“This (decision) may not have a wide-ranging impact on a lot of cases but it should have an impact on how people think about the death penalty in this country,” said John Blume, a death-penalty attorney from Columbia, S.C. “There is a hypothetical innocent man out there but now there will be no way to prove it in court.”

Texas prosecutors welcomed the ruling and said that it will clear the way for the execution of an inmate convicted in 1981 of murdering two police officers.

More than 2,600 inmates sit on Death Rows around the nation. Since 1976, when the high court reinstated capital punishment, 191 of them have been executed. That number is not higher in part because federal courts in the past have had the power to block executions while further appeals were considered.

Monday’s decision is a dramatic example of a trend in the high court that has been apparent for the last six years. Under Rehnquist’s leadership, the justices have sought to prevent state prisoners from reopening their cases through a writ of habeas corpus, which allows federal judges to hear a state prisoner’s claim that he is being held in violation of the Constitution.

That trend was apparent in two related rulings Monday. In an Arkansas case, the justices said that a Death Row inmate cannot reopen his case simply because his lawyer appeared to bungle his defense. In a second Texas case, the court on a 5-4 vote said that a sentencing jury need not be told to consider the defendant’s youth--the murderer in this case was age 17--before imposing the death penalty.

Ironically, the three rulings closing off new appeals in death penalty cases came on a day when the justices paused to pay tribute to their former colleague, Justice Thurgood Marshall, who died Sunday. A former counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a member of the high court for 24 years, Marshall fiercely opposed the death penalty as unfair and unjust.

Even as they have cut down on death penalty appeals over the years, the justices have insisted that, if confronted with a potentially innocent person or a “fundamental miscarriage of justice,” they would allow further hearings.

On Monday, however, they closed even that door in the case of Leonel Herrera, a Texas Death Row inmate who was scheduled to be executed last February.

Herrera, a south Texas drug runner, was convicted in 1982 of killing a police officer who stopped his speeding car. Before he died, the officer identified Herrera from a photograph. A second eye witness in the officer’s car also said that Herrera shot the officer. After that verdict, Herrera pleaded guilty to the murder of a second officer during the same evening.

He was scheduled to die by lethal injection on Feb. 19, 1992. But in the months before his execution, his lawyers turned up new evidence that they said proved his innocence. They contended that Herrera had been framed in part by corrupt police who were involved in the drug trade.

In two court affidavits, a former state judge and a friend of Herrera’s late brother, Raul Sr., said that the brother had admitted that he--not Leonel--shot the officers. Raul’s son, Raul Jr., also filed a statement saying that he was hiding on the floor of the car on the night of the shooting and saw his father shoot the two officers.

The Texas courts refused to reopen Herrera’s case but his lawyers petitioned U.S. District Judge Raul Hinojosa. They contended that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment would be violated by the execution of someone who is “actually innocent” of the crime.

Hinojosa agreed to block the execution and to consider the new evidence. But state prosecutors quickly appealed to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which cleared the way for execution. It ruled that “a claim of ‘actual innocence’ based on newly discovered evidence” is not grounds for granting a further hearing in federal court.

Hours before Herrera was to die, his lawyers filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. Four justices voted to consider his legal claim and a Texas court then halted the execution.

On Monday, six justices voted in the case (Herrera vs. Collins, 91-7328) to uphold the death sentence but for different reasons.

Rehnquist, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, flatly rejected Herrera’s claim that “newly discovered evidence” can be the basis for reopening his case.

O’Connor and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy agreed with the decision but added that they did so because they were convinced Herrera was indeed guilty. Affidavits filed 10 years after the crime and pointing to a now-dead suspect should be “treated with a fair degree of skepticism,” O’Connor said.