Death Penalty Appeal Stance Rejected

The Supreme Court on Monday again rebuked federal judges in California for using minor procedural errors to overturn death sentences.

Rather than simply cite flaws in instructions given to a jury, the judges must show that those errors had a clear impact on the verdict, the high court said.

On a 5-4 vote, the justices reversed a July ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that threw out a death sentence handed down for a 1979 murder in San Francisco.

A state prosecutor said Monday’s ruling will make it far more difficult for death sentences to be reversed on federal appeal.

In an unsigned opinion, the conservative majority said it was determined to “protect the state’s sovereign interest in punishing offenders” and to avoid putting prosecutors through the “arduous task” of retrying or resentencing a defendant more than a decade after the original verdict.

Monday’s ruling marks the latest skirmish in a three-sided battle over the death penalty in California.

The state has the nation’s largest death row, with more than 500 condemned inmates. Yet executions remain rare. Only five murderers have been put to death since capital punishment was restored 20 years ago.

Unlike their counterparts in the South, federal judges in California have insisted on carefully examining the cases that have led to death sentences and they have been willing to reverse those in which a constitutional flaw is revealed.

But the state’s prosecutors in turn have repeatedly gone to the Supreme Court and asked that those pro-defendant rulings be reversed.

Dane Gillette, the state’s capital punishment coordinator, said that Monday’s decision will have an impact on many cases pending in the federal courts.

“If something can be shown to be a minimal error, then it could not warrant reversing the death sentence,” he said.

The case decided Monday concerned Russell Coleman, who was convicted in 1981 of the rape and murder of a San Francisco woman two years earlier.

During his sentencing hearing, jurors were given a long list of instructions. They were told, among other things, that the governor had the power to commute a sentence but that they should avoid any consideration of this power.

This was an error. In fact, under California law, because Coleman had been convicted of previous felonies, the governor could not commute his sentence without the approval of the state Supreme Court.

The jurors also were told that Coleman was extremely violent and had stabbed a fellow inmate and assaulted deputies. They sentenced him to death. The state courts later rejected his appeals and upheld his death sentence.

Last year, however, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte overturned Coleman’s death sentence. “By giving the jury inaccurate information,” the state had violated Coleman’s constitutional right to due process of law, the judge ruled.

In July, the 9th Circuit Court agreed. “A commutation instruction is unconstitutional when it is inaccurate,” the three-judge panel said.

State prosecutors appealed that conclusion to the Supreme Court in September and the justices reversed the ruling without bothering to hear arguments.

The flawed instruction may have been a “harmless error,” the court said in the case (Calderon vs. Coleman, 98-437). Judges should not reverse a death sentence “based on mere speculation” about the effect of a procedural mistake. Instead, they must determine whether it had “substantial and injurious effect or influence on the jury’s verdict,” the court said.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, joined by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, formed the majority. They sent Coleman’s case back to be reconsidered by the 9th Circuit.

The dissenters, led by Justice John Paul Stevens, said that the lower court rulings were “unquestionably correct.”