9th Circuit 'all but ignored' aggravating factors in death-penalty case, Supreme Court says
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday against an Arizona death row inmate’s quest to change the sentence that he received by presenting additional mitigating evidence about his psychological problems and childhood abuse. (Image from Shutterstock)
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday against an Arizona death row inmate’s quest to change the sentence that he received by presenting additional mitigating evidence about his psychological problems and childhood abuse.
The Supreme Court reversed a decision for prisoner Danny Lee Jones by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco.
The appeals court “substantially departed” from the standard used to determine ineffective assistance of counsel and “all but ignored the strong aggravating circumstances in this case,” the high court said in the May 30 opinion by Justice Samuel Alito.
Alito’s opinion was joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative justices. Dissenters were Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Jones was convicted for the murders of Robert Weaver and his 7-year-old daughter Tisha Weaver and the attempted murder of Robert Weaver’s grandmother, Katherine Gumina. Jones beat all three victims with a baseball bat and also used a pillow to smother the child. The crime happened 32 years ago.
Jones had gone to the Weavers’ home to steal guns that he later sold to finance a trip to Las Vegas. Gumina died 17 months later.
Arizona law required a death sentence when one or more aggravating circumstances were present and when there were “no mitigating circumstances sufficiently substantial to call for leniency.”
The trial judge found four aggravating circumstances in Jones’ case. They were the commission of multiple homicides; a motive for financial gain; murders that were “especially heinous, cruel or depraved;” and the murder of a young child.
The judge also found four mitigating circumstances. Jones suffered from long-term substance abuse, the problem may be caused by genetic factors and head trauma, he may have been under the influence of alcohol and drugs at the time of the murders, and he was physically abused as a child.
The judge found that the mitigating factors weren’t sufficiently substantial to outweigh aggravating factors.
In appeals, Jones’ lawyers sought to introduce additional evidence about Jones’ psychological disorders, sexual and physical abuse that he suffered as a child, his cognitive impairment, and his introduction to drugs and alcohol at age 9.
But Jones was not able to establish a reasonable probability that the new mitigating evidence would have altered the outcome at sentencing, Alito said.
The 9th Circuit erred, Alito said, when “it downplayed the serious aggravating factors present here and overstated the strength of mitigating evidence that differed very little from the evidence presented at sentencing.”
Alito also said the 9th Circuit “applied a strange circuit rule” that prohibits courts in ineffective-assistance cases from assessing the relative strength of expert witness testimony. And he said Jones’ experts failed to link his additional disorders to the murders.
In a dissent joined by Kagan, Sotomayor agreed that the 9th Circuit erred when it “all but ignored the strong aggravating circumstances.” But the majority should have returned the case to the 9th Circuit for reconsideration, rather than reweighing the factors, she said.
In a separate dissent, Jackson said the 9th Circuit did consider aggravating and mitigating factors, and there was no legal error.
“To be sure, the 9th Circuit’s discussion of the aggravating factors was concise,” Jackson wrote. “But there is no benchmark length for any such discussion.”
The case is Thornell v. Jones.
Hat tip to SCOTUSblog.
