Death-penalty case was epitome of 'extreme judicial malfunction,' 6th Circuit says
A federal appeals court has granted habeas to a death row inmate who challenged his sentencing, holding that an Ohio judge displayed an objective risk of bias partly because he enlisted the prosecutor to write the death-penalty opinion. (Image from Shutterstock)
A federal appeals court has granted habeas to a death row inmate who challenged his sentencing, holding that an Ohio judge displayed an objective risk of bias partly because he enlisted the prosecutor to write the death-penalty opinion.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati ruled for defendant Nathaniel Jackson in an Aug. 6 panel opinion by Judge Richard Allen Griffin, an appointee of former President George W. Bush.
The appeals court called the case the epitome of an “extreme judicial malfunction.”
“Jackson’s sentencing proceeding was blatantly unconstitutional at its core due to the trial-court judge’s bias and misconduct, as well as his exclusion at sentencing of relevant mitigating evidence,” the appeals court said.
The appeals court found violations of Jackson’s rights under the 14th Amendment and the Eighth Amendment.
The trial judge, Judge John M. Stuard, died 38 days after his retirement, according to a February 2013 story by the Tribune Chronicle. The former Trumbull County, Ohio, judge apparently had a fatal heart attack at age 73.
Jackson was accused of conspiring with a woman to kill her ex-husband. In 2001, Jackson broke into the man’s home and fatally shot him. He was convicted the next year.
According to the 6th Circuit, Stuard gave two pages of “incomplete, handwritten notes” notes to the prosecutor in the first sentencing and asked him to “draft the entirety of an opinion sentencing Jackson to death.”
“It is hard to imagine a more ‘extreme’ case of bias from ex parte contact than this one,” the 6th Circuit said. “And Judge Stuard’s conduct evidencing bias did not stop there.”
Stuard released his second opinion the same day of the court-ordered resentencing hearing. It was “almost identical” to the original, the appeals court said. “Judge Stuard could impose the death penalty,” the appeals court said, “but he could not be bothered to draft an opinion explaining why.”
Stuard had delayed the resentencing hearing until his retirement approached, finally ruling at that time apparently to avoid transferring the case to a new judge after his departure, the appeals court said.
In addition, Stuard refused to allow “three additional volumes of mitigating evidence” at the resentencing hearing, including information about Jackson’s intellectual disabilities and affidavits from family members. The judge did, however, accept Jackson’s description of his good conduct on death row.
U.S. Supreme Court precedent allows capital defendants to present all relevant mitigating evidence supporting a sentence less than death, including at resentencing proceedings, the appeals court said.
Stuard had maintained during disciplinary hearings that the prosecutor who wrote the opinion was only performing a ministerial task and did not gain a tactical advantage. The judge received a public reprimand in 2009.
Hat tip to Law360, which covered the opinion.
