High Court: 7th Circuit Too Hasty in Denying Death Row Inmate’s Claims

The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered the courts to consider the unresolved claims of an Indiana death row inmate convicted of murdering his brother and three others.

Joseph Corcoran had raised five issues in a habeas appeal, including claims that prosecutors committed misconduct at his sentencing and that he should not be executed because he is mentally ill. But a federal district judge ruled on just one—a claim that his sentence violated the Sixth Amendment. The judge ordered resentencing and said the other issues were moot as a result of his ruling.

The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the Sixth Amendment ruling and reinstated the death penalty without considering the other issues. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the appeals court erred.

“We now grant certiorari and hold that the 7th Circuit erred in disposing of Corcoran’s other claims without explanation of any sort,” the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in a per curiam, summary opinion (PDF). “The 7th Circuit should have permitted the district court to consider Corcoran’s unresolved challenges to his death sentence on remand, or should have itself explained why such consideration was unnecessary.”

An editorial in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette says Corcoran should not be executed because he “demonstrated classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia.” Corcoran, convicted of killing four people in 1997, acted because he thought they were talking about him, according to the article.

He was acquitted of the shotgun slayings of his parents five years earlier, the Journal Gazette says.

Hat tip to SCOTUSblog.