SCOTUS won't hear case of inmate on death row for 30 years; dissenters see 'glaring' legal error
The U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear the case of a Texas inmate who claimed that executing him after more than 30 years on death row would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
The Supreme Court denied cert on Monday in the case of Lester Leroy Bower Jr., according to the order list (PDF). The Eighth Amendment claim was one of three issues raised by Bower, convicted of the 1983 murders of four men in an airplane hangar.
Three justices who dissented from the cert denial said they would have granted cert and ordered a new sentencing hearing for Bower. They focused on this issue: whether the procedures in effect at Bower’s sentencing allowed jurors to fully consider evidence of good character.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
When Bower was sentenced, Texas allowed mitigating evidence only in the context of three issues: whether the conduct was deliberate and carried a reasonable expectation of death, whether there was a probability the defendant would continue to commit violent acts, and whether the defendant acted in response to provocation. The U.S. Supreme said that procedure was unconstitutional in a 1989 case, Penry v. Lynaugh, because it didn’t allow jurors to consider relevant mitigating evidence.
The Texas Cuort of Criminal Appeals made irrelevant distinctions between Bower’s case and the Penry case when it denied a new sentencing hearing, Breyer said. “I recognize that we do not often intervene only to correct a case-specific legal error,” he wrote. “But the error here is glaring, and its consequence may well be death.”
