Last year, it turns out, wasn’t a good year for the death penalty. Just 125 people were sentenced to death, less than half the number who received that sentence in 1998.
The reasons for this decline aren’t hard to discover. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, has limited the classes of people who can receive the death sentence and juries generally have seemed more reluctant to impose the death sentence, especially now that most states allow sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
But while it’s true that death penalty opponents have had a lot of good news lately, it hasn’t been entirely bleak for capital punishment supporters.
On the same day the figures cited above were announced, the Supreme Court decided to review a case out of Oregon, which – if allowed to stand – could badly muddy the process juries must use before imposing the death sentence.
The Oregon case revolves around Randy Lee Guzek, who was convicted of two counts of murder stemming from a 1988 burglary. Guzek and two confederates planned that burglary and also planned to kill the occupants of the home. Guzek was ultimately convicted of both murders. In one instance, he “prompted” an associate to shoot and in the other, Guzek fired four shots into the victim.
He was sentenced to death, not once but three times. The first two sentences were set aside because of general federal court rulings on the submission of mitigating evidence and the taking of victim impact statements. His third death sentence was set aside last year by the Oregon Supreme Court on grounds that Guzek was denied the opportunity to submit “alibi evidence” during his sentencing phase.
It is this ruling that will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, and no wonder. The Oregon Supreme Court tossed out Guzek’s death sentence based on a very novel, if not nutty, interpretation of a couple of earlier U.S. Supreme Court cases. That was a mistake; the high court doesn’t much like it when lower courts misapply earlier cases.
In the Guzek case, it is quite clear the Oregon court went too far and almost willfully ignored the language of earlier Supreme Court cases and applicable Oregon law.
In his third sentencing hearing, Guzek’s attorneys attempted to introduce evidence that Guzek could not have committed the murders “because he was elsewhere at the time,” according to two relatives. The court refused to allow this testimony, citing an Oregon law that says once the prosecution has presented evidence that the death penalty is warranted, the defense may introduce evidence “concerning any aspect of the defendant’s character or background or any circumstance of the offense.” In the typical murder case, that mitigating evidence might involve the defendant’s childhood, his upbringing, his good acts, his remorse or his reluctance to be involved in the crime.
In its 2004 decision, however, the Oregon Supreme Court greatly expanded the notion of what constitutes the “circumstance of the offense” to include testimony intended to show that the defendant didn’t commit the crime in the first place.
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to guess what future defendants might be able to do should the U.S. Supreme Court rule that sentencing procedures may now include unlimited testimony on whether the defendant was even in the area where the original crime was committed. The term “unlimited” applies here because the Oregon law specifically commands the court to hear “any mitigating evidence” having to do with the “circumstance of the offense.”
The nation’s highest court has never spoken directly to the narrow issue raised in the Oregon case, but as two dissenters on the Oregon Supreme Court have pointed out, it has spoken to two very closely related issues that leave little doubt of the outcome. As the dissenters put it, the phrase “circumstance of the offense” cannot possibly mean “revisiting the issue of guilt or innocence of the underlying offense.”
If it does, future sentencing hearings won’t need judges as much as circus ringmasters.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.
