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Date Posted: 18:41:48 02/16/02 Sat
Author: MAJ
Subject: fate of Florida deat row inmates

Tallahassee, Florida (Ap)-The fate of nearly 800 death row inmates in Florida and 8 other states may rest on the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case taht could have the most dramatic effect in 30 years n the way the states apply the death penalty.

The high court agreed last month to hear a case from Arizona that asks whether a judge instead of a jury can decide whether a convicted killer deserves the death penalty.

The court's decision, expected by summer, could affect sentences already handed down in nine states where judges choose between a death sentence and life in prison for a convicted killer.

In Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, juries have no role in sentencing those they convict in capital cases. In Florida, Alabama, Delaware, and Indiana, juries make recommendations but judges make the decision.

"It goes to the very heart of what we mean by the right to a jury trial, and we have argued it forever," said Denise Young, a lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, who represents death row inmates.

Defenders of the sentencing laws at issue have argued that judges can be better than juries at applying the law without passion. Having a judge make the choice may lead to fewer death sentences, or sentences better able to withstand scrutiny on appeal, some prosecutors have said.

Florida leads the nine states with 372 inmates on death row, followed by Alabama with 184, Arizona with 128 and Indiana with 39.

The court could rule broadly on whether it is ever appropriate to have a judge make the final call, or confine its ruling to the situation in Arizona and the four other states with nearly identical laws.

Since teh Supreme Court agreed on January 11 to hear the challenge to Arizona's law, it has granted stays of execution to two Florida inmates whose lawyers had cited the pending Arizona case. This has lex some lawyers to suggest that the Supreme Court believes that Florida's law and those like it are constitutionally suspect, too.

Under Florida's law, a judge can impose the death penalty even if a jury recommends a life sentence.

Exactly what would happen if the death penalty laws in the nine states were invalidated is not clear. Some lawyers have speculated that the death row inmate's sentences could be commuted to life in prison. Or the inmates might be resentenced, with some receiving a death sentence all over again.

The defendant in the Arizona case is Timothy Ring, who was condemned for the 1994 murder of an armored car driver during a holdup.

His case could be the biggest challenge to the nation's death penalty laws since 1972, when the Supreme Court declared that capital punishment had become too "arbitrary and capricious." The court imposed a moratorium on capital punishment across the country, leading some 600 death sentences in dozens of states being reduced to life in prison.

In 1984 the Supreme Court upheld Florida's law against a challenge that asserted it violates the Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury. In 1990, the high court upheld Arizona's law against a similar challenge.

But in June 2000, a Supreme Court decision on an unrelated New Jersey case gave new hope to death row lawyers.

In Apprendi v. New Jersey, the judge struck down the state's hate crime law, ruling that a judge could not use the law to lengthen the sentence of a man who shot into a black family's home.

To do so meant the judge was considering facts not put before the jury, and that violates the Constitution's guarentee of trial by jury, the court ruled.

Defense attorneys hope the Supreme Court will apply that reasoning to laws that allow judges to impose the death penalty.

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