"Life is more important than politics" - G.W.Bush

Ah, what respect for life! Too bad I am a devil-worshipping east-coast liberal who cares nothing for the gift of life. My only hope for being spared an internity in the fires of hell is that, perhaps, our god-fearing president, who did not grant reprieves to 152* people killed under unconstitutional Texas law, will show me the path to righteousness. Please, lord, let it be so!

November 16, 2004
Supreme Court Rebukes Texas Again Over a Death Sentence
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - The Supreme Court overturned a Texas death sentence on Monday while delivering its latest rebuke to the way the death penalty is being handled by judges in the state, which has executed far more people than any other in the modern era of capital punishment.

The errors committed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in upholding the death sentence of LaRoyce L. Smith were so clear to a majority of the Supreme Court that the justices decided the case in the inmate's favor on the basis of the briefs, without hearing arguments.

Mr. Smith was convicted in 1991 of murdering a co-worker at a Taco Bell restaurant in Dallas where he had recently worked. He was 19. With an I.Q. of 78, he had reached the ninth grade in special education classes.

[...]

The justices said Monday that the Texas appeals court ignored problems the Supreme Court had already identified and that it should have known, when it affirmed the sentence last April, that the jury instructions made the death sentence unconstitutional.The state court "erroneously relied on a test we never countenanced and now have unequivocally rejected," the justices said.

[...]

Under the Texas law that the Supreme Court approved when it permitted capital punishment to resume in 1976, a death sentence was mandatory if jurors answered yes to two questions: Was the killing deliberate, and would the defendant present a continuing danger to society?

There was no room for consideration of mitigating circumstances that the court found in subsequent decisions had to be considered by the jury if the defendant offered them.

After the court ruled in 1989 that Texas had to give jurors the chance to consider mitigating factors, the state added new instructions. Jurors who wanted to take mitigating factors into account should do so by answering no to one of the two questions, even if they believed that the correct answer was yes.**

In a decision in 2001, the Supreme Court found this response constitutionally flawed. It then amplified that decision in the Tennard case in June.

Both in 2001 and in June, the justices said, telling jurors to answer the questions honestly and while at the same time instructing them to disregard their own answers placed the jurors in an untenable position, most likely preventing them from giving proper weight to the defendant's mitigating evidence.

[...]

Of the 943 executions in the country since 1976, Texas has carried out 335*, more than the next six states combined. It has 457 people on death row, second to the 635 in California, which has conducted 10 executions.

*Our righteous and illustrious president oversaw the execution of half of those performed in TX since 1976.
**Notice that a juror has to LIE to the court in order to mitigate the death sentence.