SCOTUSblog by Edmund LaCour 7/29/2019
The Supreme Court’s decisions in this term’s death penalty cases suggest that the court is more willing than before to defer to the states’ judgments about how the death penalty should be carried out and who should be subjected to it, and that inmates challenging their death sentences should bring their challenges without delay.
Justice Anthony Kennedy had been the crucial fifth vote on several of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions to declare certain groups of defendants to be beyond the scope of certain punishments. For example, in the 2008 case Kennedy v. Louisiana, he wrote the opinion for a five-justice majority that held that the Eighth Amendment prohibited the death penalty for child rapists, and in the 2012 case Miller v. Alabama he joined another five-justice majority that held that mandatory sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole could not be imposed on minors who committed murder. When Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy, some court-watchers predicted that this trend of broader Eighth Amendment readings would end, a prediction supported by the court’s decision in Madison v. Alabama.
Vernon Madison suffers from dementia and episodic amnesia that he claims have erased his memory of the murder for which he was sentenced to death. In 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit granted Madison habeas relief on the theory that because his mental illness left him no memory of his capital offense, he cannot rationally understand the connection between his crime and his execution. The Supreme Court summarily reversed, concluding that the state court’s contrary judgment should not have been vacated under the deferential standards of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor) filed a concurrence stating that the issue should be reviewed when presented outside the AEDPA context.
Madison returned to state court, lost again and then filed a petition that was granted in February 2018. But at oral argument, Madison’s counsel largely conceded that the state could execute a defendant if his disability caused him only to lose the memory of committing his capital offense. Madison instead argued that the state court had misapplied precedent that bars states from executing inmates who cannot rationally comprehend why they are being punished.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/07/symposium-the-supreme-court-turns-against-novel-or-late-breaking-execution-challenges/#more-288384
