State judges may no longer make the key determination between life and death in capital-punishment cases without violating constitutional safeguards.

In the second major capital-punishment ruling in less than a week, the US Supreme Court has struck down the sentencing procedures used in Arizona death-penalty cases, saying it violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a trial by jury.

The court, in a 7-to-2 decision, drew a parallel between the sentencing system of Arizona (and by extension eight states with similar systems), and the sentence-enhancement system that the high court struck down two years ago in a landmark case called Apprendi v. New Jersey.

The bottom line: A much anticipated revolution in criminal sentencing just became a lot more revolutionary.

Although the high court declined to extend its Apprendi reasoning to strike down minimum mandatory sentencing schemes in a related case also announced Monday, the court's ruling in the death-penalty case is expected to trigger a fresh barrage of appeals in state and federal courts nationwide.

Death-penalty opponents hailed the ruling as more evidence of an emerging national consensus against capital punishment. "Yet again, in less than a week, the Supreme Court has joined legislators and so many others in the country in rightly expressing this deep reservation about the way the death penalty is being implemented," says Brenda Bowser of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Opponents of this trend say it threatens to clog the already overburdened court system with new appeals and undermines consistency in sentencing laws.

"It's a betrayal of the American people's reliance on the Supreme Court," says Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. "This was a settled question that the Supreme Court had squarely resolved. And what they are telling us is that we cannot rely on their precedents. They may change their mind tomorrow."

At the heart of it all is the Apprendi decision. In that case, the court declared for the first time that "any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed maximum must be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt."

Dissenting justices at the time of the Apprendi decision raised concerns that its sweeping language would almost certainly invalidate the death-penalty sentencing procedures in Arizona and other states that authorize judges – not juries – to make the final decision on life or death.

Those predictions have now become reality.

What that means in terms of death-row inmates is that more than 770 death sentences might now be invalid because they were meted out by judges rather than by juries.

"Capital defendants, no less than non-capital defendants, we conclude, are entitled to a jury determination of any fact on which the legislature conditions an increase in their maximum punishment," writes Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the majority in Ring v. Arizona.

Page: 1 | 2