A Supreme Court skeptical of death row appeals has recently sided with three inmates
By Emily Condon, John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a death row inmate in Florida who was blocked from challenging his sentence even though a lower court acknowledged a key witness lied on stand, marking the third time the conservative high court has backed an inmate sentenced to death in recent weeks.
In an unsigned opinion, the court threw out a decision from a federal appeals court that sided with the state because, it said, the judges considered DNA evidence that had not been presented at trial. Over a dissent from two conservative justices, the Supreme Court’s summary decision will require the federal appeals court to take another look at the case.
It was the latest of several high-profile death penalty cases in which the Supreme Court has sided with a defendant over the objection of some members of the court’s conservative wing.
Last week, the court ruled in favor of a Black man on death row in Mississippi who said the prosecutor engaged in racial bias by striking Black jurors. A week earlier, the court let stand an appeals court decision that barred Alabama from executing a man that lower courts found is likely intellectually disabled.
Especially on its emergency docket, the Supreme Court rarely steps in to stop an execution. In May, the court denied requests to halt executions in Tennessee and Florida.
But the record is more mixed in merits cases. Last year, the Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Richard Glossip, whose appeal drew national attention and support from the state’s conservative attorney general. After nearly three decades in prison and three last meals, Glossip was released on bond last month.
Whitton’s bloody boots
The Florida inmate, Gary Richard Whitton, was convicted in 1992 for the 1990 murder of his friend James Maulden in a motel. Whitton has denied his guilt and is attempting to have his conviction overturned. The case, initially tried before a Florida jury, has made its way through five Florida or federal courts in over 30 years, most recently the Florida Supreme Court and the Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Maulden was found in his room at the Sun and Sand Motel in Destin, Florida. His skull was fractured, court records show, and he had been repeatedly stabbed in the chest and other parts of his body.
Whitton had unsuccessfully appealed to the Supreme Court twice before.
The Supreme Court’s decision Monday drew a sharp dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas, who said his colleagues had overread the significance of the 11th Circuit’s focus on the DNA testing. And, Thomas wrote, the majority had been willing to swoop into Whitton’s case even when it has failed to do so in a series of other cases he felt were just as worthy.
The justices were reviewing an 11th Circuit decision that acknowledged prosecutors failed to disclose that a key witness named Jake Ozio had been previously arrested as a juvenile, even though he claimed on the stand that was not the case. But the federal appeals court ruled that it didn’t matter due to other “overwhelming” evidence against Whitton.
That other evidence, the appeals court said, included a 2002 DNA retest that linked splattered blood on Whitton’s boots to the victim. But that test was conducted a decade after the trial and was never admitted in court.
“The Court of Appeals did something peculiar: It considered not only the evidence that was presented to the jury at Whitton’s trial, but also evidence the jury never saw,” the Supreme Court said in its decision Monday. “The evidence in question relates to blood stains on Whitton’s boots, which were seized the day after the murder.”
At Whitton’s trial, the jury heard an opposite account of the blood from a DNA specialist who said the blood found on Whitton’s boots did not match the victim’s DNA. Two co-inmates of Whitton, including Ozio, also testified that he told them he “stabbed the bastard,” while in jail, but both have since recanted their statements.
Whitton’s attorney argued that the circuit court should not be allowed to consider the 2002 test. Florida officials counter that the boots were not central to the 11th Circuit’s reasoning, and they note that federal law restricts the ability of courts to review state criminal convictions.
Thomas: Decision is ‘unfortunate’
And that is the point that Thomas made in a dissent joined in part by Justice Samuel Alito.
Thomas wrote that the court was basing its decision on “one-and-a-half sentences” in the appeals court opinion.
“In rejecting one of Whitton’s claims — which would fail on other grounds anyway — the Eleventh Circuit mentioned a fact that was notable but certainly not dispositive to its analysis: DNA testing had since further confirmed that Whitton is guilty.”
Toward the end of the opinion, Thomas also opined about several other non-death penalty cases in which the Supreme Court has declined to weigh in with a summary decision. That included a high-profile case the Supreme Court declined to hear two years ago dealing with whether three elite Boston public schools violated the Constitution with a zip-code based admissions policy intended to ensure racial diversity.
“Even when presented with multiple opportunities to vindicate the rights of families to pursue education for their children on color-blind terms, this court ‘refused to correct a glaring constitutional error,’” Thomas wrote in his dissent.
The conservative justice also pointed to a recent case the court declined to hear last year involving Indiana University’s “bias response team,” an effort to lower the temperature of heated rhetoric that critics say winds up chilling speech on campus.
“It is unfortunate that the court chose to intervene at the request of a convicted murderer to correct the Eleventh Circuit’s inconsequential foot fault,” Thomas wrote. “What makes it even worse is that the court does so even while it refuses to correct far more consequential errors for law-abiding citizens, such as the discriminated-against families in Boston.”
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