SCOTUS Rules in Favor of Death Penalty Defendant

Burton A. Rose, Esq. on 07/20/2010

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The U.S. Supreme Court issued a summary per curiam ruling (5-4) on June 29, 2010 in favor of the defendant in a death penalty case, Sears v. Upton, #09-8854, 2010 WL 2571856. The defense attorney had sought to win favor with the jury during the penalty phase by portraying the individual’s childhood as stable, loving, and essentially without incident as a way to show that a death sentence would devastate the individual’s family, who were shocked and dismayed by the crime. The Court concluded that this strategy had backfired, as the prosecutors used that background evidence to suggest that the individual had led a privileged life and obtained a death sentence. The majority said that the defense lawyer’s choice of that theory led to a completely inadequate investigation of a childhood that was immersed in parental abuse, including head injuries that doctors deemed significant enough to impair his capacity.

The case involved Demarcus Ali Sears, who was convicted of a brutal murder in Georgia where a woman was forcibly kidnapped from a shopping center parking lot in her own car, raped and stabbed to death. Sears was sentenced to death. The majority determined that the state courts’ ineffective assistance analysis was flawed because the issue of prejudice was not correctly resolved. Also, counsel’s initial mitigation investigation was constitutionally inadequate. The case was remanded for further proceedings.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., noted that they would have denied review. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. The dissent was stinging (e.g., the mitigation evidence relied upon by the Court is “just plain hilarious”), as was the majority’s response to the dissent (e.g., Justice Scalia was accused of “channeling powers of telepathy” as to what the trial court actually decided in this case).