Delaware Supreme Court asked to weigh death penalty
Over two dozen capital murder cases pending trial in Delaware could be impacted as the state Supreme Court decides whether it will consider the constitutionality of the death penalty law, officials say.
Superior Court Judge Paul Wallace asked the Delaware Supreme Court on Monday to consider whether Delaware's death penalty law is constitutional in light of two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings for Kansas and Florida.
If the state Supreme Court were to consider the matter, it could put on hold all pending capital murder cases – of which four were scheduled to go to trial in the next 120 days.
The request comes at a time when Delaware’s death penalty is already being scrutinized. The state House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Thursday on a death penalty repeal bill. Gov. Jack Markell has said he would sign the bill if it passes.
The judge is asking the Supreme Court to use as a test case Benjamin Rauf, the Temple University law graduate charged with gunning down classmate Shazi Uppal, 27, in the parking lot of a Hockessin nursing home last summer.
Police have said the shooting occurred during a drug deal gone awry.
Rauf was indicted on Dec. 21 and charged with first-degree intentional murder, first-degree felony murder, possession of a firearm during those felonies and first-degree robbery. He now awaits trial, and the state has announced its intent to seek the death penalty.
The judge is asking that, before Rauf’s capital murder case goes to trial, the state Supreme Court weigh the impact of two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions with respect to Delaware’s law.
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The first of those two decisions is from earlier this month, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of Florida's death penalty system, saying it gives too much power to judges instead of juries. In that case, a man was convicted of the 1998 murder of his manager at a Popeye's restaurant in Pensacola and was sentenced to death by a judge.
Delaware, Alabama and Florida are the only states that allow judges to override a jury's recommendation of life and, instead, impose a sentence of death. Judges in Delaware have not been using that power.
The second recent decision came down just last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty for three Kansas inmates who had been granted reprieve by their state Supreme Court based on very small and specific grounds.
The three inmates, two of whom were involved in the same gruesome rape-and-murder case, had argued that their sentences were flawed because of faulty instructions given to the jury, which, in Kansas, has to weigh aggravating circumstances against mitigating ones when they decided whether or not to impose the death penalty.
The juries in these two cases were told that they had to find the aggravating factors beyond a reasonable doubt, but they were given no standard against which to measure the mitigating factors. The state Supreme Court had agreed with the inmates that it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment when the trial judge failed to specify that the jury did not have to hold the mitigating factors to the same high standard as the aggravating ones. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, reversed that decision.
The Florida case is much more relevant to Delaware than the Kansas case is, said Judith Ritter, a professor at the Delaware Law School.
"It could be very significant," she said of the potential impact of that case on Delaware law.
But, she said, the structure of the death penalty laws in Florida and Delaware are not exactly the same. Here, the jury must find that there was an aggravating factor in order to give the death penalty and, after they have decided that there was one, the judge can weigh it against the mitigating circumstances.
"Arguably, that weighing can be done by a judge because it's not fact-finding," Ritter said.
It was the fact-finding done by judges in the Florida courts that the U.S. Supreme Court decided was unconstitutional – all the fact-finding must be done by the jury, it ruled.
Ritter happened to be at the U.S. Supreme Court when the justices heard arguments in the Florida case, Hurst v. Florida.
"It seemed crystal clear to me that Hurst was going to win," she said – it didn't sound like a close case.
But, if the Delaware law were to end up ultimately being examined by the U.S. Supreme Court, it would likely be less clear. Even though the decision about imposing the death penalty lies with the judge – which the U.S. Supreme Court might find is not good, either – the judge isn't doing any of the actual fact-finding, she said.
Putting the question to the U.S. Supreme Court is a long way off, though. First, the state Supreme Court is charged with taking up the issue.
Wallace said the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is important and urgent because of the high number of cases pending in Delaware. Defense attorneys in at least three of the death penalty cases had motions filed after the Florida ruling, asking the court to declare Delaware’s capital sentencing scheme unconstitutional.
"Delaware's capital cases must proceed only under sentencing procedures that comport with federal and state constitutional requirements for the determination of a potential sentence of death,” he wrote.
Lawyers from the Department of Justice and Delaware Office of Defensive Services supplied questions to the Supreme Court in the request.
The Department of Justice issued a statement Tuesday confirming the certification of “appropriate questions to the Delaware Supreme Court to resolve whether Delaware’s law and process for reaching a death sentence has been affected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Hurst v. Florida.”
Delaware Chief Defender Brendan O’Neill also previously said in his opinion the Florida ruling “casts doubt on the validity of Delaware's death penalty scheme.”
Contact Jessica Masulli Reyes at (302) 324-2777, jmreyes@delawareonline.com or Twitter @JessicaMasulli.