user: Q: Delaware Supreme Court Rules State’s Death Penalty Unconstitutional

Delaware’s rules for imposing the death penalty are unconstitutional, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, a decision that could mean an effective end to capital punishment in Delaware.

In a 148-page opinion, the court held that Delaware’s death penalty law gave judges, rather than juries, too great a role in imposing death sentences, violating constitutional requirements that the United States Supreme Court laid out in a January decision that has brought executions in Florida to a temporary halt.

The Delaware legislature came close to abolishing the death penalty directly this year, but the debate was put on hold to await the ruling by the state’s highest court.

Delaware’s attorney general said in a statement Tuesday that he was reviewing the court’s decision and could not comment on whether Delaware would appeal to the federal Supreme Court.

But there appeared to be little chance, in any case, that the Supreme Court would overturn the decision, said Eric M. Freedman, an expert on capital punishment at Hofstra University’s law school. “This probably means, as a practical matter, the end of the death penalty in Delaware,” he said.

Delaware carried out its last execution in 2012 and has 14 prisoners on death row. The death penalty has been abolished in 18 other states, and executions have been delayed in many others because of a scarcity of lethal injection drugs and disputes over execution procedures.

In the case decided Tuesday, Delaware officials had said they would seek the execution of Benjamin Rauf, a New Yorker who is charged with murdering a fellow law school classmate last year during a drug deal in Delaware. But Mr. Rauf’s lawyers argued that Delaware’s procedures violated Supreme Court requirements for the primacy of jury decisions in capital cases.

Until recently, Delaware was one of three states, along with Florida and Alabama, that allowed judges to decide if the circumstances of a crime warranted the death penalty. Judges in those three states were also allowed to override a jury decision and impose such a penalty.

In January, the federal Supreme Court ruled, in Hurst v. Florida, that Florida’s capital sentencing law was unconstitutional because “the Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.”

Florida’s subsequent effort to revise its law, allowing imposition of the death penalty by a jury vote of 10 to 2, rather than a unanimous vote, is also under challenge.

The new decision by the Delaware justices is significant and could have national repercussions because it accepts the principles in the Hurst decision and takes them to their logical conclusion, clarifying issues that the federal Supreme Court did not address, said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a private research group.

The Delaware court found that a jury not only must decide whether there were “aggravating circumstances” that could justify a death penalty, but also must find, “unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt,” that such aggravating factors outweigh any mitigating circumstances — the critical determination in imposing a death sentence.

In Tuesday’s decision, issued unsigned by a majority, the Delaware Supreme Court said the General Assembly would have to decide whether to reinstate the death penalty and to draft new legal procedures.

The State Senate voted this year to end capital punishment, and the governor said he would sign such a bill. Abolition was contested in the House, with final resolution delayed pending the state’s Supreme Court decision in the Rauf case. A new drive to revive the death penalty in Delaware, experts said, would clearly face an uphill battle.

A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2016, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Ruling by Delaware Justices Could Deal Capital Punishment in the State a Final Blow. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
What are the most important parts of this text?

A: Justices held that a law gave judges too great a role in imposing death sentences, a decision that could effectively end capital punishment in Delaware.


Q: Holocaust-denying bishop headed for new trouble with Vatican

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 1:56 PM

A Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop who made headlines in 2009 when Pope Benedict XVI rehabilitated him and members of his breakaway traditionalist society is heading for new trouble with the Vatican.

Bishop Richard Williamson is planning to consecrate a new bishop on Thursday in Brazil without Pope Francis’s consent – a church crime punishable by excommunication.

The Rev René Miguel Trincado Cvjetkovic confirmed the planned consecration of the Rev Christian Jean-Michel Faure in an email to The Associated Press. The consecration was first reported by the traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli.

Williamson, Trincado and Faure have all been, or are in the process of being, kicked out of the Society of St Pius X, which was formed in 1969 by the late archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican council. They have opposed the society’s recent efforts at reconciliation with the Holy See.

In 1988, the Vatican excommunicated Lefebvre, Williamson and three other bishops after Lefebvre consecrated them without papal consent.

Benedict, first as cardinal and then as pope, tried to bring the group back into full communion with Rome, eager to prevent further schism and the expansion of a parallel, pre-Vatican II church.

In 2009, Benedict removed the excommunications – but an uproar ensued, since Williamson said in a television interview aired just before the decree was made public that he did not believe Jews were killed in gas chambers during the second world war.

Trincado said neither Williamson nor Faure fear a new excommunication “because what we intend with this consecration is to preserve the true Catholic faith from the greatest crisis that the church has suffered in her history”.
What are the most important parts of this text?

A:

assistant: A Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop who made headlines in 2009, is heading for new trouble with the Vatican.