Opinion ID: 2604767
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: unconstitutionality of the 1977 act as being applied

Text: The Court's opinion delivered today, authored by Justice Shepard, and which commands a bare majority of the Court's membership is reminiscent of his views which were set forth in his dissenting opinion in State v. Lindquist, 99 Idaho 766, 589 P.2d 101 (1979) wherein, in declaring his view to affirm a death sentence, he concluded: With all deference and respect to our brethern on the Bench of the United States Supreme Court, I regret that I can neither understand what they have said as a court, where they now stand as a court or where they may be going in this important area of the law involving capital cases and the death penalty. I may well be wrong in my interpretation of what they have said and what they will do. I believe it is equally possible that today's majority may be in error in their understanding. I am sure the sentencing judge here suffered an agony of the spirit much greater than that of Mr. Justice Blackmun. This Judge had need to face the human rather than decide in the sanctity and solitude of his chambers while considering an abstract principle. The trial judge shouldered his heavy burden and I think this Court should affirm his decision, leaving to the United States Supreme Court, if they so desire, the option of deciding the fate of Phillip Lewis Lindquist. 99 Idaho at 775 [589 P.2d 101]. Although the Lindquist majority opinion authored by Justice Bakes readily recognized as a matter of law that Idaho's then existing death penalty statutes were invalid in light of  Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 96 S.Ct. 2978, 49 L.Ed.2d 944 (1976) which held unconstitutional a North Carolina mandatory death penalty statute virtually identical to the Idaho statute... 99 Idaho at 768, 589 P.2d at 110, the Lindquist dissent set forth in detail the facts of Lindquist's crime. Those facts were then, and remain, unpalatable, but cannot affect the obligation of an Idaho court to adhere to the Constitution of the United States and apply its precepts as the Supreme Court of the United States interprets and applies that Constitution. Admittedly, to have joined the Lindquist and Creech [7] execution bandwagons would have met with large spread public favor. Today, four years after Creech and Lindquist, that same Creech is again before the Court on review of the imposition of a death sentence. Once again a popular decision would be to affirm that death sentence. Of this there can be no doubt. Even before sentence was imposed upon Creech by the district court, the Boise Statesman, by far Idaho's newspaper of largest circulation, in its Sunday edition of September 20, 1981, both editorialized on his fate and carried a lead article authored by its managing editor: The Idaho STATESMAN