AADP Media Archive

California Supreme Court to Consider Petition to Halt Capital Prosecutions

Calling Governor Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on executions a “paradigm shift” in the death-penalty landscape, a defendant facing the death penalty in Los Angeles has petitioned the California Supreme Court to halt capital prosecutions in the state. On July 1, 2019, lawyers for Cleamon Johnson—whose death penalty trial is scheduled to begin in January 2020—have filed a pretrial petition for review, arguing that capital juries “cannot be expected to provide a fair and reasoned penalty-phase determination free from speculation” about whether a death sentence would ever be carried out.

The petition is based on the 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Caldwell v. Mississippi, which held that “It is constitutionally impermissible to rest a death sentence on a determination made by a sentencer who has been led to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the defendant's death rests elsewhere.” It argues that because of the moratorium, jurors will “be unable to assume a death sentence will result in an execution and be unable to comprehend fully the gravity of their decision.” This, it argues, creates a constitutionally unacceptable risk that jurors might impose a death sentence merely to “send a message,” delegating to the courts the ultimate responsibility for whether a defendant should live or be condemned to die.

Robert Sanger, Johnson’s lead defense attorney, said the decision is important not only for Johnson but for other defendants facing potential death-penalty charges. “If the courts don’t take a serious look at it before we have a whole slew of additional trials,” he told the Sacramento Bee, “we’re not only going to spend a whole lot of money now, they may have to be redone." Prosecutors filed their response to the petition on July 16, arguing that standard jury instructions are adequate to address Johnson’s concerns. “Jurors are routinely asked to set aside these types of things in order to reach a just verdict based on the evidence and the law,” prosecutors wrote. “The real goal of this petition is to turn Governor Newsom’s moratorium, which is nominally a ‘reprieve,’ into a judicial abolition of the death penalty in California.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Asks Pennsylvania Supreme Court to Strike Down State’s Death Penalty

Citing race disparities, ineffective representation by court-appointed lawyers, and arbitrary case outcomes, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to strike down the state’s death penalty. In a brief filed on July 15, 2019 in the consolidated appeals of Philadelphia death-row prisoner Jermont Cox and Northumberland County’s Kevin Marinelli, the District Attorney’s office argued that Pennsylvania’s death penalty “has repeatedly been handed out in an unreliable and arbitrary manner” and urged the court to rule “that the death penalty, as it has been applied, violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s ban on cruel punishments.”

Explaining the filing, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (pictured) told The Appeal that the death penalty “really is not about the worst offenders. It really is about poverty. It really is about race.” Philadelphia prosecutors stressed that theme throughout their brief, finding that nearly three-quarters of the Philadelphia death sentences imposed between 1978 and 2017 had been overturned in the courts, mostly as a result of ineffective assistance from “under-funded, inadequately supported court-appointed counsel.” The result, city prosecutors said, was a death row overwhelmingly composed of poor black defendants who had been denied meaningful representation at trial.