Supreme Court: Return a likely innocent man to Death Row

Appeals court had overturned conviction, ordered new trial

Innocence doesn’t get you off Death Row, even if your court-appointed counsel was so woefully ineffective that higher courts ruled that you deserve a new trial.

That’s the crux of the unnerving 6–3 decision, Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas and released May 23.

For Barry Lee Jones, a Tuscon man convicted of murdering a child, that means Arizona can now execute him. For democracy, it’s another erosion of individual rights in favor of state power. For the court, it’s another step in undermining legal precedent— in voting, abortion, and, now, legal rights.

Supporting Arizona’s repeated contention that “innocence isn’t enough” for a new trial, the ruling argues that Jones and David Ramirez, another Arizona Death Row inmate, should not have been allowed to present new evidence in federal court. Federal review “imposes significant costs on state criminal justice systems,” it said.

“In our dual-sovereign system, federal courts must afford unwavering respect to trials in state court,” according to the ruling. Federal courts “lack the competence and authority to relitigate a state’s criminal case.”

This reasoning, of course, doesn’t weigh the financial costs of long-term imprisonment and the societal cost of executing someone wrongly convicted. And it ignores the fact that state courts, with overburdened public defenders, can make tragic mistakes.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling “perverse” and “illogical.”

“The Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel,” she wrote, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

The court’s decision also counters its 2012 ruling in Martinez v. Ryan, another case out of Arizona. That decision allows a defendant with “substantial” claims to make a case of ineffective legal assistance in federal court. That 7–2 ruling included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who nonetheless supported the new ruling.

The issues in the Jones case would seemingly qualify as substantial enough to warrant serious consideration of a new trial.

He was convicted in 1995 of rape and murder in the death of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray. An autopsy showed a blow to her abdomen, which ruptured her small intestine and slowly poisoned her. At trial, prosecutors relied on circumstantial evidence and dubious forensic testimony to convince jurors that Jones had repeatedly assaulted her the day before she died.

According to The Intercept, a media outlet that has reported on this case for years:

“Not only had his trial lawyers failed to investigate the medical evidence that provided the basis for his conviction, but his post-conviction attorney also failed to do the same. At Jones’s evidentiary hearing in 2017, medical experts debunked the narrow timeframe during which the state claimed Jones had assaulted Rachel, showing that her fatal injury could not have developed so quickly. A slew of additional witnesses shed light on shocking investigative failures by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.”

There are also other potential suspects. Gray’s mother, Angela, was eventually convicted of child abuse and sentenced to eight years in prison. There’s evidence that the girl’s brother sexually preyed on young girls. And shortly before her death, the girl reportedly said that a boy had hit her in the stomach with a metal bar.

District Judge Timothy Burgess overturned Jones’ conviction in 2018. If not for the failures of the attorneys, he wrote, jurors likely “would not have convicted him of any of the crimes with which he was charged and previously convicted.” That decision, twice upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was voided by the Supreme Court decision.

In the Jones case, Thomas wrote, federal intervention is “an affront to the state and its citizens who returned a verdict of guilt after considering the evidence before them.”

That would make sense only if we pretend mistakes are not made and that vengeance and corruption do not exist.

At least 10 men and women have been exonerated after having been wrongly convicted for killing a child, based on faulty evidence, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

For example: In April 2018, Vicente Benavides was exonerated after spending nearly 26 years on California’s death row for supposedly raping, sodomizing, and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter. In fact, the toddler had not been raped and may have died from internal injuries sustained from being hit by a car.

Many people may see legal the challenges of Death Row inmates as having little to do with them. After all, few people end up facing possible execution, deserved or not. But that is why those cases must be handled with utmost care. That means actually caring about innocence or guilt.

When that’s not expected when the issue is life or death, how can we count on it when dealing with other legal matters? And how can we trust the highest court in the land to set a standard of fairness when it treats the credibility of the justice system so cavalierly?