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Friday, October 23, 2009

Courts - Even more on: "SCOTUS rejects 7th Circuit ruling re Joseph Corcoran"

An editorial today in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, headed "A proper reversal," concludes:

Here is the legal issue:

After Corcoran’s lawyers challenged his death sentence through state courts, which upheld the death penalty, Corcoran had the right to challenge it in federal courts. His lawyers asked a federal judge to throw out the death penalty on five grounds. The late U.S. District Judge Allen Sharp ruled in Corcoran’s favor on one challenge, the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. He told state courts to resentence Corcoran to a penalty other than death.

Sharp failed to rule on the other four grounds; so only the one issue was before the federal appeals court when it reversed Sharp, leaving the other arguments unresolved in the federal courts. “The Seventh Circuit should have permitted the (federal) District Court to consider Corcoran’s unresolved challenges to his death sentence” when it reversed Sharp, the Supreme Court ruled.

One of those challenges concerns Corcoran’s mental illness. The Supreme Court in 2002 banned the execution of inmates with mental retardation, ruling the condition diminishes the culpability of the defendant. Judges have since struggled with determining to what degree mental illness similarly diminishes culpability.

The courts will now likely head down a path of deciding what level of mental illness makes a criminal ineligible for the death penalty.

Increasingly, elected officials and courts are deciding that the death penalty is so arbitrary, that the true guilt of too many defendants remains in question, that it cannot be fairly applied. Corcoran’s lawyers also raise other significant issues, including the constitutionality of the state’s death penalty law.

Corcoran brutally killed four people and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. But executing a man who is clearly and severely mentally ill in the name of the people has no place in a civilized society.

There are many earlier ILB entries on the Corcoran case - here is the list.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 23, 2009 09:47 AM
Posted to Courts in general