Finality and fairness

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday the 1st of June. So glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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REICHARD: Time now for Legal Docket.

The Supreme Court is entering opinion season, and today three rulings about criminal convictions and sentencing. One says a case deserves another look. The other two say there are limits to how often courts can revisit old criminal judgments.

EICHER: First, a death-penalty case.

PITCHFORD: I’m Terry Pitchford. I’m from Grenada, Mississippi. I’m here for capital murder. They gave me a death sentence.

In this case, Pitchford v Cain, the Supreme Court tossed out Pitchford’s conviction and death sentence.

The case goes back more than twenty years. Pitchford was one of two teenagers who robbed a grocery store and left store owner Reuben Britt dead. The teen who pulled the trigger took a plea deal and 20 years in prison. Terry Pitchford chose to go to trial. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

The issue before the Supreme Court was not whether Pitchford committed the crime…that’s not in dispute. It was whether the jury-selection process complied with the Constitution.

Prosecutors used peremptory strikes to remove four of five black prospective jurors. Under a Supreme Court precedent called Batson vs Kentucky, prosecutors may strike jurors without stating a reason—but the strikes must not be for reason of race.

REICHARD: Pitchford’s lawyers argued the Batson process broke down. Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts, along with liberals Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the majority.

The trial judge had asked prosecutors to explain the strikes and accepted their answers as race-neutral…one juror arrived late, two had brothers convicted of violent crimes, and another was a young, unmarried father.

The breakdown was the judge not allowing meaningful challenge from the defense. But during oral argument, Justice Samuel Alito wondered, who’s fault was that?

ALITO: Well, this is the most timid and reticent defense counsel that I have encountered. Any competent defense attorney that I knew would have spoken up …

EICHER: Yet other justices viewed the record differently. Justice Kavanaugh hinted at the eventual ruling during oral argument:

KAVANAUGH: ….the reason this matters is this is a death penalty case, right? And he was 17 when he committed the crime, and he did not, not that this is good, but he was not the shooter, correct?

STEWART: That’s right, Your Honor.

REICHARD: The dissenting justices wrote that Pitchford’s claim of a “muzzled defense team” did not square with the record. The dissent criticized the majority for ignoring the high bar that federal law imposes before federal courts can overturn state convictions.

EICHER: The ruling clears the way for further proceedings and possibly a new trial for Pitchford, who’s now served two decades in prison.

The next two cases answer a different question: when should a criminal judgment stay settled?

This one was 8-1, the Supreme Court saying federal prisoners cannot use compassionate release to challenge the validity of their convictions.

Compassionate release allows courts to shorten a prison sentence in extraordinary circumstances—such as terminal illness, or advanced age, or certain family emergencies.

That phrase does leave some room for interpretation, so defense counsel has tried to use compassionate release to fix what they see are unjust convictions or sentences. Which is what Jose Ferndandez tried doing here. 

But the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected those expansions.

REICHARD: And the justices did here, too.

Compassionate release is what the name implies, the court held, and not for correcting a legal error.

Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin had the winning argument for the government:

FEIGIN: I think what you’ve just heard …is a proposal to make it instead an open-ended loophole to challenge the validity of sentences continuously through a potentially endless series of collateral attacks on the criminal judgment.

EICHER: Justice Neil Gorsuch underscored the effort Congress made to make final things final:

GORSUCH: And I thought, in our legal system, the jury’s verdict on the facts is not something a court can impeach unless it’s clearly erroneous.

REICHARD: And finally, a federal inmate serving more than 40 years for a string of armed robberies will stay behind bars after another high court ruling on that same doctrine of compassionate release.

EICHER: This decision was 6-3, the court ruling that prisoners cannot use non-retroactive sentencing reforms as grounds. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.

This case involved a man named Daniel Rutherford. He was sentenced under older and more harsh federal laws after he robbed a Philadelphia clinic. Pretending to be a patient, Rutherford pulled a gun and stole money and jewelry, though he never fired the gun.

At the time, federal law imposed mandatory prison terms for mere possession of a gun during a violent crime. Rutherford’s convictions added up to more than 42 years in prison, and much of that was from the federal gun statute’s so-called “stacking” provisions.

REICHARD: Under President Trump’s first term, Congress passed the First Step Act and that eliminated mandatory sentence stacking for first time offenders. But Congress explicitly did not make those changes retroactive. 

Rutherford argued his sentence was so disparate from the new rules that it should count as an “extraordinary and compelling reason” for compassionate release.

Justice Kavanaugh signaled concern during oral argument about the separation of powers:

KAVANAUGH: We’re now going to give a second look for district judges to revisit those sentences even though Congress … did not want them made retroactive … obviously, the Commission was very divided on this question...  The Commission dissenters said this is a seismic structural change to our criminal justice system that countermands Congress’s judgment. And that’s my concern on this case…

The majority agreed with that, saying the courts cannot do indirectly what Congress chose not to do directly.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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