The legal scheme Delaware uses to sentence convicted murderers to death violates the U.S. Constitution, the state’s high court ruled on Tuesday.
A divided Delaware Supreme Court said that the state’s capital sentencing system, which allows a judge to impose the death penalty even when a jury specifically declines to do so, violates a person’s right to a jury trial.
“Put simply, the Sixth Amendment right to a jury includes a right not to be executed unless a jury concludes unanimously that it has no reasonable doubt that is the appropriate sentence,” wrote Chief Justice Leo Strine in a lengthy opinion accompanying the court’s otherwise brief, five-page decision.
The lead decision, issued jointly by Strine and two other justices, rested in large part on Hurst v. Florida, in which the U.S. Supreme Court in January found a similar death penalty regime in Florida to be unconstitutional.
Strine said the jury process was “the protective armor ... against unwarranted imposition of the death penalty,” which in turn requires jurors to “to have an extremely high level of confidence” that they were making the right call.
“There is no circumstance in which it is more critical that a jury act with the historically required confidence than when it is determining whether a defendant should live or die,” the chief justice wrote.
Rather than issuing the ruling as part of a lengthy appeals process involving a current death row inmate, the Delaware Supreme Court took the case on a fast-track basis after a lower court sought guidance in the case of Benjamin Rauf, who stands charged with first-degree murder and other felonies.
Prosecutors had indicated their intention to seek the death penalty for Rauf. But in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hurst, the trial court asked the Delaware Supreme Court whether this “reflected an evolution of the law”― that is, whether the state’s death penalty statute remained valid.
On Tuesday, the state’s high court answered no to that question. The ruling also said jurors in a capital case must be unanimous in finding beyond a reasonable doubt the so-called aggravating factors that justify the imposition of the ultimate punishment.
In addition, the court concluded that the statute couldn’t be salvaged, and left it up to the Delaware legislature to come up with a replacement death sentencing law.
“The multiple infirmities in the Delaware death penalty statute ... must be addressed by the General Assembly,” wrote Justice Randy Holland in his own concurring opinion.
Of the five justices on the Delaware Supreme Court, three voted to strike the sentencing regime in full, one agreed with this result only in part, and one justice dissented altogether and would’ve left the sentencing scheme in place.
With the law no longer on the books, it is likely that Delaware’s current death row population, which was sentenced under it, will seek to challenge their punishments ― as inmates in Alabama have tried in the wake of the Hurst ruling. Alabama’s death penalty law is similar in kind to Florida’s and Delaware’s, but hasn’t yet been invalidated.
Delaware last executed a death row inmate in 2012. It has 18 people on its death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
