Death Row Inmate Gets Divided Supreme Court Win on Sentence

The US Supreme Court sided with an Arizona death-row inmate in a procedural dispute over when a state court ruling can cut off federal review of a death sentence.

The 5-4 ruling on Wednesday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Arizona Supreme Court got it wrong when it found that one of its previous rulings hadn’t changed the law enough to allow John Cruz to challenge his punishment.

The Arizona ruling couldn’t serve as an “adequate and independent state-law ground” that would preclude federal review, Sotomayor said.

Emphasizing how rare it is for the justices to make such a finding, Sotomayor said that the state court’s determination that Lynch v. Arizona “was not a significant change in the law is an exceptional case where a state-court judgment rests on such a novel and unforeseeable interpretation of a state-court procedural rule that the decision is not adequate to foreclose review of the federal claim.”

Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joined their more liberal colleagues, Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan in the majority.

In dissent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett called the court’s decision “jarring,” saying that the justices owed “the utmost deference to the state court.”

Barrett was joined by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

Cruz was convicted in state court of first-degree murder for shooting Tucson Police Officer Patrick Hardesty in 2003.

Cruz’s death sentence prompted the appeal. He wanted the jury to know that he would’ve been ineligible for parole if sentenced to life instead of death, which his lawyer, Neal Katyal, said at the November argument mattered because the jury foreman said they looked for a reason to be lenient.

Though 1994 US Supreme Court precedent in Simmons v. South Carolina gave defendants the right to inform juries of parole-ineligibility when future danger is at issue, Arizona courts said the law didn’t apply in the state.

The US Supreme Court summarily reversed that decision in 2016’s Lynch v. Arizona, over dissent from Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, finding that Arizona juries must also be informed of the lack of parole.

After Lynch was decided, Cruz tried again to challenge his sentence, but was rejected under a state procedural rule that bars post-conviction relief without a significant change in law. The state high court said it wasn’t a significant change in law but rather a change in the application of law.

Barrett’s dissent argued that the justices were “powerless to revise a state court’s interpretation of its own law.”

The case is Cruz v. Arizona, U.S., No. 21-846.