The Supreme Court of Alabama has reversed and remanded the death penalty sentence for a man convicted of robbing and fatally shooting a man in 2009.
Anthony Lane was convicted in 2011 of capital murder during the commission of a robbery in the death of 57-year-old Frank Wright, who was killed off Messer Airport Highway while en route to pick up his wife at Birmingham's airport.
Based on the jury's recommendation , Circuit Judge Clyde Jones sentenced Lane to death. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Lane's conviction and sentence and the Alabama Supreme Court denied Lane's request to review his conviction on Jan. 30, 2015.
Now, the Alabama Supreme Court has reversed the judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his sentence, and remanded the matter to the trial court to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the court said in a ruling issued Friday.
"Based on Atkins, Hall, and the apparent reasons behind the United States Supreme Court's vacation of the Court of Criminal Appeals' judgment, we must reverse the judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals and remand the cause to that court with directions to remand the matter to the trial court," the state supreme court said.
On Oct. 5, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Lane's sentence and remanded it back to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama for further consideration. The high court asked the Alabama appeals court to look at the case in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 ruling that declared unconstitutional Florida's method of determining whether a capital murder defendant is intellectually disabled.
Florida law says an intellectual disability is defined as an IQ test score of 70 or less. But the supreme court justices held that that Florida's "rigid rule ... creates an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed, and thus is unconstitutional."
Lane had a full-scale IQ of 70.
The Florida case focused on the medical community's interpretation of the significance of an IQ test score. Because Lane was afforded a hearing on his intellectual disability, the trial court was not barred from considering other evidence in determining whether Lane was intellectually disabled, the appeals court stated.
Therefore, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled, Lane is due no relief under the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Florida case.
Associate Justice Greg Shaw dissenting on the Supreme Court of Alabama's ruling, saying the court is acting prematurely in vacating Lane's death sentence.
Shaw said the court should more closely examine whether Atkins v. Virginia, a Supreme Court case which determined intellectually disabled people are not eligible for the death penalty, applies to lane. Specifically, the court should look at whether Lane exhibits subaverage intellectual functioning and whether he exhibits deficits in adaptive behavior, which problems manifested themselves before the age of 18, Shaw said in his dissent.
"The trial court ruled that he failed to prove that he exhibited significant or substantial deficits in adaptive behavior--the second part of the Atkins analysis described above," he said.
Shaw said he agreed no strict IQ score cutoff was used in this case and said Lane was afforded the full opportunity to present exactly the type of adaptive-skills evidence.
After the state supreme court granted certiorari review, the state and Lane filed a "joint motion" indicating that they had "reached an agreement" and asking this Court to remand the case to the trial court with instructions to resentence Lane to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Both parties later also told the court they both agreed "that death is not the proper sentence" in this case and that "[t]his agreement was reached after a thorough review of the existing record and an examination of additional evidence that is outside the record."
Shaw called the joint motion improper.
"But there is a better, more procedurally proper way to do this; I thus respectfully dissent," he said.
Associate Justice Kelli Wise concurred.
Source: al.com, Anna Beahm, September 15, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
