The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear a convicted double murderer’s appeal of his death sentence and decide whether Arizona’s high court should have applied current law when reviewing mitigating and aggravating evidence in the decades-old case.
In 1991, James McKinney and his older half-brother committed 2 burglaries, and in each crime one of the brothers killed a victim with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
Although the brothers dispute who pulled the trigger in each crime, separate juries found McKinney guilty of 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, and convicted his brother of 1 count each of 1st- and 2nd-degree murder.
A trial judge sent McKinney to death row in 1993, a ruling upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court 3 years later
The state’s highest court refused to consider evidence of McKinney’s severely abusive upbringing because it found no “causal nexus” between his trauma and his crimes. The court practiced its so-called “causal nexus” test for capital crimes for 16 years before abandoning it in 2005.
After a Ninth Circuit panel initially rejected his habeas petition, a 6-5 majority of the en banc appeals court found in 2015 that the Arizona Supreme Court’s refusal to hear mitigating evidence before imposing the death penalty violated the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Eddings v. Oklahoma, which found that a trial court in another case should have considered evidence of a defendant’s difficult childhood and emotional disturbance.
The majority ordered the district court to grant McKinney’s habeas petition unless Arizona reduced his sentence or allowed him to submit mitigating evidence at another hearing.
The state challenged the ruling, and the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed McKinney’s death sentence. It held that U.S. Supreme Court decisions requiring juries rather than judges to make findings necessary to support the death penalty did not apply to McKinney’s case because they were issued after 1996, when his conviction became final.
In a petition for a writ of certiorari to the nation’s highest court, McKinney urged the justices to resolve the “clear division in authority, which similarly impacts a substantial number of death-row inmates in Arizona, and which has significant implications for other capital cases across the country.”
“By refusing to remand McKinney’s case for resentencing, the Arizona Supreme Court created a clear split with five other state and federal courts, which have each held that resentencing is required to correct Eddings errors,” the petition states.
The Supreme Court decided Monday to add the case to its docket for the next term. Per their custom, the justices did not comment on the decision to take up the case.
Source: Courthouse News, Staff, June 10, 2019
U.S. Supreme Court to hear Chandler death penalty case
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear the death penalty case of a man convicted of murder in Arizona.
The plaintiff in McKinney v. Arizona is current death row inmate James Erin McKinney. McKinney was convicted of murdering Christene Mertens in her Chandler home during a robbery, then doing the same to Jim McClain 13 days later in March of 1991.
McKinney was sentenced to death in 1993. A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the sentence in 2015, ruling that the Arizona Supreme Court did not properly weigh mitigating factors.
McKinney's attorneys have argued that the sentencing judge did not consider McKinney's post-traumatic stress disorder due to severe child abuse, which could have resulted in a lesser sentence.
The case before the Supreme Court now will determine whether Supreme Court rulings that have changed death penalty cases since McKinney's initial sentence should be applied to McKinney, and, subsequently, other death row inmates convicted before 2002.
McKinney's accomplice, Charles Hedlund, had his death sentence overturned for the same reason in 2016.
In 2002, the ruling in Ring v. Arizona held that the 6th Amendment requires a jury to find the "aggravating factors necessary for imposing the death penalty." In 2015, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Arizona's "causal nexus" rule unconstitutional. The rule requires any mitigating evidence, such as mental illness or post-traumatic stress disorder, to be directly tied to the crime committed in order to be considered in sentencing.
In 2018, the Supreme Court refused to consider a case challenging the constitutionality of the Arizona death-penalty statute, which petitioners argued is overly broad.
According to the Arizona Department of Corrections, there are currently 116 inmates on death row.
Source: azcentral.com, Staff, June 10, 2019
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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
