Justices say Kansas court wrongly overturned death sentences

The Supreme Court restored two death sentences Wednesday, just a week after ruling Florida’s death penalty system unconstitutional.

“Rather than to take credit where credit belongs to others, the relief those families must have felt to get this was palpable”, Bennett said during a press conference.

A almost unanimous Supreme Court Wednesday reinstated death sentences for three convicted Kansas murderers.

On the second issue, Scalia said that that “joint proceedings are not only permissible but are often preferable when the joined defendants’ criminal conduct arises out of a single chain of events”, he wrote.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Stephen McAllister, the E.S. & Tom W. Hampton Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Kansas, argued the cases on behalf of the state of Kansas.

The cases now return to the Kansas Supreme Court, which will determine whether additional proceedings are necessary.

The decision means, at least on these grounds, that the death sentences handed down for all three men should be reinstated – although other arguments could be raised when the Kansas Supreme Court reconsiders the cases in light of Wednesday’s decision.

“It would mean nothing, we think, to tell the jury that the defendants must deserve mercy beyond a reasonable doubt; or must more-likely-than-not deserve it”, Scalia wrote, and added that a more involved sentencing approach would “produce anything but jury confusion”.

She only noted that she wouldn’t have heard the case in the first place, so as to not keep Kansas – whose own supreme court in 2014 overturned the brothers’ sentences – from tinkering with its own death-sentencing schemes.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the court’s 8-1 decision, began his decision by recounting the facts of Gleason and the brothers’ cases.

“Jurors were told to consider any mitigating circumstance, even those not found to exist by other members of the jury”, Scalia said. “Jurors would not have misunderstood these instructions to prevent their consideration of constitutionally relevant evidence”.

Even with the ruling, the brothers’ challenge to their death sentences is not yet over. Jonathan and Reginald Carr were sentenced together. “The joint sentencing proceedings did not render the sentencing proceedings fundamentally unfair”.

All but Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Scalia’s opinion in full.

The women were raped repeatedly before all five were taken to a snow-covered soccer field and shot in the head. One of those kidnapped, a woman named in court papers as Holly G., managed to survive because a bullet deflected off a hair-clip she was wearing. She did not endorse the state court’s decision, but instead said the justices should have passed up the chance to review it.

Gleason was convicted in the February 2004 killing of Mikiala Martinez and Darren Wornkey in Great Bend. Wornkey was her boyfriend.