Schriro v. Summerlin
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| Schriro v. Summerlin | ||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued April 19, 2004 Decided June 24, 2004 |
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Schriro v. Summerlin, 542 U.S. 348 (2004), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that a requirement that a different Supreme Court decision requiring the jury rather than the judge to find aggravating factors would not be applied retroactively.
[edit] Facts
In April of 1982, Warren Wesley Summerlin killed a creditor who had come to his home in Phoenix, Arizona, to inquire about a debt. He was later convicted of first-degree murder and received a death sentence. Under Arizona law at the time, a jury decided the question of guilt but a judge sitting without a jury decided the question of penalty after receiving evidence regarding aggravating and mitigating factors. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence. While the appeal in his habeas corpus case was pending in the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court decided Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002), which held that such aggravating factors had to be proved to a jury rather than a judge. The Ninth Circuit ruled that the Ring decision applied to Summerlin's case even though Ring was decided after Summerlin's conviction had become final on direct review. The state appealed this decision to the Supreme Court.
[edit] Result
The Court, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, stated that "we give retroactive effect to only a small set of 'watershed rules of criminal procedure implementing the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding.' That a new procedural rule is 'fundamental' in some abstract sense is not enough; the rule must be one 'without which the likelihood of an accurate conviction is seriously diminished."
