The Supreme Court lifted the death sentence for Delma...

The Supreme Court lifted the death sentence for Delma Banks, who claimed that prosecutors played dirty and withheld evidence at his trial. Banks, black, one of the country's longest-serving death row inmates, was sentenced to die for the 1980 killing of a 16-year-old white boy, ichard Wayne Whitehead. The Supreme Court voted 9-0 to return Delma Banks' case to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on the penalty phase issue. The court voted 7-2 to also lift the death sentence. From Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion lifting Banks' death sentence: "The state withheld evidence that would have allowed Banks to discredit 2 essential prosecution witnesses. The state did not disclose that one prosecution witness was a paid police informant, nor did it disclose a pretrial transcript revealing that the other witnesses' trial testimony had been intensively coached by prosecutors and law enforcement officers. "Furthermore, the prosecution raised no red flag when the informant testified, untruthfully, that he never gave the police any statement and, indeed, had not talked to any police officer about the case until a few days before the trial." Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter and Stephen Breyer fully agreed with Ginsburg. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia did not agree that Banks got a raw deal from prosecutors, but still would have sent his case back to a federal appeals court for further consideration. The case is Banks v. Dretke, 02-8286.