The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Warren Summerlin...

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Warren Summerlin v. Arizona, which could have reversed 85 of Arizona death sentences and more than 100 nationwide. Summerlin was a Phoenix man who murdered a bill collector in 1981. He was sentenced to death by a judge Warren W. Summerlin, was sentenced to death on July 12, 1982. In 2002, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco threw out Summerlin's death sentence. The Arizona Attorney General's Office appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments in April. Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled on another Arizona case, Ring v. Arizona, in where the practice of judges rendering death sentences, in Arizona and four other states, was unconstitutional. Because of that ruling, Arizona passed a law 2 years ago that now requires juries instead of judges to sentence a convicted murderer to death. The federal appellate court concluded last year that the Supreme Court's decision on Ring was retroactive to all murder cases sentenced by judges in Arizona and other states before the law took effect sending the case back to the Supreme Court. In today's ruling, Chief Justice Harold Rehnquist, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia voted not to make the death sentences retroactive. "New substantive rules generally apply retroactively, but new procedural rules generally do not," The Supreme Court ruled. "Ring's holding is properly classified as procedural." Only watershed rules of criminal procedure are given retroactive effect. The Ring decision was not a watershed rule of criminal procedure, the court ruled. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer voted in the minority. The case had the potential to overturn 111 death sentences in 4 states: 87 in Arizona, 15 in Idaho, 5 in Montana and 4 in Nebraska. That would have eliminated more than 2/3 of those states' total death row population of 161. It could also have changed 15 Nevada cases in which offenders were sentenced to death under a law that let judges decide sentences when juries deadlocked or defendants pleaded guilty. See also (see also October 13, 2001, September 2, 2003, December 1, 2003)