Court Rules That Only Juries Can Impose Death Sentences: The decision was based on the sixth amendment guarantee of a trial by one’s peers.

“Joining Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg in the majority were Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Stephen G. Breyer and — somewhat surprisingly — the conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dissented…

The decision in Ring v. Arizona, 01-488, invalidated the death-sentencing procedures in five states, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, which have 168 people under death sentences and where a judge or panel of judges decides sentence. It could also affect the capital punishment statutes in four other states, Alabama, Delaware, Florida and Indiana, which have 529 people under death sentences. Those states have a hybrid system under which juries advise a judge on the sentence…

(I)t was not clear whether the condemned prisoners would automatically get life sentences or could be sentenced to death again under new procedures. Some previous landmark opinions on capital punishment have meant reprieves for whole death-row populations.”

This is the second monumental death sentence restriction handed down by the Suporeme Court this week, of course, after the ruling that mentally retarded prisoners cannot be executed. I worked as a psychiatric consultant on three death row cases, in two of which (in Alabama) the death sentence had been imposed by the presiding judge’s override of a jury’s “recommendation” of a lesser sentence; the third defendant was mentally retarded…