SCOTUS NEWS
on Apr 3, 2023
at 10:38 am
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Over a dissent from the court docket’s three liberal justices, the Supreme Courtroom turned down a request from a Louisiana man on death-row to weigh in on when another person’s confession is the form of proof that the Structure requires prosecutors to show over. The court docket’s denial of evaluate in Brown v. Louisiana got here on the finish of a list of orders from the justices’ personal convention final week.
The justices didn’t add any new instances to their docket for the 2023-24 time period.
David Brown was one of many “Angola 5,” a gaggle that attempted unsuccessfully to flee from a maximum-security jail in Louisiana in 1999. Throughout the failed try, jail guard David Knapps was crushed to demise with a hammer.
Brown admitted that he had tried to flee, however he maintained that he had not been current when Knapps was killed, a lot much less had any function in his demise. He was convicted and sentenced to demise by a jury in 2011.
A number of months after Brown’s trial, prosecutors disclosed for the primary time an interview during which one other member of the Angola 5, Barry Edge, confessed to Knapps’s homicide with out implicating Brown. The decide who tried Brown ordered a brand new sentencing listening to for him in 2014. Choose Jerome Winsberg dominated that the prosecution’s failure to supply Brown with Edge’s assertion violated the Supreme Courtroom’s landmark 1963 choice in Brady v. Maryland, holding that prosecutors should present a defendant with favorable proof.
However the Louisiana Supreme Courtroom reinstated Brown’s demise sentence. It dominated that even when prosecutors had turned over Edge’s assertion, it wouldn’t have made a distinction in Brown’s case – as a result of, for instance, of the bodily proof connecting Brown to the assault on Knapps and since Edge’s assertion “is definitely silent as to which people participated within the bodily assault” on Knapps.
Brown got here to the Supreme Courtroom final summer time, asking the justices to take up his case. On Monday, the justices rejected that plea.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court docket’s choice to not evaluate Brown’s case. In a four-page opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Jackson contended that the Louisiana Supreme Courtroom’s choice reinstating the demise penalty was clearly unsuitable. Edge’s confession was favorable to Brown as a result of, by implicating Edge and one other particular person within the assault on Knapps, it “helps an inference that Brown was not one of many people who killed or determined to kill the sufferer,” Jackson wrote. And if the jury that sentenced Brown to demise had heard Edge’s confession, Jackson continued, there’s a probability that not less than one juror may need voted to present Brown a life sentence, relatively than the demise penalty. Due to this fact, she defined, she would have granted Brown’s petition for evaluate and summarily reversed – that’s, dominated in his favor with out further briefing or oral argument.
The justices’ subsequent often scheduled convention is on Friday, April 14; they’re additionally anticipated to problem opinions in argued instances that day. Orders from the April 14 convention are anticipated on Monday, April 17, at 9:30 a.m.
This text was originally published at Howe on the Court.