Man Put to Death After High Court Ruling

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court has spoken on the issue of capital punishment for people who commit crimes as juveniles, overruling a lower court and allowing Oklahoma to execute a man who killed two people when he was 17.

The 5-4 vote late Thursday illustrated the court's bitter division over whether capital punishment is appropriate in those cases.

It also indicated that the four justices who called the executions "shameful" last fall do not have the fifth vote needed to stop them.

Scott Allen Hain, 32, had won a reprieve Wednesday from the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites). He was put to death Thursday night for helping to burn to death a man and woman in 1987.

Oklahoma had asked the high court to intervene, arguing that Hain's appeals had run out. He was convicted of kidnapping a man and a woman from outside a Tulsa bar in 1987 and stuffing them into the trunk of a car that he and another man then set on fire. Hain said he acted under the control of his older accomplice.

At issue in his appeal before the lower court was not his juvenile status but whether the government should have paid for Hain's lawyer at a clemency hearing.

The execution of people who were juveniles when they committed their crimes is a particularly charged issue for the Supreme Court, which has held that states may put to death people who were 16 or 17 when they killed. The United States is one of the few countries that allow such executions.

In October, the four most liberal justices said the court should raise the age for executions to 18.

"The practice of executing such offenders is a relic of the past and is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society," Justice John Paul Stevens (news - web sites) said in an opinion joined by Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (news - web sites) and Stephen Breyer (news - web sites). "We should put an end to this shameful practice."

The same four justices opposed Hain's execution, while the most conservative court members voted for it: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor (news - web sites), Antonin Scalia (news - web sites), Anthony Kennedy (news - web sites) and Clarence Thomas (news - web sites).

Justices also rejected an emergency appeal written by Hain, without an attorney, in which he asked the court to define standards of decency. He pointed them to the dictionary where decent is defined as respectable and kind.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that executing mentally retarded people is unconstitutionally cruel. Some death penalty opponents hoped the court would extend that view to juveniles.

"It doesn't sound like they have much hope of getting the rules changed for people under 18, unless there's a change on the court in their favor, which is very unlikely," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

There is no consistent breakdown at the court in capital cases. For example, the justices outlawed executions of mentally retarded on a 6-3 vote. In the past year, justices voted 8-1 against a death row inmate, and 8-1 for a convicted killer.

Cynthia Orr, a San Antonio attorney who oversees death penalty issues for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said she still expects the court to eventually take up a juvenile case. The 5-4 action "may be an indication that it hasn't come to them with sufficient evidence or data to make a determination."

Whether he was a juvenile or an adult, burning people to death is evil, and evil has to be stopped. I believe in the death penalty.

I have trouble not thinking about the excruciatingly painful end to life that the victims suffered in this case. A 17-year-old has the capacity to understand that. Would burning him alive be cruel and unusual punishment? I’m not sure I would say so, particularly if I was a relative of the deceased individuals. Me thinks he got off lightly.

What shameful practice are they talking about? Murdering two people in cold blood by burning them in the trunk of a car? Or putting to death the sorry perps that committed the crime?

5 posted on 04/04/2003 7:22:32 AM PST by AxelPaulsenJr (Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb the hell out of saddam. Bomb saddam to hell.)

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