I thought it was a pretty good explanation. They said that the death penalty had been decided by a jury that had dotted every i and crossed every t - it was a completely sound decision. And the judges in this appeal looked back into thousands of pages of the court record and found three words that they thought were prejudicial and therefore overturned the death sentence. A technicality, in other words.
And the editorial blamed street violence on the message that the justice system doesn’t take murder seriously (not that of cops, at least), not the mere existence of guns themselves.
I saw nothing about dotted i’s and crossed t’s, except in taking what they were told at face value maybe. This means, at worst, the case gets sent back to a new jury for a resentencing, and with the mistakes taken out it ought to come out as before, if this was actually due. Nobody has commented on what the mistake might imply for cloudier cases, if it were allowed to slide. “Hard cases make bad law.”