In a decision most significant for what it declined to do, the U.S. Supreme Court has rebuffed efforts by state prosecutors to further limit the scope of federal habeas corpus review of state criminal cases. In a 6-3 vote with Justice Breyer writing for the majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Georgia death-row prisoner Marion Wilson (pictured), saying that he was entitled to federal-court review of the reasons why the Georgia state courts had rejected his claim that he had been provided ineffective penalty-phase representation. Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented. The Court reversed a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that had denied Wilson's ineffective assistance claim based upon speculation as to why the state appeals court—which had issued only a one-sentence decision—had earlier denied the claim, rather than considering the reasons the trial court had actually done so. The technical legal issue in the case was how a federal court should handle a habeas corpus case filed by a state prisoner when the state appellate court, without explanation, summarily affirmed a reasoned lower-court ruling against the prisoner. Wilson had been sentenced to death in Baldwin County, Georgia in 1997. In his state post-conviction proceedings, he alleged that he had been denied the effective assistance of counsel in his penalty-phase proceedings when his lawyer failed to investigate and present available mitigating evidence that could have spared his life. The state post-conviction court conducted an evidentiary hearing, after which it denied relief, issuing a written order that explained the court's reasoning. Wilson then asked the Georgia Supreme Court for permission to appeal the order but the court summarily turned him down saying only that "it be hereby denied." Wilson next filed a habeas corpus petition asking the federal courts to review his ineffective assistance of counsel claim, arguing that, under the federal habeas statute, he was entitled to relief because the state court had unreasonably determined the facts and unreasonably applied the law when it rejected his claim. The federal district court agreed that Wilson had been ineffectively represented, but ruled against him nonetheless, deferring to the state court's conclusion that his trial counsel's failures had not been prejudicial. In an opinion that would have created a nearly insurmountable bar for a habeas petitioner to meet, the Eleventh Circuit held that federal courts should "not 'look through' a summary decision on the merits to review the reasoning of the lower state court," but should limit their review to whether any possible rationale could support the state appeals court judgment. The Supreme Court disagreed. Rather than adopting "an approach ... that would require a federal habeas court to imagine what might have been the state court’s supportive reasoning," Justice Breyer said that the habeas court should "look through" an unexplained state court decision on the merits and "presume that the unexplained decision adopted the same reasoning" as that employed by the lower court. That presumption, he wrote, may be rebutted if the state is able to show that the unexplained decision most likely rested on other grounds. The Court returned Wilson's case to the Eleventh Circuit with instructions to review his ineffectiveness claim under the correct standard. The ruling is the second time this Term the Court has sided with death-row prisoners on procedural issues affecting access to federal review of their cases. In March, the Court issued a ruling preserving indigent death-row prisoners' access to investigative funds "reasonably necessary" to develop their habeas corpus claims, overturning a ruling by the Fifth Circuit that had required habeas petitioners to meet a harsher standard.

Death row is aging and increasingly infirm and, as a series of recent death warrants suggest, that phenomenon is raising legal, practical, and humanitarian concerns. One year after executing 75-year-old Thomas Arthur, Alabama on April 19 executed 83-year-old Walter Moody (pictured, left), the oldest person and only octogenarian put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977. Attempts to execute prisoners debilitated by physical and cognitive impairments exacerbated by aging have proven problematic and inhumane. After canceling his previously scheduled cancer surgery to issue a death warrant, Alabama failed for 2 1/2 hours to set an intravenous line to execute gravely ill 61-year-old Doyle Hamm on February 22. His lawyer moved to bar the state from trying a second time, describing the failed attempt as "torture." Ohio tried and failed to execute terminally ill 69-year-old Alva Campbell (pictured, center) in November 2017. He then died of his terminal illness on March 3. And in late January 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court halted Alabama's scheduled execution of 67-year-old Vernon Madison (pictured, right), who is legally blind, incontinent, and unable to walk independently, and suffers from vascular dementia caused by strokes that have left him with no memory of the offense for which he was sentenced to death. The Court on February 26 agreed to review his claim that his illness leaves him mentally incompetent to be executed. A Washington Post review of Department of Justice data reported that the percentage of death-row prisoners aged sixty or older has more than doubled this century, up from 5.8 percent of U.S. death rows in 2007 to 12.2 percent in 2013. The aging of the row has also affected executions. An Associated Press review of the Death Penalty Information Center execution database found that the median age of an executed prisoner in the U.S. rose from 34 to 46 between 1983 and 2017. A DPIC analysis of U.S. execution data found that only two of the 933 prisoners executed in the United States between 1977 and 2004 were aged 65 or older. That total was matched in a single 35-day period this year between March 15 and April 19, when Georgia executed 67-year-old Carlton Gary and Alabama executed Mr. Moody. In 23 years of executions between 1977 and the close of the 20th century, ten prisoners aged 60 or older were executed. Thirty-six have already been executed this decade, 13 since 2015 alone. The aging of death row raises humanitarian issues, separate and apart from the risk of botched executions. Speaking to Associated Press, DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham noted that, while many of the prisoners facing execution have been convicted of terrible crimes, the public is "torn between wanting to punish [them] severely and the belief it is beneath us as a nation to kill a frail person who is already dying. It’s a challenge to our morality and our sense of humanity,” Dunham said. The attempts to execute the infirm also have attracted international attention and approbation. When Alabama sought to execute Madison, David O'Sullivan, the European Union's Ambassador to the United States, wrote "an urgent humanitarian appeal" to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey not to execute him. The Ambassador's letter reminded Alabama that "[t]he execution of persons suffering from any mental illness or having an intellectual disability is in contradiction to the minimum standards of human rights, as set forth in several international human rights instruments." When Ohio sought to execute Campbell, his lawyer, assistant federal defender David Stebbins, predicted that the execution could become a “spectacle” if prison staff were unable to find a suitable vein. “All of this in an attempt to execute an old and frail man who is no longer a threat to anyone,” Stebbins said. In a statement that applies to more and more prisoners facing death warrants, Madison’s lawyer, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, summed up the issue: “Killing a fragile man suffering from dementia," he said, "is unnecessary and cruel.”

Mexican national Vicente Figueroa Benavides (pictured), wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Kern County, California for supposedly raping, sodomizing, and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter, will soon be freed after nearly 26 years on death row. He will be the 162nd person and fifth foreign national exonerated from a U.S. death row since 1973. In a media advisory on April 17, 2018, Kern District Attorney Lisa Green announced on April 17, 2018 that her office would be dropping all charges against Benavides, one month after the California Supreme Court vacated the former farmworker’s convictions for sexually assaulting and murdering Consuelo Verdugo, which the court called a product of “extensive,” “pervasive,” “impactful,” and “false” forensic testimony. The girl, the court said, had never been sexually assaulted and may actually have died from being hit by a car. At trial, the prosecution presented testimony from forensic pathologist Dr. James Diblin, who told the jury that Consuelo had died from “blunt force penetrating injury of the anus” and claimed that many of her internal injuries were the result of rape. He further testified that arm injuries, other internal trauma, dilated pupils, and compression rib fractures she had sustained had been “caused by tight squeezing during a sexual assault.” During post-conviction proceedings, Benavides’s lawyers presented evidence from Dr. Astrid Heger, one of the country’s leading experts on child abuse, debunking Diblin’s false testimony. Dr. Heger described Diblin’s assertion that Consuelo’s injuries had been the product of sexual assault as “so unlikely to the point of being absurd. … No such mechanism of injury has ever been reported in any literature of child abuse or child assault.” Rather, she said, the internal injuries Consuelo sustained were commonly seen in victims of automobile accidents. Hospital records and witness statements obtained by Benavides’s appeal lawyers also undermined Diblin’s false testimony. Records showed that the examining physicians from Consuelo’s initial hospitalization had not seen any signs of bleeding when she was brought to the emergency room, and a nurse who helped treat Consuelo reported that neither she nor any of her colleagues had seen evidence of anal or vaginal trauma when the child arrived. Indeed, the court said, the medical records showed that the injuries to Consuelo’s genitalia and anus that Diblin had claimed were evidence of sexual assault were actually “attribut[able] to medical intervention,” including repeated failed efforts to insert a catheter and the improper use of an adult-sized catheter on the small child. Associate Justice Carol Corrigan—a former prosecutor—described the forensic testimony that Benavides had brutally raped and anally sodomized Consuelo as “among the most hair-raising false evidence that I’ve encountered in all the time that I’ve been looking at criminal cases.” On appeal, prosecutors admitted that the forensic evidence they used to convict Benavides was false, but asked the state court to sustain a conviction for second-degree murder. Even after agreeing on April 17, 2018 to drop all charges, District Attorney Green refused to concede that Benavides was innocent of murder. “[I]t doesn’t mean he’s innocent of the physical child abuse,” she said. “My decision not to retry the case is not the same as a finding of factual innocence[.] I'm not stating in any way that he’s factually innocent of the death of the child.” At least ten men and women have been exonerated from death rows across the United States after having been wrongly convicted for killing a child. In the cases of Rodricus Crawford and Sabrina Butler, the medical evidence also showed that no crime had occurred, but the defendants were convicted based on false forensic testimony. Benavides is the fourth person exonerated from California’s death row since 1980. A California prison spokesperson said he is expected the be freed “within a few days,” as soon as the Kern County court orders his release. [UPDATE: The court formally dismissed all charges against Mr. Benavides and he was released on April 19, 2018.]

Forty-four former state and federal prosecutors and Department of Justice officials—including former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey—have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a new trial to Corey Williams (pictured), saying that Caddo Parish, Louisiana prosecutors violated their duty to ensure that “justice shall be done” by withholding exculpatory evidence in a murder case that sent an intellectually disabled teenager to death row. Williams’s petition alleges that police and prosecutors knew that Williams had been framed by the actual killers, that police coerced him to falsely confess, and that the prosecution deliberately withheld witness statements given to police that could have helped Williams prove he had been framed. No physical evidence linked Williams to the 1998 robbery and murder of Jarvis Griffin, who was delivering a pizza to a Shreveport home. Several witnesses said they saw Gabriel Logan, Nathan Logan, and Chris Moore (nicknamed “Rapist”) steal money and pizza from Griffin, while the sixteen-year-old Williams was simply standing outside at the time. The victim’s blood was found on Gabriel Logan’s sweatshirt; Nathan Logan’s fingerprints were found on the empty clip of the murder weapon; and Moore was in possession of some of the proceeds of the robbery. Only Moore claimed to have seen Williams commit the killing. Williams, who had intellectual disability caused by severe lead poisoning from regularly eating dirt and paint chips as a young child and who as a teenager still repeatedly urinated himself, initially told police he had nothing to do with the killing. But after six hours of police interrogation, Williams confessed to the murder. After detectives presented the older men with Williams’s confession, their stories changed to corroborate it. At trial, Caddo Parish prosecutor Hugo Holland presented the confession and Moore’s testimony as evidence of WIlliams’s guilt. Then, having withheld from the defense police statements that implicated his witnesses in framing Williams, Holland ridiculed the defense claim that Williams had been framed, calling it “the biggest set of circumstances concerning a conspiracy since John Kennedy was killed in 1963.” The prosecutors’ amicus brief in support of Williams states that “[t]he prosecutor’s goal is not only to strive for a fair trial, but also to protect public safety by ensuring that innocent persons are not convicted while the guilty remain free.” It stresses that this is a case in which, “[h]ad the statements not been withheld, there is a reasonable probability that the verdict would have been different.” Ben Cohen, Williams’s longtime lawyer, said that “[w]hat the prosecutor and the police did is outrageous. They knew Williams was innocent and they just went forward anyway.... They don’t think his life matters.” Eleven men have been exonerated from Louisiana's death row since the 1970s, including the Caddo Parish exonerations of Glen Ford and Rodricus Crawford. All eleven cases involved police and/or prosecutorial misconduct. Holland himself has been implicated in withholding witness statements in another capital prosecution showing the defendant had not participated in the killing. Holland was forced to resign his position as an assistant district attorney for Caddo Parish in 2012 after he and another prosecutor were caught falsifying federal forms in an attempt to obtain a cache of M-16 rifles for themselves through a Pentagon program that offers surplus military gear to police departments. Williams was released from death row after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Atkins v. Virginia, barring the death penalty for persons with intellectual disability, and is currently serving a life sentence.