A civilian federal appeals court has dealt another blow to the Guantánamo military commission death-penalty proceedings, striking more than two years of decisions in the USS Cole bombing prosecution of Abd Al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Al-Nashiri because of a military judge’s undisclosed conflict of interest. Al-Nashiri faces capital charges for his alleged role in the suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 in which 17 U.S. Navy sailors were killed and another 39 were injured.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a writ of mandamus vacating all orders issued by Colonel Vance Spath (pictured) between November 19, 2015 and his retirement in 2018 because Spath had not disclosed to defense counsel that he had applied for employment with the Department of Justice (DOJ) as an immigration judge while continuing to preside over pretrial proceedings against Al-Nashiri, who is being prosecuted by the DOJ. During the time period in which he was seeking employment with the DOJ, Spath issued numerous oral rulings from the bench and more than 450 written orders. The panel wrote that “[r]equiring Al-Nashiri to proceed under the long shadow of all those orders, even if enforced by a new, impartial military judge, would inflict an irreparable injury unfixable on direct review. Al-Nashiri thus has no adequate remedy for Spath’s conduct other than to scrub Spath’s orders from the case at the earliest opportunity.” The court, which has appellate authority over the Guantánamo U.S. military commissions, also vacated all military appeals decisions by the United States Court of Military Commission Review involving orders issued by Spath.

The long-delayed Guantánamo military commission proceedings against Al-Nashiri have been beset by controversy. Captured in 2002, Al-Nashiri was subjected to 14 years of "physical, psychological and sexual torture" in secret CIA-run detention centers. His lawyers unsuccessfully sought to have him tried in civilian court rather than in a military tribunal as a result of the torture. In October 2017, after Spath refused to allow Al-Nashiri’s defense lawyers to investigate the discovery of eavesdropping devices in a meeting room reserved for attorney-client communications, his entire civilian legal team resigned from the case. Judge Spath then held Brigadier General John Baker, the Chief Defense Counsel for the Military Commissions Defense Organization, in contempt after Baker said he had lost confidence in the integrity of “all potential attorney-client meeting locations” at Guantánamo and refused to reverse his decision authorizing the defense team to withdraw. The civilian Convening Authority of the Guantánamo tribunals, Harvey Rishikof, then intervened to release Baker from detention. The resignations left Al-Nashiri's defense solely in the hands of a single military lawyer, Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, who had never tried a murder case. Spath repeatedly denied Piette’s request for a continuance until expert death-penalty counsel could be appointed, instead telling Piette to “engage in self help” by attending special training to become “more comfortable handling capital matters.” Then, in February 2018, Spate indefinitely halted all pretrial proceedings in the case, and in July 2018 announced his retirement from military service. A Freedom of Information Act request by reporter Carol Rosenberg discovered that Spath had been seeking to become a DoJ immigration judge during this period.

In vacating Spath’s rulings, the federal appeals court wrote: “We do not take lightly the crimes that Al-Nashiri stands accused of committing. To the contrary, the seriousness of those alleged offenses and the gravity of the penalty they may carry make the need for an unimpeachable adjudicator all the more important.”

In a contentious ruling issued in the early morning hours of April 12, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a stay of execution issued by lower federal courts and cleared the way for Alabama to execute Christopher Price (pictured). The Court’s 5-4 decision, issued after 2:00 a.m. Eastern time, came after Alabama had postponed Price’s execution minutes before the midnight Central time expiration of his death warrant, with the lower court stay of execution still in effect. Joined by the three other liberal and moderate justices, Justice Breyer authored a scathing dissent that exposed sharp divisions in the Court over the manner in which it considers execution-related challenges in death-penalty cases.

Scheduled to be executed April 11, Price challenged Alabama’s lethal-injection protocol as unnecessarily torturous and –as required by Supreme Court case law – proposed an alternative method of execution. Price selected nitrogen hypoxia, the alternative method of execution made available in Alabama’s death-penalty statute. The Alabama Attorney General’s office opposed Price’s motion, arguing that lethal gas was not available to Price because he had failed to select it during the 30-day window created when Alabama added lethal gas to its execution statute. The district court agreed and denied Price’s claim, prompting an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The circuit court ruled that once Alabama had codified lethal gas as an alternative method of execution under its statute, it could not claim that gas was unavailable to execute Price. However, the circuit court rejected Price’s stay motion, saying he had failed to meet the additional burden imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court that he prove that execution by nitrogen hypoxia would significantly reduce the risk of unnecessarily severe pain during the execution.

Following the 11th Circuit’s ruling, Price returned to the district court with uncontroverted affidavits from medical experts who said nitrogen gas posed a significantly reduced risk of severe pain compared to the state’s lethal-injection protocol. Based on this evidence, the federal district court granted Price a stay of execution. Later in the day, without ruling on the merits of the district court’s order, the 11th Circuit imposed its own stay of execution to consider jurisdictional issues presented by the district court stay. Alabama then filed an emergency motion in the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to vacate the stay, leading to the overnight ruling by the Court.

In a one-paragraph order vacating the stay, the majority said that Price had not timely selected lethal gas during a 30-day window created when Alabama added lethal gas to its execution statute and then waited until February 2019 to challenge the state’s method of execution. As a result, the majority viewed Price’s lawsuit and pre-execution filings as untimely. Justice Stephen Breyer – joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – wrote an impassioned dissent. “Should anyone doubt that death sentences in the United States can be carried out in an arbitrary way,” he wrote, “let that person review the … circumstances as they have been presented to our Court this evening.” Breyer highlighted the uncontested evidence presented in the courts below: that Alabama’s lethal injection protocol will likely cause Price “severe pain and needless suffering”; that lethal gas is a readily available method, and that lethal gas is likely less painful than Alabama’s lethal injection protocol. Breyer also criticized the majority’s substitution of its judgment for the district court’s finding that Price had been “proceeding as quickly as possible on this issue since before the execution date was set” and was not attempting “to manipulate the execution.” Breyer expressed deep concern for the majority’s insistence on vacating a stay despite his request to consider the issue at a prescheduled conference to be attended by all the justices that morning. “To proceed in this way calls into question the basic principles of fairness that should underlie our criminal justice system,” Breyer wrote.

Alabama has not yet set a new execution date.

The Missouri Supreme Court has ordered a new sentencing trial for Marvin D. Rice (pictured), a former sheriff’s deputy whose trial judge sentenced him to death despite the votes of 11 of his 12 jurors to sentence him to life. On April 2, 2019, the court vacated the death sentence imposed by St. Charles County Judge Kelly Wayne Parker in 2017 under the state’s controversial “hung jury” sentencing provision. Under that law, the trial judge has authority to independently evaluate the evidence and determine the sentence to be imposed whenever the jury vote for life or death is not unanimous. Rice, a former Dent County deputy sheriff and state correctional officer, was charged with murdering his ex-girlfriend, Annette Durham, during a custody dispute over their son and killing her boyfriend, Steven Strotkamp. The jury convicted Rice of capital murder for killing Durham but was deemed hung when a single juror held out for death. It convicted him of second-degree murder in Strotkamp’s death and agreed to a life sentence for that murder. Parker disregarded the jury’s vote and imposed the death penalty for Durham’s murder.

No state in the United States authorizes a judge to override a jury's recommendation of a life sentence and all three states that previously permitted the practice ended it in the past three years. Missouri law, however, considers a non-unanimous vote a nullity rather than a recommendation, entrusting the sentencing decision to the judge. Rice challenged the constitutionality of the statute under the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2016 ruling in Hurst v. Florida that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” Rice also argued that the prosecutor’s repeated comments about his decision not to testify at trial violated the Fifth Amendment, which bars the use of a defendant’s silence against him. The Missouri court granted a new sentencing trial on the Fifth Amendment issue, avoiding having to decide the constitutionality of the state statute.

No jury has sentenced anyone to death in Missouri since 2013. However, since that time, Missouri judges have sentenced two defendants to death under the hung jury provision. In addition to Dent, a trial judge sentenced Craig Wood to death in 2018 after his jury split 10-2 in favor of a death sentence. As in Dent’s case, Wood’s lawyers have argued that allowing a judge to impose a death sentence when a jury does not reach a unanimous sentencing decision is unconstitutional. In 2016, the Florida Supreme Court and the Delaware Supreme Court struck down provisions in their death-penalty laws permitting judges to impose death sentences based upon non-unanimous jury recommendations for death. Alabama still permits that practice if ten or more jurors have voted for death.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stayed the execution of Mark Robertson (pictured), a Dallas death-row prisoner whom Texas had scheduled for execution on April 11, 2019. The court’s April 8 stay order did not specify the reason it halted the execution, but Robertson’s lawyers had filed an appeal seeking review of their claim that his court-appointed trial lawyer, Michael Byck, had “engaged in purposeful discrimination” by deliberately excluding African Americans from serving on his jury. In 1997, Byck testified in a hearing in the case that he had been "more than happy to violate anybody else's rights” in picking a jury and that he had intentionally struck prospective black jurors. He also testified that he had told prosecutors prior to the trial that he “didn't want to have any blacks on the jury” because he believed they would not be sympathetic to Robertson, a white defendant. The Dallas County District Attorney’s office had a long history of racially discriminatory jury selection practices, and Byck testified that he and the prosecutors had agreed to “indulge each other” in their “prejudices.”

Race discrimination in death-penalty jury selection has been an issue for decades. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court in Swain v. Alabama, upheld a death sentence imposed by an all-white Alabama jury on a black defendant charged with rape, imposing on the defendant the burden of proving that the prosecutor in a county had systematically removed all black jurors in “case after case … with the result that no Negroes ever serve on petit juries.” In Dallas County, a 1963 office manual instructed prosecutors not to “take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated.” In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that Swain had erected an insurmountable evidentiary burden and declared that the removal of even a single prospective juror on the basis of race was unconstitutional. Dallas prosecutors nonetheless continued to discriminatorily strike black jurors, and District Attorney Henry Wade – the county D.A. from 1951 to 1987 – once threatened an assistant prosecutor, “If you ever put another n****r on a jury, you’re fired.” In 2005, in the case of death-row prisoner Thomas Joe Miller-El, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the Dallas D.A.’s office had a “culture of discrimination” that was “suffused with bias against African-Americans.” It twice reversed lower court decisions that had denied Miller-El relief for the racial discrimination in his case and granted Miller-El a new trial.

Jeremy Schepers, one of Robertson’s attorneys, unequivocally condemned Byck’s discriminatory actions. “Mr. Robertson’s trial attorney testified under oath that it was his ‘conscious desire’ to keep African Americans off the jury,” Schepers told the Houston Chronicle. “And, through a variety of methods he succeeded in doing just that. By now there should be no confusion on this matter – racial discrimination in the administration of justice is intolerable. The courts should not hesitate to denounce this unacceptable behavior.” In a motion filed in Robertson’s case, attorney Lydia Brandt urged the court to intercede, rather than allow a death sentence tainted by discrimination to stand. “In the end, Mr. Byck succeeded in his discriminatory plan – Mr. Robertson was tried by an all-white jury,” she wrote. “At best, the State turned a blind eye towards Mr. Byck's discrimination; at worst, they were a willing co-conspirator.”