Citing "relentless non-compliance" with court orders and "chronic obstructionism" by a prosecution team it says "has effectively compromised" Scott Dekraai's rights to due process and a fair penalty trial, a California trial court has barred prosecutors from pursuing the death penalty in the worst mass killing in Orange County history. In a scathing opinion on August 18, Judge Thomas M. Goethals (pictured)—who had disqualified the entire Orange County District Attorney's office from the case as a result of earlier misconduct and lying to the court about a decades-long practice of using jailhouse informants to violate defendant's constitutional rights—wrote that in light of continued "indolence and obfuscation" from the Orange County Sheriff's Department in response to orders seeking information on the informant scandal, the court had "lost confidence that it can ever secure compliance" by the prosecution with future court orders in the case. Given the "unprecedented" nature of the government misconduct, Judge Goethals wrote, it would "be unconscionable, perhaps even cowardly," for the court not to take remedial action by barring the death penalty. Judge Goethals addressed the emotional toll on the victims' families created by the need to conduct four years of court proceedings investigating the scandal. He said the court would "do what little it can to mitigate their suffering" by imposing eight consecutive life sentences "that will end this case now and insure that this defendant dies a forgotten man in some obscure maximum security prison." Family members in the courtroom expressed anger at county prosecutors. Butch Fournier, whose sister Michelle, Dekraai’s ex-wife, was one of the eight victims, said, "It’s been six years for nothing. ... They caused us pain and suffering that was unnecessary. It was a cut-and-dry case." Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer—a former prosecutor who is considered a likely candidate for District Attorney next year—called on District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens to resign, saying the conduct of the District Attorney's and Sheriff's offices had been "reprehensible" and constituted an "egregious assault on our criminal justice system." In a statement, Spitzer wrote: "I am appalled that the misconduct of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, in collusion with the OC Sheriff’s Department, resulted in this miscarriage of justice. I am incredulous that the Orange County criminal justice system has earned a national reputation for corruption that will take years, if not decades, to repair. Fundamental changes are needed." The editorial board of the Orange County Register said "the fact that a death sentence couldn’t even be secured for an admitted mass murderer speaks to the level of dysfunction within the county’s criminal justice system." The Orange County District Attorney's office was named in a July 2017 report by Harvard University's Fair Punishment Project as one of the prosecuting offices cited for repeated prosecutorial misconduct.

Merck Chief Executive Officer Kenneth C. Frazier (pictured) resigned from the president’s American Manufacturing Council on August 14, saying “[a]s CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.” In a statement posted on Merck’s Twitter account, Frazier said: "Our country's strength stems from its diversity and the contributions made by men and women of different faiths, races, sexual orientations and political beliefs. America's leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal." It was not the first time that Frazier, the only African-American CEO of a major pharmaceutical company, has spoken out on matters of social justice. Following his successful pro bono representation of James Willie "Bo" Cochran, a black, Alabama death-row prisoner wrongly convicted of the murder of a white grocery store manager, Frazier wrote that the case showed him that "there can be no fair and consistent application of the death penalty under the current system." Frazier undertook Cochran's representation while a partner at the Philadelphia law firm, Drinker, Biddle & Reath, and remained on the case after joining Merck. Cochran won a new trial after Frazier and his team showed that, in two prior trials, the prosecutor had systematically removed 31 of the 35 potential black jurors because he believed they were less "reliable" and more likely to acquit black defendants. Frazier initially doubted Cochran's proclamation of innocence: witnesses inside the store described the suspect as a black man and, as police converged on the scene, heard a gunshot coming from a nearby trailer park, less than one mile from where Cochran was found with a gun and cash. But Frazier discovered during the post-conviction proceedings that there was no physical evidence against his client, the only bullet recovered near the scene did not match Cochran's gun, and the fatal bullet could not be tested because police had cut it out of the victim's body and removed it before delivering the body to the medical examiner. "He was convicted," explains Frazier, "despite evidence suggesting an accidental police shooting and cover-up." Even though the state only had circumstantial evidence against him, Cochran was tried three separate times for the killing (the first time, there was a mistrial, and the second time his conviction was reversed on appeal). "Although some maintain the criminal justice system is color-blind," Frazier wrote, "the reality is that race plays a substantial role in the judicial process." In Cochran's retrial, a jury that Frazier says "was not selected primarily on the basis of race" acquitted him in less than an hour. 

An Arizona death-row prisoner has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the state's capital punishment statute, arguing that Arizona's sentencing scheme "utterly fails" the constitutionally required task of limiting the death penalty to the worst crimes and worst offenders. On August 15, lawyers for Abel Daniel Hidalgo (pictured) wrote that a study of more than a decade's worth of murder cases from Maricopa County, where Hidalgo was tried, showed that aggravating factors that could make a defendant eligible for the death penalty were present in 99% of all the cases. This, they say, violates the Eighth Amendment requirement established by the Court that a capital-sentencing statute must “genuinely narrow the class of persons eligible for the death penalty.” They wrote that evidence presented to the Arizona state courts showed that "every first degree murder case filed in Maricopa County in 2010 and 2011 had at least one aggravating factor" that made a defendant eligible for the death penalty, and that over the course of eleven years, 856 of 866 first-degree murder cases filed in the county had one or more aggravating circumstances present. In a press statement, Hidalgo's defense team says that, as a result, "geography and county resources—rather than the characteristics of the offender or the crime—play an outsized role in Arizona’s arbitrary application of the death penalty." With the fourth largest death row in the U.S. as of January 2013, Maricopa County imposed the death penalty at more than double the rate per murder as the rest of the state, and its 28 death sentences imposed between 2010-2015 were the third most of any U.S. county. Hidalgo's petition notes that defendants of color accused of killing white victims "are more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as minorities accused of killing other minorities ... [a]nd a Hispanic man accused of killing a white man is 4.6 times as likely to be sentenced to death as a white man accused of killing a Hispanic victim." This, they say, makes Arizona's death penalty unconstitutionally arbitrary. In the alternative, the petition argues—citing national legislative and sentencing trends—that the death penalty nationwide now offends "evolving standards of decency" and should be declared unconstitutional. The lawyers write, "[t]he long experiment ... in whether the death penalty can be administered within constitutional bounds has failed. It has failed both in Arizona in particular and in the Nation more broadly." 

In a decision that could have broad impact on the state's death row, the Florida Supreme Court on August 10 upheld the death sentence imposed on James Hitchcock, despite his having been unconstitutionally sentenced to death. In a 6-1 ruling, the court said it would not enforce its 2016 ruling in Hurst v. State—which declared unconstitutional any death sentence imposed after one or more sentencing jurors had voted that a life sentence was the appropriate punishment—in cases that had completed the direct appeal process before June 2002. That date is when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ring v. Arizona that a capital defendant has a Sixth Amendment right to have the jury determine all facts necessary for the state to impose a death penalty. But the Florida courts did not apply Ring to death-penalty cases in the state until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida's death-penalty statute in 2016. At that time, in Hurst v. Florida, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reiterating that "[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death." When Hurst's case returned to the Florida Supreme Court later that year, the state court ruled that non-unanimous jury verdicts were unconstitutional. However, the court then ruled in an appeal brought by Mark Asay—scheduled to be executed August 24—that it would not apply Hurst to cases that pre-dated Ring. Hitchcock and other Florida death-row prisoners pressed a number of other constitutional arguments, including that death sentences imposed after non-unanimous jury votes are unreliable, in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and that the court's bright-line cutoff for enforcing Hurst was unconstitutionally arbitrary, violating due rocess and the right to equal protection of the law. The Hitchcock court declined to consider those arguments, dismissing them as "nothing more than arguments that Hurst v. State should be applied retroactively to [Hitchcock's] sentence." Hitchcock's case was closely watched because the Florida courts had frozen the briefing schedules for 77 similarly situated death-row prisoners who also were arguing that Hurst should be enforced in their cases. Justice Barbara J. Pariente dissented, writing, "[r]eliability is the linchpin of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, and a death sentence imposed without a unanimous jury verdict for death is inherently unreliable." She noted that Hitchcock, who was twenty years old at the time of his crime, has had four different unconstitutional death sentences since he was first tried in 1977, with the U.S. Supreme Court twice overturning the death penalty in his case. She further noted that four Florida Supreme Court justices had written that his death sentence was disproportionate and that he should be resentenced to life. “To deny Hitchcock relief when other similarly situated defendants have been granted relief amounts to a denial of due process,” she wrote.