An Arizona appeals court judge has urged the state’s supreme court to rule that the death penalty violates Arizona’s state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In an August 16, 2018 opinion dissenting from the Arizona Supreme Court’s affirmance of death-row prisoner Jason Bush’s conviction and sentence, Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence Winthrop (pictured)—sitting by designation in the case because of the recusal of one of the high court’s justices—wrote that “[t]he death penalty not only inflicts unnaturally cruel punishment, but the application and implementation of the death penalty is, at best, arbitrary and capricious.” According to Judge Winthrop, the dangers of wrongful convictions and death sentences, systemic “flaws in administering the death penalty, and our historic inability to devise a method to implement the death penalty free from human bias and error” require that the death penalty be declared unconstitutional. His opinion catalogued a range of problems in Arizona’s application of capital punishment, including racial bias, wrongful convictions, and geographic disparities. The death penalty, he also wrote, “has been shown to … impose unintended trauma on the victim’s family and friends, and to be cost prohibitive. … [G]iven the continued reports that demonstrate defendants may be sentenced to death because of jurors’ inherent bias, and studies that demonstrate the death penalty has no identifiable deterrent effect, the answer to the question of whether the cost of the death penalty outweighs the societal benefit is a resounding, ‘No.’” Judge Winthrop’s dissent echoes many of the themes of—and frequently quotes from—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Glossip v. Gross (2015), which questioned whether the death penalty, as applied today, violates the U.S. Constitution. “We simply can no longer ignore the seemingly inherent variants and problems associated with implementing the death penalty,” Judge Winthrop wrote. “To continue to affirm the enforcement the death penalty, given what we now know, is to approve a punishment that is both cruel and unusual.” The court majority in Bush’s case upheld his conviction and death sentence, rejecting a variety of arguments that the trial and sentencing were constitutionally flawed. The majority “express[ed] no opinion … [on] the validity of capital punishment under Arizona’s Constitution,” reserving that judgment for a case in which “the issue [were properly] raised, developed, and argued.” However, Bush’s case, they wrote, was “not the appropriate case to address or decide” that issue.

(Howard Fischer, Border militiaman’s convictions, death sentences upheld in Arivaca slayings, Capitol Media Services, August 16, 2018.) Read the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. Jason Eugene Bush. See Arizona and Arbitrariness.

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