Arizona Prisoner Asks U.S. Supreme Court To Declare State’s Death Penalty Unconstitutional

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, 2017, 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.”