The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a sweeping challenge to the constitutionality of capital punishment brought by Arizona death-row prisoner Abel Hidalgo (pictured). After scheduling consideration of Hidalgo v. Arizona for ten separate court conferences, the Court on March 19 unanimously denied Hidalgo’s petition for writ of certiorari. In a statement issued in conjunction with the Court’s ruling, however, Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, expressed concern about a second issue raised by Hidalgo—the constitutionality of Arizona’s method of deciding which defendants are eligible for the death penalty. The four justices said that the Arizona Supreme Court had misapplied Supreme Court precedent on that “important Eighth Amendment question,” but believed the factual record was insufficiently developed to warrant the court’s review of the case at this time. Hidalgo had presented records from more than 860 first-degree murder cases over an eleven-year period in Maricopa County—where he was charged—showing that 98% of first-degree murder defendants in that county were eligible for the death penalty, but had been denied an evidentiary hearing to further develop the issue. This “evidence is unrebutted,” the four justices said, and “would seem to deny the constitutional need to ‘genuinely’ narrow the class of death-eligible defendants.” Although “[e]vidence of this kind warrants careful attention and evaluation,” they wrote, the absence of an evidentiary hearing had left the Court with a factual record that “is limited and largely unexamined by experts and the courts below.” With an “opportunity to fully develop a record with the kind of empirical evidence that the petitioner points to here,” the four justices said, “the issue presented in this petition [would] be better suited for certiorari.” The court declined without comment to review a broader challenge Hidalgo presented to the constitutionality of capital punishment itself. Hidalgo is one of many death-row prisoners to raise that issue in the wake of a 2015 dissent by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg in Glossip v. Gross in which they said it is “highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment” prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.

(Michael Kiefer, U.S. Supreme Court turns down case challenging Arizona’s death penalty, The Arizona Republic, March 19, 2018; Chris Geidner, Death Penalty Opponents See Some Good News In The Supreme Court’s Decision Not To Hear A Case, BuzzFeed News, March 19, 2018; Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Won’t Hear Challenges to Arizona’s Death Penalty Law, The New York Times, March 19, 2018; Amy Howe, Justices decline to weigh in on constitutionality of death penalty, SCOTUSblog, March 19, 2018.) Read the statement by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Find links to the Supreme Court pleadings in Hidalgo v. Arizona here. See Arizona and Supreme Court.

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