The U.S. Supreme Court re-instat­ed the death sen­tence of Ronald Sanders in a 5 – 4 rul­ing over­turn­ing a deci­sion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. After Sanders had been sen­tenced to death in California, the state’s supreme court held that two of the aggra­vat­ing fac­tors used by the jury in its sen­tenc­ing deter­mi­na­tion were invalid. The 9th Circuit had held that California is a ​“weigh­ing state” and hence the use of these invalid aggra­vat­ing fac­tors ren­dered the death sen­tence uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because the low­er court had not found that such use was harm­less to the defendant.

The major­i­ty in the U.S. Supreme Court dis­pensed with the dis­tinc­tion between weigh­ing and non-weigh­ing states and annouced a new way of eval­u­at­ing the effect of invalid aggra­vat­ing fac­tors: ​“An inval­i­dat­ed sen­tenc­ing fac­tor (whether an eli­gi­bil­i­ty fac­tor or not) will ren­der the sen­tence uncon­sti­tu­tion­al by rea­son of its adding an improp­er ele­ment to the aggra­va­tion scale in the weigh­ing process unless one of the oth­er sen­tenc­ing fac­tors enables the sen­tencer to give aggra­vat­ing weight to the same facts and cir­cum­stances.” The Court found that in this case there were oth­er aggra­vat­ing fac­tors fit­ting this descrip­tion and there­fore Sanders’ death sen­tence was valid.
(Brown v. Sanders, No. 04 – 980, decid­ed Jan. 11, 2006; see also Associated Press, Jan. 11, 2006). See Supreme Court.

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