State Supreme Court upholds death sentence

BOISE – The state’s highest court reversed a lower court’s ruling on the death penalty Thursday, saying Idaho’s new law placing the capital punishment question in the hands of juries rather than judges is not retroactive.

The case affirmed a death sentence for George Junior Porter, a 47-year-old Kamiah man convicted of beating his girlfriend to death. It also has ramifications for 13 other inmates who were sent to death row by judges before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that process unconstitutional.

Bruce Livingston, the federal public defender representing Porter, said it makes no sense to hold that sentencing by a judge violates the constitutional right to trial by jury but then refuse to apply that principle to all those whose rights were violated.

“It’s very difficult to explain to people why an arbitrary line based on when their appeal was considered makes it OK to execute them,” Livingston said. “They’ve been saying this for ever and being told, ‘No, no, no!’ and now it turns out those courts were wrong. But they’re being told too bad. That makes no sense to me. It’s executing people on technicalities.”

But LaMont Anderson, head of the capital litigation unit for the Idaho Attorney General’s office, said the Idaho Supreme Court’s ruling will get other death penalty appeals moving again.

“It’s very significant because for the last several months the federal court has imposed a stay in many of Idaho’s death penalty cases, waiting for the Idaho Supreme Court to rule on this issue,” Anderson said. “Those stays will now be vacated and we’ll be able to pursue litigation in those cases.”

The capital punishment cases of more than 100 death row inmates in a handful of states were thrown into question in 2002, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juries – not judges – must decide whether to impose the death penalty.

Then, earlier this year, the nation’s high court clarified its ruling, saying that the jury sentencing only applied to new cases and those still on appeal at the state level. Death penalty cases on appeal at the federal level must still proceed under the old rules.

But in his appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court – filed before the U.S. Supreme Court clarified its stance – Porter argued that Idaho’s retroactivity doctrine is less restrictive than the federal doctrine. He asked the court to uphold the ruling of 2nd District Judge John Bradbury, who 18 months earlier had thrown out Porter’s death sentence.

Finally, he argued, it was unfair for the federal ruling not to apply to his case simply because he had already exhausted his appeals before the state.

The Idaho Supreme Court unanimously disagreed.