Page 90 - Freedom in the world_Neat

Several states have placed formal or de facto moratoriums on capital punishment until
concerns about bias and wrongful convictions can be resolved. Maryland declared a
moratorium on capital punishment between 2002 and 2004 pending the completion of a
study on racial and geographic disparities in sentencing. Although the report found
significant disparities, Republican governor Robert Ehrlich lifted the moratorium in 2004,
and two prisoners have since been executed. New Jersey, which allows capital punishment
but has not carried out an execution since 1963, passed a legislative measure halting
capital punishment in January 2006.

The most discussed moratorium, though, was declared in 2000 by Illinois governor George
H. Ryan. Between the reinstatement of Illinois’ death penalty in 1977 and 2000, the state
executed 12 people but freed 13 from death row because of new evidence. Ryan, a
Republican, said he could not support a system that was “so fraught with error and has
come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state’s taking of innocent life.”13 Before
leaving office in 2003, he emptied the state’s death row in a historic mass commutation.
Fairness in Sentencing. Punishments for the most serious crimes, such as rape and murder,
are generally similar across jurisdictional lines. However, sentences for less severe crimes
vary widely by jurisdiction. To ensure fairness, federal and state governments have
implemented guidelines that mandate sentence ranges based on the crime and the
mitigating or aggravating circumstances. The guidelines are meant to protect defendants
from sentences influenced by their (or judges’) personal characteristics, and from other
potentially discriminatory judgments.
However, sentencing guidelines have been challenged in recent years, and the Supreme
Court has limited them in several cases. Many of these rulings have reduced the sentencing
authority of judges by stressing defendants’ right to have the facts of their cases decided
by juries.

In the 2000 case Apprendi v. New Jersey, the Supreme Court invalidated a statute that
allowed judges to exceed the legislatively determined maximum sentence if they found that
a crime had been committed because of racial bias. The court said that allowing judges to
consider bias as an aggravating factor violated defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to a
trial by jury. In Blakely v. Washington (2004), the Supreme Court ruled that giving judges
the power to increase sentences based on their own determinations of facts not presented
to a jury violated the defendant’s due process rights. Defendant Robert Blakely had
pleaded guilty to murdering his wife. During the sentencing phase of his trial, the judge
had determined that Blakely acted with “deliberate cruelty,” an aggravating factor that
significantly increased the mandatory minimum sentence for his crime. The Supreme
Court’s ruling in the case invalidated most state sentencing guidelines that gave judges
the discretion to increase sentences based on aggravating factors. Two subsequent
decisions by the high court in 2005, United States v. Booker and United States v. Fanfan,
overturned mandatory federal sentencing guidelines on the same Sixth Amendment
grounds cited in Blakely and Apprendi.
Some 55 percent of all federal prisoners and more than 21 percent of inmates in state
prisons are incarcerated for drug crimes.14 Although the percentage has declined, the
absolute numbers of drug offenders in prison has risen steadily in recent years. This is due
both to an increase in criminal prosecutions and to longer prison sentences for inmates
convicted of drug crimes.

Page 90 of 168