Murderer put back on Death Row

Supreme Court says jury likely weighed religious conversion

March 23, 2005|By David G. Savage, Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court decided 5-3 Tuesday to restore a death sentence for a murderer in Orange County, Calif., who became a devout Christian after entering prison.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 6-5 ruling, had reversed William Payton's death sentence because jurors might have thought they could not consider his behind-bars conversion to Christianity. A prosecutor had argued that only the crime counts, not what happens after the convict goes to prison.

The Supreme Court disagreed with the appeals court and said the jury almost surely weighed Payton's religious conversion but decided he deserved to die anyway.

Tuesday's decision is another example of the recurring dispute between the liberal-leaning 9th Circuit and the more conservative Supreme Court.

In 1996, Congress changed the law to say federal judges should defer to reasonable decisions of the state courts in death penalty cases. In 1980, Payton raped and stabbed to death Pamela Montgomery at a boarding house in Garden Grove, Calif. He also repeatedly stabbed two other persons who survived to testify against him.

9th Circuit reversed again

A jury convicted him and sentenced him to die, and the California courts upheld the sentence. But the 9th Circuit said that in imposing the death sentence, the jury probably had not weighed all the mitigating evidence in the case--especially his conversion to Christianity--because of the prosecutor's comments.

Writing for the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the decisions of the California courts were reasonable, and the jury may well have seen Payton's religious conversion as "altogether insignificant in light of the brutality of the crimes."

Justices David Souter, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, saying reasonable jurors would have thought they could not consider his religious conversation as grounds for leniency. Chief Justice William Rehnquist took no part in the ruling.

In a 5-4 decision that also overturned a 9th Circuit ruling, the high court said police in Los Angeles' Simi Valley hadn't used excessive force when they handcuffed for nearly three hours all the occupants of a house that was raided, even though they quickly learned the people at the home were innocent.

Rehnquist said police are free to handcuff everyone when carrying out such a raid to protect themselves. In this case, police were looking for a violent gang member, he said, and so had reason to be cautious.

The ruling in the case gives police more leeway in carrying out raids.

When a SWAT team burst into a house in 1998, they were looking for a gang member but instead awakened 18-year old Iris Mena. With guns pointed at her, she was handcuffed and taken in the rain to a nearby garage.

Police soon realized the target of their search wasn't there, but Mena said she was kept in handcuffs for nearly three hours.

She later sued two officers, contending they subjected her to an unreasonable seizure in violation of the 4th Amendment.

A jury agreed with her and awarded $60,000 in damages, a verdict that was upheld by the 9th Circuit.

Cell phone tower ruling

In another case, the Supreme Court made it easier for cities to say no to new cell phone towers in their neighborhoods.

The justices said in a 9-0 decision that the federal law designed to encourage the growth of the telecommunications industry does not allow cities to be sued for damages for refusing to permit a cell phone tower.

In the past decade, 140,000 cell phone towers have sprouted around the United States; the phone industry says it needs more of them to eliminate "dead spots."

The court's decision, in a case from Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., is expected to take some of the pressure off local governments to approve permits for new cell phone towers, although it doesn't mean they can refuse all of them.