Supreme Court upholds Kansas death penalty

New justice breaks tie to rule state's capital punishment law constitutional

WASHINGTON, D.C. ? New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito broke a tie today to rule that Kansas’ death penalty law is constitutional.

By a 5-to-4 vote, the justices said the Kansas Supreme Court incorrectly interpreted the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment to strike down the state’s death penalty statute.

More on the death penalty

The dissenters, the four liberal members of the high court, bitterly complained about the decision.

The Kansas court said the state’s death penalty law improperly forced jurors to impose a capital sentence even if they believed that the prosecution and defense evidence were equal in weight.

But the justices disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas disputed the claim by critics that the law created “a general presumption in favor of the death penalty in the state of Kansas.”

The ruling affirms the court’s long-held position that states should determine how juries weigh factors presented by the prosecution and defense in capital cases.

Fifteen states filed friend-of-the-court briefs, predicting that a ruling in convicted murderer Michael Lee Marsh’s favor would have required states with capital punishment to set up systems for juries to weigh evidence at sentencing.

But Justice David H. Souter, writing one of two dissents, said that “in the face of evidence of the hazards of capital prosecution,” maintaining a system like the one in Kansas “is obtuse by any moral or social measure.”

Marsh was convicted in the June 1996 killings of Marry Pusch and her 19-month-old daughter, M.P. Marsh confessed that he had been waiting in Pusch’s house when she and her child came home. Pusch was shot, stabbed and her throat was slit. Her body was set on fire. M.P. died several days later from severe burns.

The Kansas court used Marsh’s case to find the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional because it could force juries to impose death sentences if aggravating evidence of a crime’s brutality and mitigating factors explaining a defendant’s actions are equal in weight.

The case is Kansas v. Marsh, 04-1170.