Justices Deny New Hearing in Death Row Case

A split Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a death row inmate who had told his attorney not to present evidence that could spare his life does not deserve a new hearing now that he has changed his mind.

The court said that Jeffrey Timothy Landrigan did not deserve a hearing to determine whether his lawyer was ineffective because Landrigan had forbidden counsel to present testimony at his sentencing that might have mitigated the jury's decision that he deserved the death penalty.

"The district court did not abuse its discretion in finding that Landrigan could not establish prejudice based on his counsel's failure to present the evidence he now wishes to offer," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. "Landrigan's mitigation evidence was weak."

But Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent that "without the benefit of an evidentiary hearing, this is pure guesswork. The court's decision rests on a parsimonious appraisal of a capital defendant's constitutional right to have the sentencing decision reflect meaningful consideration of all relevant mitigating evidence."

The court's docket this term is heavy with death penalty cases, and the decisions have shown a court starkly divided on the issue. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has been the deciding vote in each case. Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. have sided each time with the state imposing capital punishment; Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer have supported the inmate's claim that his rights were not protected.

With today's ruling, Kennedy has voted three times with each group.

Landrigan has a particularly violent past, with a father who also received the death penalty. Landrigan was in prison in Oklahoma for killing a man when he stabbed another inmate. He subsequently escaped from prison and killed Chester Dean Dyer in Arizona.

Landrigan refused to let his attorney call his ex-wife and birth mother to testify on his behalf at sentencing and told the judge: "I think if you want to give me the death penalty, just bring it right on. I'm ready for it."

Thomas said that a lower court was correct in concluding that additional mitigating evidence would not have made a difference in the sentence Landrigan received, and that an additional hearing was unnecessary.

Stevens said the majority's decision "can only be explained by its increasingly familiar effort to guard the floodgates of litigation." He said only a fraction of such appeals receive such evidentiary hearings, and there is no reason to believe that they are a burden on federal courts, as the majority opinion implied.

The small number of hearings, Stevens wrote, "makes it abundantly clear that doing justice does not always cause the heavens to fall."