Delaware’s rules for imposing the death penalty are unconstitutional, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, a decision that could mean an effective end to capital punishment in Delaware.
In a 148-page opinion, the court held that Delaware’s death penalty law gave judges, rather than juries, too great a role in imposing death sentences, violating constitutional requirements that the United States Supreme Court laid out in a January decision that has brought executions in Florida to a temporary halt.
The Delaware legislature came close to abolishing the death penalty directly this year, but the debate was put on hold to await the ruling by the state’s highest court.
Delaware’s attorney general said in a statement Tuesday that he was reviewing the court’s decision and could not comment on whether Delaware would appeal to the federal Supreme Court.
But there appeared to be little chance, in any case, that the Supreme Court would overturn the decision, said Eric M. Freedman, an expert on capital punishment at Hofstra University’s law school. “This probably means, as a practical matter, the end of the death penalty in Delaware,” he said.
Delaware carried out its last execution in 2012 and has 14 prisoners on death row. The death penalty has been abolished in 18 other states, and executions have been delayed in many others because of a scarcity of lethal injection drugs and disputes over execution procedures.
In the case decided Tuesday, Delaware officials had said they would seek the execution of Benjamin Rauf, a New Yorker who is charged with murdering a fellow law school classmate last year during a drug deal in Delaware. But Mr. Rauf’s lawyers argued that Delaware’s procedures violated Supreme Court requirements for the primacy of jury decisions in capital cases.
Until recently, Delaware was one of three states, along with Florida and Alabama, that allowed judges to decide if the circumstances of a crime warranted the death penalty. Judges in those three states were also allowed to override a jury decision and impose such a penalty.
In January, the federal Supreme Court ruled, in Hurst v. Florida, that Florida’s capital sentencing law was unconstitutional because “the Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.”
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