“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
―
Cruz v. Arizona, 2023
Decided today, this case is an application of a fairly complicated doctrine that says, in essence, that states are free to apply their own laws, except when they are not. Got it?
The case involves the sentence of death to one John Montenegro Cruz, for the murder of a Tucson Police officer. Here is how a local paper describes the encounter:
The 2003 incident stems from an investigation of a hit-and-run accident by Hardesty and Benjamin Waters, which led to a nearby apartment where they found two women and Cruz, who fit the description of the driver. Cruz identified himself as "Frank White."
As Hardesty and Cruz went back to the car, Cruz leaned in as if to retrieve something and then took off running. Hardesty chased him on foot; Waters drove the patrol car around the block to cut Cruz off.
When Waters turned the corner, he said, he saw Cruz throw down a gun. Hardesty's body was immediately discovered. He had been shot five times; four of those shots came from no more than a foot away.
The Tucson jury sentenced Cruz to death. The argument is over whether the jury should have been told that an alternative sentence of life in prison carried with it no possibility of parole. The trial judge, during sentencing phase, declined that instruction. According to Arizona law, that was within his discretion. According to a complicated application of federal law, that should be the end of the story, unless it isn't.
Boiling away all of the legal gymnastics, this opinion was authored by a justice who does not now, nor will she ever support capital punishment. In countless death penalty cases, she votes in favor of making it hard enough that it is impossible to apply, or in opposition to it ever being administered. At all. Ever.
Her problem ("She only has one?") is that the Constitution clearly permits the death penalty. Some states have abolished it, Johnny Rocket and the Supremes have diluted it, but in those states where it is permitted it is an option for situations where some asshole ambushes a police officer and then shoots them execution style.
Mind you, there is no question that this is the guy who murdered Officer Hardesty. Nor is there evidence that the sentence of death is improper. Nor is there any evidence that the jury wanted to sentence Cruz to anything other than death. Twenty years later...
Well, now Cruz will have to be resentenced under the terms of the Supreme Court's wisdom (as opposed to that of the citizens of a city who lost one of their police officers). The victim's friends and family will have to be located and invited once again to testify what it was like to know that their loved one died a violent death. They can dredge up the feelings of loss compounded by twenty Christmases without him.
Or, they can decide that the feelings are better left locked away. In which case this defendant will live out his life in prison.
Maybe.
All because someone doesn't have a good, legal reason to abolish the death penalty, so she's willing to cobble together a bunch of bad ones.
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