IN TWO MURDER CASES The U. S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument Wednesday in its review of two Ninth Circuit rulings in Arizona murder cases. The rulings announced new delays in the death sentence of an Arizona double murderer and overturned the conviction of a man found guilty of killing a 4-year-old girl. At issue in Shinn v. Ramirez & Jones is whether the attorneys for the convicted murderers can introduce new evidence on federal habeas corpus that they failed to present during years of state court review, which is prohibited under federal law.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has joined these cases to encourage a decision to overturn the Ninth Circuit’s ruling.
A jury convicted David Ramirez, a parolee with two violent prior felonies, on strong evidence of the 1989 stabbing murder of his girlfriend and her 15-year-old daughter. On the day of the murders, police were summoned to the victims’ apartment by neighbors who heard screaming. Ramirez was found covered in blood inside the apartment alone with the victims’ bodies. Both died of multiple stab wounds, and the girl was found nude. Ramirez later admitted having sex with the young girl on the night of the murders as well as on four prior occasions. At trial, Ramirez did not deny his guilt, but claimed that his difficult childhood and mental disabilities disqualified him from a death sentence. The judge disagreed and, based upon the aggravating circumstances, sentenced him to death. After several years of review on appeal and state habeas corpus, Ramirez claimed for the first time on federal habeas corpus that his trial attorney was incompetent because he failed to introduce evidence of his “mental retardation, brain damage, impaired intellectual functioning, childhood poverty, childhood neglect and abuse, in utero exposure to pesticides and alcohol, and the fact that he was the product of the rape of his 15-year-old mother by his uncle. He also contends that [his attorney failed] to provide [appointed expert] Dr. McMahon with additional information concerning Ramirez’s low IQ scores and poor grades.”
Barry Jones was convicted of the 1994 sexual assault and murder of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter. Neighbors testified to seeing Jones hit the child the day before she died. Friends testified that while visiting Jones that evening they saw the little girl lying on a couch bleeding and crying in pain. Jones lied, saying that a paramedic had examined her. Early the next morning, after the little girl died, Jones dropped her and her mother off at a hospital and drove away. The Pima County medical examiner determined that the child died from an infection caused by blunt force trauma to the abdomen and that she had also been sexually assaulted. For these crimes, Jones received a death sentence. After his conviction and sentence were upheld by Arizona courts on direct review and state habeas corpus, Jones claimed for the first time, on federal habeas corpus, that his trial attorney had been incompetent for failing to sufficiently challenge the medical evidence. He claims the attorney should have introduced experts questioning the timeline for the child’s injuries.
In Ramirez’s case, the federal district court denied the murderer’s claims, finding that based upon the trial record, the defense attorney was not incompetent. In Jones’s case, the district court initially denied the claims but granted them after the Ninth Circuit sent the case back. The Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of both murderers on appeal, announcing that the U. S. Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Martinez v. Ryan allowed the new evidence.
When the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Arizona’s appeal, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation agreed to join the case. In a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, Foundation Legal Director Kent Scheidegger argues that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 clearly restricts the introduction of new claims and evidence that could have been presented during the state court review of the convictions and sentences. To the extent that the Martinez decision might be interpreted to conflict with that restriction, the federal statute prevails.
“Both defendants had the opportunity to make their cases in state court,” said Scheidegger. “The Ninth Circuit defied an Act of Congress to give them a do-over that the law forbids. We hope the Supreme Court will correct this error and restore the rule of law,” he added.