Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 24, 1990 TAG: 9004240608
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/4 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
By a 7-2 vote, the justices threw out an appeal filed for - but not by - Gene Simmons, sentenced to death for killing 16 relatives and acquaintances in 1987.
The court said such an appeal cannot be filed by a fellow death row inmate.
Simmons says he wants to be executed, and refuses to appeal.
Lawyers for Arkansas death row inmate Jonas Whitmore argued that state appeals courts must review all death sentences, even when not asked to do so by the condemned murderer.
Writing for the court today, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said Whitmore lacks the proper legal standing to mount a challenge in Simmons' behalf.
The court rejected arguments by Whitmore's lawyers that the uniqueness of the death penalty and society's interest in its proper imposition justifies some kind of relaxed legal-standing standard.
"The short answer to this suggestion is that the requirement of a . . . case or controversy is not merely a traditional rule or practice but rather is imposed directly by the Constitution," Rehnquist said.
"It is not for this court to employ untethered notions of what might be good public policy to expand our jurisdiction in an appealing case," he said.
Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, who oppose capital punishment under all circumstances, dissented.
Writing for the two, Marshall said, "The court today allows a state to execute a man even though no appellate court has reviewed the validity of his conviction or sentence."
In what prosecutors called a murderous rampage in the little town of Russellville, Simmons gunned down his wife, three sons, four daughters, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren and two acquaintances within a few days of Christmas 1987.
Simmons, 49, refused to appeal his convictions and death sentence, saying he wanted to die by lethal injection as quickly as possible.
Three days before Simmons was to die March 16, 1989, Whitmore sought to challenge the state's death penalty law in Simmons' behalf.
On the eve of the execution, the nation's highest court postponed Simmons' death to study Whitmore's argument that the Constitution requires state appeals courts to review all death sentences, even when the convicted defendant asks to die.
by CNB