
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, June 18, 1994                   TAG: 9406200112
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: |Knight-Ridder/Tribune|
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

JURIES MUST BE TOLD OF NO-PAROLE RULES

WASHINGTON - Expanding the concept of truth in sentencing, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that defense lawyers seeking to prevent a death penalty generally have a right to inform the jury when the alternative of ``life imprisonment'' really means no parole.

The 7-2 ruling casts doubt on the constitutionality of some death sentences in three states - Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia - and is expected to provoke new legal challenges to death penalties in Texas, which leads all states in Death Row population.

Most of the 26 states that provide for imprisonment without release as an alternative to execution require that juries be told a defendant is ineligible for parole.

But Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia refuse to inform juries of that fact. There are 170 Death Row prisoners in Pennsylvania, 55 in South Carolina and 46 in Virginia.

With Friday's ruling, the justices added another constitutional protection to a long list of safeguards against imposing the death penalty unfairly.

That development led the dissenters - Antonin Scalia, joined by Clarence Thomas - to observe with dismay: ``The heavily outnumbered opponents of capital punishment have successfully opened yet another front in their guerrilla war to make this unquestionably constitutional sentence a practical impossibility.''

The new safeguard amounts to this:

Whenever life imprisonment without parole is the only alternative to a death penalty, and the prosecutor argues that a convicted murderer is so dangerous to society that he must be executed, the defense lawyer must be allowed to inform the jury that the defendant isn't eligible for parole.

Justice David Souter argued that the trial judge be required to convey the truth to the jury, but failed to muster a majority.

Based on the new constitutional requirement, the justices ordered a new sentencing trial for Jonathan Dale Simmons, who beat and sexually assaulted three elderly women - including his grandmother - and beat a fourth to death in Columbia, S.C., in 1990.

by CNB