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- Britta Slopianka, Axis of Logic
Correspondent in Germany

April 25 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether convicted murderers facing the death penalty have a constitutional right to argue to the sentencing jury that they didn’t commit the crime.

The justices today agreed to review an Oregon Supreme Court decision letting Randy Lee Guzek present alibi evidence indicating he might not have taken part in the 1987 shooting of two people in their home. The case was among five new disputes the court in Washington accepted today and will resolve in its 2005-06 term, which starts in October.

Courts around the country disagree whether the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, forbidding cruel and unusual punishments, gives defendants the right to offer “residual doubt” evidence as they seek to avoid the death penalty.

“The Oregon Supreme Court’s ruling opens the door to relitigation of defendant’s guilt in the penalty-phase proceeding,” Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers argued in the state’s appeal.

The Oregon Supreme Court said it was following the logic of earlier U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

“The Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence suggests that defendant’s alibi evidence is the type of evidence that a defendant is constitutionally entitled to introduce during the penalty phase for the jury’s consideration,” the Oregon court said.

Domino’s Case

The high court today also:

•          Agreed use a case involving Domino’s Pizza Inc. to consider the scope of a federal civil rights law that bars discrimination in contracts. The question is whether the law allows lawsuits by someone who is affected by the contract yet isn’t one of the contracting parties.

•          Agreed to consider expanding the legal liability of the U.S. Postal Service, accepting an appeal by a Pennsylvania woman who tripped over mail left on her porch.

•          Agreed to decide whether the federal government can reduce Social Security payments to people who defaulted on their student loans more than a decade earlier.

•          Refused to revive a $959 million award to 17 onetime American servicemen who were tortured by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime while they were prisoners during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

•          Refused to reinstate the death penalty for a mentally retarded Texas man who was sentenced before the justices barred executions of retarded people in 2002.

Late-Night Burglary

The Supreme Court ruled in 1988 that sentencing juries need not be instructed to consider residual-doubt evidence. The new case asks whether, even in the absence of a jury instruction, defendants have a right to present that type of evidence.

In other cases, the nation’s highest court has said defendants must be allowed to present evidence suggesting a limited level of culpability—such as testimony that someone else was the ringleader.

Guzek, now 35, and two other men were convicted of shooting Rod and Lois Houser to death in their rural Oregon home during a late-night burglary. At sentencing, Guzek’s lawyers sought to offer testimony from his grandfather and mother accounting for his whereabouts at the time of the killings.

The case against Guzek, first sentenced to death in 1988, has moved up and down the court system for 17 years. The Oregon Supreme Court decision marked the third reversal of his death sentence.

Oregon has executed only two people since the state restored its death penalty in 1978, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The state, which uses lethal injections, has 32 people on death row.

The Supreme Court has scaled back the use of the death penalty in some contexts in recent years. In March, the court, citing the ban on cruel and unusual punishments, barred executions of murderers who were under 18 at the time of the crime.

The case is Oregon v. Guzek, 04-928.

To contact the reporter on this story:

Greg Stohr in Washington at  gstohr@bloomberg.net.

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