Kevin Burns' legal counsel failed him. Now, the Supreme Court has too. (via Deadline: Legal Blog)
to decide them at all, sometimes leaving grave errors undisturbed in declining review.
The question in Kevin Burns’ case wasn’t about his guilt but his sentence. He was convicted of “felony murder” because two people were killed during a robbery in which he participated. But even though the jury didn’t have to find that he pulled the trigger to convict him, it still had to decide whether to sentence him to death — and it did, for the murder of one of the victims, Damond Dawson.
That “failure to act,” as the dissent called it, means that Burns “now faces execution despite a very robust possibility that he did not shoot Dawson but that the jurors, acting on incomplete information, sentenced him to death because they thought he had.” Sotomayor called the court’s refusal “disheartening” because the justices have previously sided with defendants in similar situations.
“The need for action is great because Burns faces the ultimate and irrevocable penalty of death,” Sotomayor wrote for the trio. Because of the court’s refusal to act, she concluded, “the indefensible decision below will be the last for Burns.”
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