High-court rebuke for Ga.

A U.S. Supreme Court justice on Monday criticized the way the Georgia Supreme Court considers capital appeals, calling its review faulty and superficial.

The likely result, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “is the arbitrary or discriminatory imposition of death sentences.”

Stevens went out of his way to criticize the state Supreme Court’s “proportionality review” in the high court’s rejection of death-row inmate Artemus Rick Walker’s appeal. The review is supposed to make sure a death sentence is not disproportionately severe when compared to similar cases.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution documented the same problem with the state Supreme Court’s review a year ago. Walker’s lawyers cited the AJC’s investigation in their appeal to the high court.

The newspaper found that the state Supreme Court’s review typically compares death cases only with other death cases, not similar cases in which a life sentence was imposed. The AJC also found that, since 1982, 19 percent of the death cases cited by the court to justify other death sentences had already been thrown out on appeal.

No other justice joined Stevens in his criticism. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately, saying the state Supreme Court committed no error in its review. Stevens’ accusations are “entirely without foundation,” Thomas said.

Walker was sentenced to death for the May 12, 1999, murder of bank executive Ray Lynward Gresham, 57, in Macon County. Walker, who owned a service station next door to the bank, devised a plan to rob Gresham and stabbed him 12 times in the chest and back.

A year ago, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld Walker’s death sentence.

In accordance with Georgia law, the court compared Walker’s death sentence with sentences imposed in similar cases.

But Georgia’s review is now too truncated, Stevens said. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s death-penalty law in 1976, he said, the high court assumed that a “meaningful proportionality review” meant comparing a death sentence with similar cases that received both death and life sentences.

In Walker’s case, the state Supreme Court cited 21 similar death sentences in a one-paragraph appendix. But the court made no mention of the details of those cases and did not note that several of them involved double murders, unlike Walker’s, Stevens said. It also did not consider similar cases that resulted in a life sentence, the justice added.

“Rather than perform a thorough proportionality review to mitigate the heightened risks of arbitrariness and discrimination in this case, the Georgia Supreme Court carried out an utterly perfunctory review,” Stevens said.

The court turned down Walker’s appeal on procedural grounds, saying the challenge to the proportionality review should have been previously litigated in the state courts.

Stevens said the denial of Walker’s appeal was not a legal precedent, opening the door to future appeals. And he added that lawyers’ arguments are “supported by our prior opinions evaluating the constitutionality of the Georgia statute.”

Thomas disagreed. There were a number of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have upheld Georgia’s way of conducting its review, he wrote.

“There is nothing constitutionally defective about the Georgia Supreme Court’s determination,” Thomas said. “Proportionality review is not constitutionally required in any form.”

Thomas was referring to a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said California’s death-penalty law, which did not have a proportionality review, was not constitutionally required to have one.

But Stevens countered that California’s law is different than Georgia’s, and the 1984 ruling “was not meant to undermine our conclusion” that the proportionality review is an important component of Georgia law.

ABOUT OUR SERIES

> A two-year investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published in September 2007, found that who was killed, and where, often determines whether a murderer is sentenced to death in Georgia.

> The newspaper also found that armed-robbery murders show the widest disparity of prosecutions for the death penalty and that, over 25 years, Georgia’s highest court mishandled its proportionality review when considering capital appeals.

> The complete series can be found on ajc.com.