Unanimous Supreme Court Ruling "not final word"?
Published Mon, Dec 11 2006 3:38 PM
Technorati Tags: News and Politics, Courts
Apparently that's the way the New York Times wants to spin this anyway. In The New York Time's Homepage RSS feed the abstract for the article on today's unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme court says this: "The Supreme Court ruling, however, may not be the last word on the issue of spectator conduct."
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 — The Supreme Court today unanimously upheld the conviction of a California man who had contended that he was denied a fair trial because people sitting in the courtroom were wearing pictures of the man he killed.
The justices ruled, in a case that addressed the relationship between federal and state courts as well as the conduct of courtroom spectators, that Mathew Musladin was not entitled to a new trial in the 1994 slaying of Tom Studer outside the San Jose home of Mr. Musladin’s estranged wife, Pamela.
Mr. Musladin admitted that he shot Mr. Studer to death, but he claimed that he did so in self-defense. After a two-week trial in which some of Mr. Studer’s relatives sat behind prosecutors while wearing small pictures of the victim, the jury found Mr. Musladin guilty. He was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison.
In today’s ruling, the justices overturned a finding by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, which had held that the California state courts and a federal district court erred in rejecting Mr. Musladin’s bid for a new trial. Today’s ruling revolved around the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, by which Congress curbed the power of federal judges to grant habeas corpus petitions to review state court convictions.
So there you have it. A convicted, murderer can't claim that pictures of his victim prejudiced the jury against him.
The Ninth Circuit is overturned yet again. And of course the New York Times trots out its favorite liberal justices to indicate that this unanimous opinion won't be the final word on this.
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