The Supreme Court dealt a blow to progressives when it declined to review the case of a death row inmate Monday.
Gay death row inmate Charles Russell Rhines, 62, was sentenced to death in 1993 for killing a doughnut shop employee during a robbery in South Dakota. Rhines has sought to appeal his conviction with the claim that his sentence was handed down by an anti-gay jury.
The decision effectively leaves Rhines’ punishment in place and issues something of a rebuke to the anti-death penalty left. Liberals recently made hay about a majority opinion handed down by the court ruling that death row inmates are not guaranteed a right to a painless death.
Death sentence upheld
Rhines was sentenced to death in 1993 for killing doughnut shop employee Donnivan Schaeffer while robbing a Rapid City store. A state Supreme Court upheld his conviction and sentence in 1996. His lawyers have attempted to argue, so far unsuccessfully, that the jury’s punishment was the result of anti-gay prejudice. A different appeal attempt by attorneys for Rhines was shot down in 2018.
The convicted killer’s lawyers assert that jurors sentenced him to death because, as Rhines claims, one juror at trial joked that he believed the defendant would “enjoy a life in prison where he would be among so many men.” Rhines’ lawyers collected sworn statements from the jurors in attempt to bolster their argument. A juror on the case claimed that another said, “if he’s gay, we’d be sending him where he wants to go.”
Another juror said that the jury knew Rhines “was a homosexual and thought the he shouldn’t be able to spend his life with men in prison,” while another said there was “lots of discussion of homosexuality” and “a lot of disgust.”
Rhines’ appeal came after the SCOTUS ruled in 2017 that evidence of racial bias could be considered in in setting aside a verdict. However, South Dakota Attorney General Jason R. Ravnsborg has rejected the claims of prejudice, saying that the jurors’ comments amount to “offhand comments” and a failed attempt at humor that don’t show a clear prejudice.
“The alleged juror comments here are not clear and explicit expressions of animus,” he said. “At best, they fall into the category of ‘offhand comment’.”
SCOTUS dealing blows to left
Ravnsborg also pointed to a note to the judge signed by the jury 26 years ago which he said indicates that Rhines’ sexuality was the furthest thing from their minds. The jurors asked the judge if Rhines would be “allowed to marry or have conjugal visits.”
“What jury conceived of gay marriage in 1992?” Ravsnborg asked. “And the fact that the jurors asked about Rhine’s access to conjugal visits with visitors from outside the prison walls also belies Rhines’s assertion that they believed prison would afford him a harem of male sexual companions.”
However, the ruling will likely rankle the left given the claims of anti-gay discrimination involved, as well as the left’s general intolerance for capital punishment. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which filed an amicus brief in support of Rhines, decried the court’s decision, saying, “sexual orientation discrimination has no place in the administration of justice.” Rhines has also received support from LGBT groups, including Lambda Legal, the National LGBT Bar Association and the ACLU.
This decision follows closely on the heels of another earlier this month that sparked an outcry on the left, with many liberal critics describing Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion as bloodthirsty and callous. Gorsuch provided the opinion in the court’s 5-4 ruling on April 1 that a Missouri death row inmate is not guaranteed a “painless” death, and that he could be executed by lethal injection.
“The Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death — something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes,” Gorsuch wrote.
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