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In Key Victory for Death Penalty Opponents, Supreme Court Sides With Death Row Inmate – McWilliams v. Dunn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2021

Marisa Bartolotta
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Type
Notes & Recent Case Developments
Information
American Journal of Law & Medicine , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 145 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics and Boston University 2018

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References

1 McWilliams v. Dunn, 137 S. Ct. 1790, 1791 (2017).

2 See generally McWilliams, 137 S. Ct. at 1791.

3 Ake v. Oklahoma, 470 U.S. 68, 83 (1985).

4 See McWilliams, 137 S. Ct. at 1791.

5 See id.

6 See id.

7 See id. at 1793.

8 Id. at 1795-6.

9 See id. at 1791.

10 See id.

11 Lawrence Hurley, Supreme Court Sides with Alabama Death Row Inmate, Reuters, June 19, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-deathpenalty/supreme-court-sides-with-alabama-death-row-inmate-idUSKBN19A21K [https://perma.cc/CCJ4-3W9T].

12 See McWilliams, 137 S. Ct. at 1791.

13 See id.

14 See id. at 1792.

15 See id.

16 See id. at 1798.

17 See id. at 1793.

18 Id. at 1798 (quoting Ake, 470 U.S. 68 at 105).

19 Id. at 1792.

20 Id.

21 See id.

22 See id. at 1793.

23 See id. at 1792.

24 See id.

25 28 U.S.C. §2254(d)(1) (2012).

26 McWilliams, 137 S. Ct. 1790 at 1792 (quoting Davis v. Ayala 135 S. Ct. 2187, 2198 (2015)).

27 See id. at 1793.

28 See Hurley, supra note 11.

29 See generally The Death Penalty Info. Center, Facts About the Death Penalty, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf (last visited Oct. 14, 2017).

30 Frank R. Baumgartner and Betsy Neill, Does the Death Penalty Target People Who Are Mentally Ill? We Checked., Washington Post (Apr. 3, 2017), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/03/does-the-death-penalty-target-people-who-are-mentally-ill-we-checked/?utm_term=.3d5f3dda7169.

31 See Garrett Epps, The Case Halting Arkansas' Executions, The Atlantic, Apr. 19, 2017 (“The issue—whether a capital defendant whose sanity or competence is at issue is entitled to an independent psychiatrist to assist with the defense—is also at stake in the cases of two Arkansas inmates, Don William Davis and Bruce Earl Ward, sentenced to death by courts in that state.”).

32 See David Alan Sklansky, Substance and Procedure in Capital Adjudication: The Supreme Court's Decision in McWilliams v. Dunn, Stanford Law School: Legal Aggregate Blog, (Jun. 19, 2017), https://law.stanford.edu/2017/06/19/substance-and-procedure-in-capital-adjudication-the-supreme-courts-decision-in-mcwilliams-v-dunn/ [https://perma.cc/ZVE3-WQTZ].

33 See Adam Liptak, With Executions in Balance, Supreme Court Grapples Over Role of Experts, N.Y. Times, Apr. 24, 2017.

34 See Sklansky, Substance and Procedure in Capital Adjudication, Stanford Law School (“What bothered the dissenters was that the Court didn't limit itself to the issue on which it had granted certiorari.”).

35 Transcript of Oral Argument at 27, McWilliams v. Dunn, 137 S. Ct. 1790 (2017) (No. 16-5294).

36 See id.

37 Id.

38 Lafortune, Kathryn A., Case Highlights the Burdens of Indigent Defendants, 48 Monitor on Psychology 35 (2017)Google Scholar (“McWilliams underscores the continuing and prejudicial effects of courts delaying expert funding approval, providing inadequate expert funds or denying access to appropriate experts.”); Press Release, Southern Center for Human Rights, Supreme Court Rules for SCHR Client over the Right to Expert Assistance (Jun. 19, 2017) (“A mental health expert who can assist in the evaluation, preparation, and presentation of the defense is indispensable in a case where the defendant's mental health is a significant issue, as it was in this case.”).

39 Matt Ford, The Supreme Court Tinkers at the Edges of the Machinery of Death, The Atlantic, June 22, 2017 (“Death-penalty opponents achieve[d] some notable victories even as the Court moved further away from abolishing capital punishment.”).

40 See Epps, supra note 31.

41 See id.

42 See id.

43 McWilliams v. Dunn, et al., American Psychological Assn. Office of General Counsel, http://www.apa.org/about/offices/ogc/amicus/mcwilliams.aspx.

44 Id.

45 The Death Penalty Info. Center, supra note 29 (34.4% of executed defendants are black); The Death Penalty Info. Center, The Death Penalty in Black and White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-black-and-white-who-lives-who-dies-who-decides# The Raw Data (last visited Oct. 25, 2017) (“blacks who killed whites were more likely to receive the death penalty than any other offender-victim combination”; “Race is more likely to affect death sentencing than smoking affects the likelihood of dying from heart disease.”).

46 Hurley, supra note 11.