Tucker v. Kemp, Warden

1987-05-29

Headline: Court denies stay and review in death-penalty case involving inflammatory victim photos, allowing the scheduled execution to proceed and leaving the fairness challenge without Supreme Court review for now.

Holding: The Court denied the request to delay the execution and refused to hear the case, so the execution may proceed and the claim about prejudicial trial photographs will not receive Supreme Court review.

Real World Impact:

Execution may proceed because the stay was denied.
Supreme Court will not review Tucker’s claim about trial photographs.
A related case (Thompson) could still affect similar photo-evidence issues.

Topics: death penalty, prejudicial evidence, trial fairness, Supreme Court review

Summary

Background

A man on death row, Richard Tucker, asked the Court to delay his execution and to review his conviction after the Eleventh Circuit denied relief. The application for a stay of execution was presented to Justice Powell, referred to the full Court, and denied. The Court also denied Tucker’s petition for a writ of certiorari. Tucker’s claim focuses on whether inflammatory, prejudicial photographs of the victim shown at trial violated his right to "fundamental fairness and a reliable sentencing determination."

Reasoning

The short order in the opinion simply denies the stay and declines to take the case; the text does not give the majority’s reasoning. Justice Brennan’s dissent criticizes the Eleventh Circuit for refusing to hold the petition pending the Court’s decision in a related case, Thompson v. Oklahoma, noting that any doubt about the relevance of Thompson should be resolved in favor of a defendant facing execution. Brennan explains that Thompson raises a closely related question about admission of victim photographs and that any standard the Court develops there could illuminate Tucker’s claim.

Real world impact

Because the Court refused both the stay and review, the scheduled execution may proceed and the Supreme Court will not decide Tucker’s photograph-based fairness claim in this order. The dissent points out that the lower courts reached different outcomes about the photographs — one found error but harmless, another found no error — and that Thompson’s forthcoming analysis could still affect similar challenges to gruesome trial photos.

Dissents or concurrances

Justice Brennan, joined by Justice Marshall, dissented. He would have granted a stay and certiorari, or at least held Tucker’s petition pending Thompson, and on his view that the death penalty is always unconstitutional he would vacate the sentence.