A Delaware Supreme Court ruling on Thursday means no inmates sitting on death row in the state will face execution.
Delaware’s high court previously ruled that the state’s death penalty law was unconstitutional, and said Thursday that its ruling applies retroactively to those already on death row. The unanimous ruling addressed the case of Derrick Powell, who was convicted of killing a cop while fleeing an attempted robbery, but applies to the others on death row.
The court changed Powell’s death sentence to “imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life without benefit of probation or parole of any other reduction.”
Delaware’s ruling comes as the hot-button issue of capital punishment has spawned new controversy at the Supreme Court in 2016. A 4-4 split decision by the Supreme Court last week allowed Alabama to proceed with its execution of a convicted killer after multiple stays from the high court.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who would have granted a stay blocking the Alabama man’s execution, is pining for the Supreme Court to “reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty,” as he wrote in a dissent from the court’s refusal to take up a new death penalty case from Florida this week.
The Supreme Court has already heard oral arguments in one death penalty case this term via Moore v. Texas, in which the court is looking to resolve whether the execution of an inmate after an elongated period of incarceration violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
