Supreme Court will consider sentence

COLUMBUS (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it will look at whether a self-described neo-Nazi should be sentenced to death, the second time this year that the high court will review a state appeal of an overturned death sentence in Ohio.

At issue are potentially significant shifts in how federal courts review convictions and death sentences that Ohio courts have previously upheld.

Those include instructions that judges give to juries about reaching a possible death sentence in capital punishment cases and rules for lawyers arguing against a death sentence for their clients.

The latest case involves Frank Spisak, who killed three men at the Cleveland State University campus over a seven-month period in 1982.

The Supreme Court justices, in an order Monday, agreed to hear the state’s plea to reinstate the death sentence for Spisak. The case will be argued in the fall.

Spisak argues the judge in his 1983 trial didn’t tell the jury the consequences of not reaching a unanimous verdict in favor of a death sentence.

He argues the jury should have been told — as juries are today — that one juror’s vote against a death sentence can lead to a lesser sentence of life in prison.

The high court could rule in a way that only Spisak’s death sentence is affected. But a broader ruling could go much farther.

“One outcome would be that all of those earlier cases that had this same type of instruction would all be reversed,” Michael Benza, one of Spisak’s attorneys, said Monday.

Attorney General Richard Cordray argues that the same instructions have been used by other courts without issue.

A decision by a federal court overturning a state court decision without solid legal ground “upsets the apple cart tremendously,” Cordray said.

Spisak’s trial turned into a spectacle as he carried a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and told the courtroom that he was God’s agent in a war against blacks and Jews. When he was sentenced to die, Spisak offered the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute.

The federal appeals court in Cincinnati has twice ordered a new sentencing hearing for Spisak, saying he received ineffective counsel during the sentencing phase of his trial and a judge’s instructions to the jury were unconstitutional.

In 2007, the justices reinstated Spisak’s death sentence in a ruling that chastised federal appeals courts for second-guessing the decisions of trial judges in murder cases.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, acting after the Supreme Court ruling, reached the same conclusion it did the first time and threw out Spisak’s death sentence.

The second Ohio case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court involves the state’s request to reinstate the death sentence of Michael Bies, who killed a 10-year-old boy in Cincinnati in 1992.

Bies’ attorneys argue he is mentally retarded and can’t be executed under the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning the execution of the mentally retarded.

The state wants a hearing on Bies’ mental state. Bies argues such a hearing is double jeopardy since state courts previously cited evidence that he is mentally retarded. The state argues no such conclusive evidence exists. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the Bies case in April.