Court rules jurors erred in consulting Bible

Posted: 10/07/05

Court rules jurors erred in consulting Bible

By Robert Marus

ABP Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (ABP)—The nation’s highest court has upheld a Colorado court’s ruling that said jurors erred when they consulted biblical law to sentence a murderer to death.

On the first day of its 2005-06 term Oct. 3, the federal Supreme Court declined, without comment, to hear an appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of convicted murderer and rapist Robert Harlan.

A panel of Colorado’s highest court in March invalidated Harlan’s death sentence, saying jurors should not have taken biblical recommendations for punishment into account when sentencing. By declining to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Colorado court’s decision to stand.

“The judicial system works very hard to emphasize the rarified, solemn and sequestered nature of jury deliberations,” the Colorado court’s majority opinion stated. “Jurors must deliberate in that atmosphere without the aid or distraction of extraneous texts.”

But the minority justices in the 3-2 Colorado decision disagreed. “The biblical passages the jurors discussed constituted either a part of the jurors’ moral and religious precepts or their general knowledge, and thus were relevant to their court-sanctioned moral assessment,” they wrote.

Colorado criminal law is unusual in that it requires judges in capital cases to instruct jurors to take into account their own moral convictions in dealing with such sentencing decisions.

According to court papers, one juror testified that she consulted the famous passage in Leviticus 24, in which Hebrew law requires “an eye for an eye.”

The decision means Harlan’s sentence will be changed to life without parole. In 1995, he was convicted of raping and murdering a woman near Denver, as well as shooting and paralyzing a woman who was trying to help the victim escape.