Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Sotomayor dissenting: Whatley v. Warden, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison (04/19/2021)

20-363 Whatley v. Warden, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison (04/19/2021)
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES FREDERICK R. WHATLEY v. WARDEN, GEORGIA DIAGNOSTIC AND CLASSIFICATION PRISON ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT No. 20–363. Decided April 19, 2021 The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied. 

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, dissenting from denial of certiorari. A jury sentenced petitioner Frederick R. Whatley to death the morning after watching him reenact a murder while wearing unnecessary leg irons and manacles. When the State called Whatley to the stand during the sentencing proceeding, his attorney waved away the prosecutor’s concerns about the visible shackles, then sat silent when the prosecutor handed Whatley a fake gun and asked him to reenact the murder for which he had just been convicted. Defense counsel’s unreasonable failure to object to Whatley’s shackling was plainly prejudicial under this Court’s precedent. I would grant the petition, summarily reverse, and remand for a new sentencing proceeding. I Following Whatley’s conviction for robbing and killing the owner of a Georgia bait shop and liquor store, the State asked the jury to impose a sentence of death. The sentencing proceeding involved just one day of evidence. 
The State relied on two, conceded statutory aggravating circumstances: Whatley committed the murder (1) during an armed robbery, Ga. Code Ann. §17–10–30(b)(2) (Supp. 2019), and (2) after having “escaped from [a] place of lawful confinement,” §17–10–30(b)(9), because he had walked away from a halfway house to which he had been paroled a few months earlier. The State further showed that Whatley had prior convictions for forging a check....

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