Ring, Timothy Stuart v. Arizona

By: Gregory Blesch & Kathryn Alfisi, Medill News Service

Brief

A sheriff's deputy in Maricopa County, Ariz., found John Magoch dead in the Wells Fargo armored van that Magoch drove for a living, his body slumped in the passenger side with a bullet-hewn hole in his head.

It was evening, Nov. 28, 1994, about four and a half hours after Magoch's partner reported the van missing from the Arrowhead Mall in Glendale, Ariz.

Wells Fargo was out more than $800,000 in cash and checks.

No one witnessed the robbery or murder, but a bicyclist reported to police that a white van followed by a red pickup truck ran a stop sign on the afternoon of the robbery and murder.

An informant led Glendale police to the girlfriend of a man named James Greenham, and the girlfriend led police to Greenham's friend, Timothy Ring, who owned a red pickup truck.

Listening to Greenham and Ring's phone calls, police heard the two discuss plans to disappear "up north" and negotiate payments - Ring was apparently holding Greenham's share in addition to his own.

After a detective left his card on Greenham's door, Greenham made a panicked call to Ring, who then called another man, William Ferguson, saying: "I don't know what to think of it. Um, [Greenham's] house is clean. Mine, on the other hand, contains a very large bag."

Police also issued press releases, hoping news coverage would make the suspects talk. It worked. After a broadcast that included a phony witness reenactment with deliberately botched details, Ring called Ferguson and said, "There was a couple of incontinuities [sic] to their story?. They showed a suppressed revolver of all things."

Two days later, police showed up with a search warrant at Ring's home, where they found a Ruger 1022 rifle outfitted with a homemade sound suppressor, as well as a duffel bag with Ring's name on it.

Inside the bag: $271,681 in cash.

Police also found a note in Ring's headboard with the number $575,995 - with the money in the bag, it was about the same amount of cash Wells Fargo reported missing - and below it the word "splits" and the letters "F," "Y" and "T." Police surmised that "F" was for "Ferguson," "Y" for "Yoda," Greenham's nickname, and "T," for "Tim."

Based on the accumulation of circumstantial evidence - no bullet was found, so Ring's Ruger couldn't be tied to the crime - a jury found Ring guilty of murder, a capital offense in Arizona.

Under Arizona law, a judge must decide whether someone convicted of murder gets death or life imprisonment. A jury alone cannot.

James Greenham, who made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed robbery, testified at Ring's special sentencing hearing. It was conducted without a jury.

Greenham fingered Ring as the shooter and said Ring wanted to be congratulated on his shot the day after the killing.

But the jury heard none of this evidence during the trial. In fact, the jury heard no evidence that identified Ring as the one who shot Magoch.

Based on Greenham's testimony at the sentencing hearing, the judge ruled that Ring "is the one who killed Mr. Magoch" and that he showed "reckless disregard for human life."

Arizona law requires the judge to find beyond a reasonable doubt at least one aggravating factor in order to sentence a defendant to die. The judge in Ring's case found two: that the murder was committed for money and "in an especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner."

On automatic direct appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court, the state's highest court affirmed the sentence, rejecting a clutch of arguments for a new trial. But one argument in Ring's appeal gave pause to Justice Stanley Feldman, who wrote the opinion.

The U.S. Supreme Court in two recent cases, Jones v. U.S. in 1999 and Apprendi v. New Jersey in 2000, seemed to overrule Walton v. Arizona, a 1990 case that upheld Arizona's sentencing procedure for capital cases.

Feldman wrote, "While the state is correct in noting that neither Jones nor Apprendi overruled Walton, we must acknowledge that both cases raise some question about the continued viability of Walton."

In Jones, the Court ruled that removing a jury's control over facts determining the "statutory sentencing range" would violate the 6th Amendment.

And the Apprendi opinion stated that "any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt."

The Court in Apprendi went on to say that the Walton opinion stands because Arizona juries find defendants guilty of capital offenses before judges determine aggravating factors and apply the death penalty.

It's a subtle distinction.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had other words for the reasoning in her dissent: "baffling, to say the least" and "demonstrably untrue."

O'Connor wrote: "A defendant convicted of first-degree murder in Arizona cannot receive a death sentence unless a judge makes the factual determination that a statutory aggravating factor exists?. If the court does not intend to overrule Walton, one would be hard pressed to tell from the opinion it issues today."

Feldman of the Arizona Supreme Court agreed with O'Connor, noting that the trial judge's determination of aggravating factors was based solely on evidence presented at the sentencing hearing and never heard by the jury.

However, because the majority opinion in Apprendi explicitly said that the Court did not mean to overturn Walton, Arizona's highest court regarded the law as constitutional and affirmed Ring's sentence.

On Jan. 11, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted certiorari in Ring's case. And on Jan. 23, the Court stayed the execution of Florida death-row inmate Amos King, who was scheduled to die the next day. Florida's law governing capital punishment is similar to Arizona's - though in Florida, juries recommend what they deem the appropriate sentence, and judges make the final call. Alabama, Indiana and Delaware have laws like Florida's.

The law in Montana and Idaho is like Arizona's, and Colorado and Nebraska allow a panel of judges to assign the death penalty. All told, a broad decision in the Ring case that holds unconstitutional a sentencing process that allows a judge to consider aggravating factors not considered by the jury at trial, could affect about 800 condemned inmates.

Andrew Hurwitz, who represents Ring before the Supreme Court, said he isn't worried that the Court retained Walton and upheld the Arizona law in the Apprendi decision less than two years ago.

"They did what the Supreme Court often does, which is that they reserved that issue for another day," he said. "And this is that day."

On June 24, 2002, the Court, by a 7-2 vote, sided with Ring, holding that the sentences of those who were sentenced to die by judges not juries cannot stand.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the lead majority opinion, with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissenting.

At the heart of the Court's decision was the irreconcilability of the findings in Walton v. Arizona and Apprendi v. New Jersey.

Ginsburg wrote: "We overrule Walton to the extent that it allows a sentencing judge, sitting without a jury, to find an aggravating circumstance necessary for imposition of the death penalty."

The Court found that Arizona's enumerated aggravating factors operate as "the functional equivalent of a greater offense," and that the 6th Amendment required that the jury be aware of these factors in order to determine appropriate sentencing.

"Capital defendants, no less than non-capital defendants, we conclude are entitled to a jury determination of any fact on which the legislature conditions an increase in their maximum punishment," Ginsburg wrote.

The jury in Ring found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder, which carries a sentence of death or life imprisonment. The Court found that if Apprendi were to be applied to the case, then "the required finding [of an aggravated circumstance] expose[d] [Ring] to a greater punishment that authorized by the jury's guilty verdict."

The Court decided in Apprendi that the "Sixth Amendment does not permit a defendant to be 'expose[d]? to a penalty exceeding the maximum he would receive if punished according to the facts reflected in the jury alone'." This decision came ten years after the decision in Walton that held Arizona's sentencing scheme to be compatible with the 6th Amendment.

The Apprendi ruling won out, to the dismay of Justice O'Connor, who wrote in a brief but pointed dissent that she would rather overrule Apprendi than Walton.

"Apprendi's rule that any fact that increases the maximum penalty must be treated as an element of the crime, is not required by the Constitution, by history, or by our prior cases. And it ignores the 'significant history in this country of ? discretionary sentencing by judges,'" she wrote.

The Court's decision in Ring v. Arizona, O'Connor argued, will only serve to open the floodgates to convicted defendants wanting to overturn their sentences.

In the states that have sentencing schemes similar to Arizona's -- Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska -- there are 168 prisoners on death row. Now that these states' capital sentencing schemes have effectively been declared unconstitutional, O'Connor wrote, all 168 prisoners are likely to challenge their sentencing rulings.

"In addition I fear that the prisoners on death row in Alabama, Delaware, Florida and Indiana, which the Court identified as having hybrid sentencing schemes in which the jury renders an advisory verdict but the judge makes the ultimate sentencing determination, may also seize on today's decision to challenge their sentences."