Top court overturns three Texas death sentences

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court overturned three Texas death sentences on Wednesday because of flawed jury instructions formerly used by the state that leads the country with the most executions.

There have been 1,071 executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Texas has carried out the most executions -- 391 -- followed by Virginia at 98. President George W. Bush, as governor of Texas in the 1990s, strongly supported the death penalty.

In one case involving LaRoyce Lathair Smith, who was convicted for the 1991 murder of a Taco Bell manager in Dallas, the 5-4 ruling marked the second time in three years that the high court has set aside his death penalty.

He won a Supreme Court ruling in 2004 that overturned his death sentence because jurors did not consider his low IQ scores, his troubled childhood and other evidence.

But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated Smith's death sentence after it concluded that any errors involving the jury instructions were harmless.

The Supreme Court's latest ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, said the state court misinterpreted federal law. Sending the case back to the state court for more proceedings, Kennedy concluded, "It appears Smith is entitled to relief."

The ruling involved a form of jury instructions no longer in use in Texas -- it automatically imposed the death penalty if jurors decided a defendant committed a deliberate murder and probably would commit future violent crimes.

Lawyers for the state told the Supreme Court during arguments in January that 47 of the 392 death row inmates in Texas were sentenced under the faulty jury instructions that the state fixed in 1991.

The new rules have allowed jurors to consider helpful or mitigating evidence, such as a defendant's background or character, that could warrant a sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty.

In the other two cases, the court overturned the death sentences of Jalil Abdul-Kabir and Brent Brewer, both of whom were convicted of separate murders that occurred during robberies.

The two inmates said that under a 1989 Supreme Court ruling they were entitled to jury instructions on evidence such as mental impairment and childhood mistreatment that might have spared them from the death sentence.

A U.S. appeals court rejected their appeals. The Supreme Court overturned that decision and concluded the jury instructions and the process were so flawed that the two death sentences must be overturned.

The court's conservatives -- Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito -- dissented in all three cases.