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Court to rule on death sentence for neo-Nazi
The justices, in an order Monday, said they will hear the state's plea to reinstate the death sentence for Frank Spisak. The case will be argued in the fall.
Spisak, a self-described neo-Nazi, was convicted in the shooting deaths of the three men at the Cleveland State University campus over a seven-month period in 1982.
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 that 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.
One of the issues before the court is whether Ohio's jury instructions at the time properly informed juries that a single vote against the death penalty would result in a life sentence instead, Michael Benza, one of Spisak's attorneys, said Monday.
The court will also consider whether Spisak's attorneys properly prepared a defense against him receiving a death sentence.
Spisak's trial in June 1983 turned into a racially and sexually charged public spectacle in which he grew an Adolf Hitler-style mustache and carried a copy of Hitler's book "Mein Kampf." He said he was an agent of God in a war against blacks and Jews.
This is the second Ohio death-penalty case before the U.S. Supreme Court this year. In April, the court will hear the state's challenge of a federal judge's decision that threw out the death sentence of Michael Bies and barred the state from trying to have it reimposed.
Bies was convicted in the 1992 murder of a 10-year-old boy in Cincinnati.