Jonathan Edward Boyer, Petitioner v. Louisiana (569 U.S. 238)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided April 29, 2013 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 569 U.S. 238 · 133 S. Ct. 1702
- Decided
- April 29, 2013
- Term
- October Term 2012
- Vote
- 5–4
- Issue area
- Judicial Power
- Disposition
- Petition denied or appeal dismissed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
PER CURIAM. The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted. It is so ordered . Justice ALITO, with whom Justice SCALIA and Justice THOMAS join, concurring. We granted certiorari in this case to decide "[w]hether a state's failure to fund counsel for an indigent defendant for five years, particularly where failure was the direct result of the prosecution's choice to seek the death penalty, should be weighed against the state for speedy trial purposes." Pet. for Cert. i. The premise of that question is that a breakdown in Louisiana's system for paying the attorneys representing petitioner, an indigent defendant who was charged with a capital offense, caused most of the lengthy delay between his arrest and trial. Because the record shows otherwise, I agree that the writ of certiorari was improvidently granted. In February 2002, petitioner and his brother were hitchhiking in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Petitioner robbed and murdered a driver who picked them up. After enlisting his brother to help him cover up the crime, petitioner fled to Florida, where he was captured about a month later. The evidence of petitioner's guilt was overwhelming. He gave the police a detailed statement describing the murder; his brother, an eyewitness, agreed to testify about the crime; multiple other members of petitioner's family told police that they had heard petitioner confess; and…
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