Mills v. Maryland (486 U.S. 367)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 6, 1988 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 486 U.S. 367 · 108 S. Ct. 1860
- Decided
- June 6, 1988
- Term
- October Term 1987
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Blackmun
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Vacated and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court. Petitioner seeks review of a decision of Maryland’s highest court which construes that State’s capital sentencing scheme in a manner that preserves its constitutionality but which may not have been evident at all to the jury charged with the sentencing function in this case. Because, we have no reason to believe that the jury also arrived at this “saving” construction, we must vacate the sentence of death and remand the case for resentencing. I Petitioner Ralph Mills was tried by a state-court jury and convicted of the first-degree murder of his cellmate in the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown. The jury found that petitioner repeatedly had stabbed his victim with a “shank” or homemade knife. In the sentencing phase of the trial, the same jury found that the State had established the one statutory aggravating circumstance it propounded, namely, that petitioner “committed the murder at a time when he was confined in a correctional institution.” App. 99. Defense counsel sought to persuade the jury of the presence of certain mitigating circumstances, in particular, petitioner’s relative youth, his mental infirmity, his lack of future dangerousness, and the State’s failure to make any meaningful attempt to rehabilitate petitioner while he was incarcerated. Id., at 89-93. On the verdict form provided by the trial…
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