Sumner, Director, Nevada Department of Prisons, et al. v. Shuman (483 U.S. 66)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 22, 1987 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 483 U.S. 66 · 107 S. Ct. 2716
- Decided
- June 22, 1987
- Term
- October Term 1986
- Vote
- 6–3
- Majority author
- Justice Blackmun
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- State/territorial law held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents the question whether a statute that mandates the death penalty for a prison inmate who is convicted of murder while serving a life sentence without possibility of parole comports with the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. I In 1958, respondent Raymond Wallace Shuman was convicted in a Nevada state court of first-degree murder for the shooting death of a truckdriver during a roadside robbery. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole under § 200.030 of Nev. Rev. Stat., which at that time provided the jury with sentencing options of the death penalty or of life imprisonment with or without the possibility of parole. See 1957 Nev. Stats., ch. 238. In 1975, while serving his life sentence, Shuman was convicted of capital murder for the killing of a fellow inmate. Pursuant to the revised version of §200.030 then in effect, Shuman’s conviction mandated that he be sentenced to death. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed Shuman’s conviction and the imposition of the death penalty. It specifically rejected respondent’s claims of error, including his objection that the mandatory imposition of the death sentence violated his rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Shuman v. State, 94 Nev. 265, 578 P. 2d 1183 (1978). Shuman unsuccessfully pursued his challenge to the mandatory…
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