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Only juries can impose death penalty, Supreme Court rules

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court Monday ruled 7-2 that it is unconstitutional for judges rather than juries to make findings of fact that result in a person being sentenced to death.

The ruling is likely to require reconsideration of the death penalties of more than 100 death row inmates in five states where judges may have made such findings of fact, legal analysts said.

"What today's decision says is that the jury must find the existence of the fact that an aggravating factor existed," Justice Antonin Scalia said in a concurring opinion. Aggravating factors are those related to a crime that legally justify the imposition of a more severe penalty.

"Those states that leave the ultimate life-or-death decision to the judge may continue to do so -- by requiring a prior jury finding of an aggravating factor in the sentencing phase or, more simply, by placing the aggravating factor determination (where it logically belongs anyway) in the guilt phase," Scalia said.

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Ruling in a case from Arizona, the Supreme Court majority declared it is a violation of the right to trial by jury for a judge to impose a death sentence unless the jury has determined that factors exist justifying such a sentence.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered the opinion, which attracted the support of the court's most liberal and most conservative justices.

"Arizona presents no specific reasons for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent," Ginsburg wrote.

Only Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor dissented.

The case involved Timothy Ring, who was found guilty by a jury of first-degree murder in the death of the driver of an armored van in 1994 in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The death sentences for Ring and at least 125 other condemned Arizona prisoners are now on hold. Death sentences in Montana and Idaho, where a single judge alone imposes the penalty, will also have to be reviewed.

In Colorado and Nebraska, where the decisions are made by three-judge panels, death sentences will be on hold until authorities decide whether to re-sentence the death row inmates.

It is unclear from the Supreme Court ruling whether Florida, Alabama, Indiana and Delaware will be affected because in those states juries give judges advisory verdicts, which in certain circumstances judges may reject.