A convicted rapist and murderer should not receive the death penalty because some of the jurors who sentenced him consulted biblical law in making their decision, according to the Colorado Supreme Court.
A closely divided panel of that state's highest court ruled March 28 that jurors should not have taken biblical law into account when reaching the decision.
“The judicial system works very hard to emphasize the rarified, solemn and sequestered nature of jury deliberations,” the majority opinion in the 3-2 decision read. “Jurors must deliberate in that atmosphere without the aid or distraction of extraneous texts.”
But the minority justices disagreed. “The biblical passages the jurors discussed constituted either a part of the jurors' moral and religious precepts or their general knowledge, and thus were relevant to their court-sanctioned moral assessment,” they wrote.
Colorado criminal law is unusual in that it requires judges in capital cases to instruct jurors to take into account their own moral convictions in dealing with such sentencing decisions.
According to court papers, one juror testified that she consulted the famous passage in Leviticus 24, in which Hebrew law requires “an eye for an eye.”
The decision means that Robert Harlan's sentence will be changed to life without parole. In 1995, he was convicted of raping and murdering a woman near Denver, as well as shooting and paralyzing a woman who was trying to help the victim escape.
Associated Baptist Press