Public defenders challenging Delaware’s death-penalty statute pushed back last week against the Department of Justice’s argument in favor of its validity, calling its understanding of a controlling U.S. Supreme Court decision “faulty and incomplete.”
In their 25-page reply brief dated April 18, the attorneys for convicted murderer Benjamin Rauf knocked the DOJ for “selectively citing narrow language” from the Supreme Court’s January ruling in Hurst v. Florida, which struck down that state’s law as unconstitutional because it allowed a judge to independently find the existence of aggravating factors in sentencing.
