Under the Delaware law, judges weren’t bound by jury recommendations in death-penalty cases, and they could weigh factors for and against capital punishment, independent of jury findings.

The Delaware Supreme Court ruled 3-2 that the law violates the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial. The majority ruled that a jury—not a judge—must decide unanimously and beyond reasonable doubt that facts in favor of a death sentence outweigh facts that counsel against.

“The proposition that any defendant should go to his death without a jury of his peers deciding that should happen would have been alien to the founders,” wrote Chief Justice Leo Strine Jr. in a concurring opinion joined by two of his colleagues.

The ruling suspended the death penalty in Delaware until the state legislature crafts new procedures. Legislation to abolish the death penalty passed in the Delaware Senate but failed in the House of Representatives earlier this year.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, praised the court’s decision and said he hoped it spelled the end to the death penalty in Delaware. “While I would have supported abolishing the death penalty legislatively, it is my hope that today’s decision will mean that we never see another death sentence in our state,” he said.

Nicole E. Byers, a spokeswoman for the Delaware Department of Justice, said the agency was reviewing the decision.

Until this year, Alabama, Delaware and Florida were the only states that allowed judges final say over death sentences. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death-sentencing procedures in January, ruling 8-1 that a jury must find each fact necessary to impose a death sentence.

A Delaware court considering a death-penalty case asked the state’s highest court to rule on whether Delaware’s death-penalty law survived the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in the Florida case, setting up Tuesday’s decision.

Justice James T. Vaughn Jr., writing in dissent, distinguished his state’s sentencing regime from Florida’s.

?While Florida’s law rendered jury recommendations “purely advisory,” he said, judges in Delaware couldn’t impose death sentences unless a jury unanimously found the existence at least one factor in support of capital punishment.

That, he said, should have saved the Delaware law from its own death sentence.

“I am satisfied that Delaware‘s death-penalty statute complies with the Sixth Amendment,” he wrote.

(Published by The Wall Street Journal - August 2, 2016)