In denying certiorari review, the high court left untouched a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit finding that conduct by Judge John M. Stuard of the Trumbull County Court of Common Pleas in Ohio, which included improper ex parte communications with the prosecutor in the criminal case against Nathaniel Jackson, rendered the sentencing of the defendant unconstitutional.
The justices did not provide an explanation for the denial, as is typical.
Jackson was convicted of aggravated murder in 2002 alongside Donna Roberts for conspiring to kill her ex-husband, Robert Fingerhut, as part of a plot aimed at securing life insurance benefits. Judge Stuard sentenced both defendants to death, but the Ohio Supreme Court later vacated Roberts' sentence after the judge admitted to asking the prosecutor in the case to draft the sentencing opinion, in violation of judicial ethics.
After Jackson made a motion for resentencing in light of the admission, Judge Stuard conceded that he also allowed Jackson's prosecutor to ghostwrite the sentencing opinion. Despite publicly reprimanding Judge Stuard, however, the Ohio Supreme Court denied Jackson's bid for resentencing.
In 2010, the Ohio Court of Appeals ordered a resentencing, instructing Judge Stuard to personally review the case and make a new sentencing decision. Jackson introduced new mitigating evidence at the new sentencing proceedings in 2012, but Judge Stuard, who refused to recuse himself from the case, declined to consider it, instead relying on the same mitigation record from 10 years prior. The judge then sentenced Jackson to death again, issuing a sentencing decision that was nearly identical to the one authored by the prosecutor.
The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Jackson's second death sentence, rejecting his claims that Judge Stuard was biased, that he was wrong in denying him the opportunity to present additional mitigating evidence, and that his attorneys at the penalty phase were ineffective.
Hitting a wall, Jackson turned to the federal judiciary and filed a petition for habeas corpus, a process allowing people sentenced in state courts to challenge their sentences on constitutional grounds. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio found Jackson's arguments compelling, saying in 2021 that state courts violated his Eighth Amendment right to present mitigating evidence and that the Ohio Supreme Court's decision contradicted U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
Bill Cool, the warden of Ross Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio, where Jackson is incarcerated, appealed to the Sixth Circuit, but lost. On Aug. 6, a three-judge panel granted Jackson habeas relief, calling Judge Stuard's conduct "egregious" and saying his ex parte communications "were neither innocent nor harmless."
"Judge Stuard secretly recruited the prosecutor to draft the entirety of an opinion sentencing Jackson to death," the panel — italicizing "to death" — said in its opinion. "Judge Stuard could impose the death penalty, but he could not be bothered to draft an opinion explaining why."
The panel also ruled that under a trio of U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the late 1970s and early 1980s — Lockett v. Ohio
, Eddings v. Oklahoma , and Skipper v. South Carolina — Jackson was entitled to introduce all available mitigating evidence at the second sentencing hearing, but Judge Stuard had prevented him from doing so in violation of the U.S. Constitution.Cool filed a certiorari petition Dec. 4, arguing that the Sixth Circuit misinterpreted the precedent and created a circuit split with other courts that allow a more limited scope of evidence during resentencing proceedings.
Cool argued in the petition that the Sixth Circuit's ruling incorrectly expanded Eighth Amendment protections by requiring Ohio's state trial court to reconsider all mitigating evidence at resentencing, when all it had to do was to correct a specific error, namely Judge Stuard's bias.
"The error had not affected the presentation of mitigation evidence, so the trial court was right to 'proceed from the point at which the error occurred' rather than backing up and redoing the mitigation hearing," Cool said in the petition, adding that the circuit split "implicates federalism and state sovereignty."
"States invest significant resources to ensure that each capital defendant enjoys a fulsome and fair mitigation evidentiary hearing," Cool said in the petition. "To hold that they must do so again on every remand, even though they conducted them without error beforehand, is burdensome and demoralizing."
The federal defender representing Jackson and an attorney for the state of Ohio did not respond Monday to requests for comments on the certiorari denial.
Jackson is represented by Paul Rudolph Bottei of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Southern District of Ohio.
Cool is represented by the Office of the Ohio Attorney General.
The case is Cool v. Jackson, case number 24-695, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Editing by Amy French and Orlando Lorenzo.
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