John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight
A U.S. Supreme Court case on regulatory rulemaking doesn’t give South Dakota’s only death row inmate a chance to renew and re-litigate the appeals that could spare his life, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Roberto Lange’s Friday decision in a case involving Briley Piper came as part of a 71-page ruling. The ruling also denied the inmate’s claims that his defense lawyers performed poorly enough to warrant an overturning of his death sentence.
Piper was one of the three men who tortured and killed 19-year-old Chester Alan Poage near Spearfish in 2000.
In a press release, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley said Lange’s ruling “is a step forward in carrying out the jury’s verdict and assuring that the Poage family receives justice.”
Piper can appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
His most recent appeal zeroed in on the Loper Bright decision issued last summer by the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that ruling, federal courts were expected to defer to the expertise of agency rulemakers in disputes over the constitutionality of things like Environmental Protection Agency requirements for wetlands, Labor Department guidance on workplace safety or, in the Loper Bright situation that upended the 40-year precedent on rulemaking, whether a commercial fishing boat is obliged to pay the salary of an on-board federal inspector.
Loper Bright opened the door to more court scrutiny of such agency rules. Its animating logic is that Congress makes laws, courts interpret laws’ legality, and rulemaker expertise should not dilute judges’ rights to ascertain the legality of bureaucrat-written regulations. Piper’s lawyers argued that the same logic applies to the federal law that draws lines around a death row inmate’s right to appeal a sentence.
The law limits how closely a federal judge can scrutinize a state judge’s decisions in death row appeals. Piper’s legal team argued that federal judges have the right to review constitutional questions, and that a congressionally authorized federal death penalty law that ties their hands shouldn’t stand.
Lange, they said, should be able to review everything the state Supreme Court said in upholding Piper’s death sentence.
Lange disagreed. The Loper Bright ruling, he wrote, “provides no support for Piper’s argument that Congress lacks the authority to limit lower federal courts’ power.”