Privileges revoked

I'm confused by this story of a Colorado Supreme Court ruling Monday:

In a sharply divided ruling, Colorado's highest court on Monday upheld a lower court's decision throwing out the sentence of a man who was given the death penalty after jurors consulted the Bible in reaching a verdict. The Bible, the court said, constituted an improper outside influence and a reliance on what the court called a "higher authority." …

The ruling involved the conviction of Robert Harlan, who was found guilty in 1995 of raping and murdering a cocktail waitress near Denver. After Mr. Harlan's conviction, the judge in the case — as Colorado law requires — sent the jury off to deliberate about the death penalty with an instruction to think beyond the narrow confines of the law. Each juror, the judge told the panel, must make an "individual moral assessment," in deciding whether Mr. Harlan should live.

The jurors voted unanimously for death. The State Supreme Court's decision changes that sentence to life in prison without parole.

That New York Times account isn't quite clear on when and why the jurors were looking at the Bible. Was it when contemplating Harlan's conviction or when contemplating the option of the death penalty? The way I see it, those are completely different situations.

It would be insane and irrelevant for a jury to consult the Bible when considering whether or not to convict. The Bible is a magnificent source of wisdom, both revealed and reasoned, asserted and argued for. I've spent years studying it. Yet when deciding whether or not a particular individual committed a particular crime it has no bearing on the particular facts of the case. If the jury in question was consulting the Bible instead of those facts in making that decision, then it seems proper to rule that they were out of bounds. But if that's the case, it would seem that jury's decision to convict — and not just its decision to impose the death penalty — ought to be overruled.

On the other hand, a jury's decision to consult the Bible when considering whether or not to impose the death penalty seems acceptable. That decision — occurring after a person has already been found guilty of a capital crime — is not a simple matter of particular facts. That decision involves more than a disinterested calculus of quantifiable mitigating factors subtracted from aggravating ones.

This is a decision that demands the jury exercise judgment and wisdom. It is one of the weightiest and most difficult decisions a group of citizens can be asked to make, and I think they ought to be free to consult the Bible, or the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, or "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "Evangelium Vitae."

If they want to ask the bailiff to bring them a VCR and a copy of Tim Robbins' "Dead Man Walking" I don't have a problem with it.

Colorado state law, however, may have a problem with it:

Legal experts said that Colorado was unusual in its language requiring jurors in capital felony cases to explicitly consult a moral compass. Most states that have restored the death penalty weave in a discussion of moral factors, lawyers said, along with the burden that jurors must decide whether aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors in voting on execution.

"In Colorado it's a more distinct instruction," said Bob Grant, who was the prosecutor in the Harlan case.

My expertise in Colorado law consists of having read the above paragraphs, so I'm in no position to judge whether or not Monday's ruling was correct according to the language of the state law.

I wonder, though, whether Colorado law would allow Quakers, Mennonites, Roman Catholics or anti-death penalty Baptists like myself to serve on juries. It does little good to simply bar us from consulting a hard copy of the Bible — we've got the relevant passages committed to memory. What would Colorado law make of my Dutch Reformed friends who believe in the death penalty but, based on a cautious prudence gleaned from biblical wisdom, do not believe it should be applied without the testimony of at least two eyewitnesses?

I didn't study the law, I studied theology, so I'm not qualified to second-guess the Colorado Supreme Court's decision.

I am, however, qualified to second-guess — and to condemn as shoddy, ill-informed, half-assed and possibly heretical — the thinking of the illiterate, Levitican CHINOs on that jury:

One juror testified she studied Romans and Leviticus, including Leviticus 24, which includes the famous articulation of Old Testament justice: "eye for eye, tooth for tooth."

Jeebus. Put the Bible down, ma'am, and step away slowly before someone gets hurt. You've lost your Bible-quoting privileges until you demonstrate at least a rudimentary understanding of what it means …

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments below for a much clearer explanation of the legal questions at work in this case. (Thanks Dwight and kodi.) Meanwhile, I will try to figure out whether I should be more relieved or enraged over the fact that I and people like me would never be allowed to sit on a jury in a capital case ….