Did Mills v. Maryland announce a “new rule” of constitutional criminal procedure?
Beard v. Banks Docket No. 02-1603 From: The Third Circuit Case at a Glance In 1983, George Banks was convicted of 13 murders, and was sentenced to death for 12 of those killings. He now claims that the instructions given to the sentencing jury violated Mills v. Maryland, 486 U.S. 36 (1988). The state claims that Mills cannot be applied retroactively to Banks’ case, despite the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court considered his Mills claim on the merits, and the fact that traditional ideas of finality arguably did not exist in Pennsylvania capital cases until at least 1998. • Previewed by Kathy Swedlow, the co-director of the Innocence Project and an assistant professor at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan.
