State v. Robinson

Summary

The court held that the Governor's commutation of defendant's death sentence to life imprisonment without parole eliminated his right to a direct appeal in the Supreme Court under the capital-case jurisdiction statute and related automatic-review provision. The court reasoned that those provisions were designed principally to prevent arbitrary or unjust executions, a concern no longer present after commutation, and that legislative history supported routing the appeal to the Court of Appeals. The court remanded for appellate review there.