Gov. Jerry Brown Commutes Shirley Ree Smith, Shaken Baby Sentence April 9, 2012, 5:37 pm One of the first posts I wrote for this blog was on the Supreme Court's first ruling of this term, Cavazos v. Smith. Shirley Ree Smith was found guilty in a 1997 California trial of shaking her seven-week-old grandson to death, and sentenced to 15 years to life. But the Ninth Circuit overturned the conviction, arguing that there was "no demonstrable support" for it. Then the high court justices, who love to pick on the San Francisco-based Ninth, vacated the lower court's decision and reinstated the trial verdict. In their 6-3 ruling they said "it is the responsibility of the jury - not the court - to decide what conclusions should be drawn from evidence." I opposed the ruling not for procedural reasons, per se, but because I don't think Ms. Smith belongs in prison. Doctors have cast doubt on whether infants can be fatally injured through shaking alone. Apparently the governor of California, Jerry Brown, agrees. On Friday he commuted Ms. Smith's sentence, explaining that she's "been free from custody since 2006 while numerous federal judicial proceedings evaluated whether her conviction should be reinstated" and that she "has been law-abiding since her release." He also noted that "significant doubts surround" her conviction. Cases like these are exactly what the clemency power is for, and Mr. Brown deserves to be congratulated for using it. The facts of the case were always questionable, and there's good reason to think that the Supreme Court upheld the jury verdict primarily out of spite against the Ninth Circuit. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg even said as much in her dissenting opinion, accusing the majority of having been "bent on rebuking the Ninth Circuit for what it conceives to be defiance of our prior demands" and of seeing the case as a "fit opportunity to teach the Ninth Circuit a lesson."