More than 100 death sentences in Arizona were struck down by what many are calling a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Many experts believe that the two back-to-back blows against capital punishment could  mean that more than 500 more death sentences also could fall in Florida and other states where juries do not decide death penalty.

This also means that prosecutors have their hands full and that state legislators will have to overhaul their capital punishment laws.

The court held that Arizona's law violated the Sixth Amendment's right to trial by jury because under that law judges, not jurors, must make the crucial factual findings required to sentence a defendant to death. Ring v. Arizona, No. 01-488.

The 7-2 decision also wiped out death penalty statutes in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska and Colorado, where judges alone determine who lives and who dies. The decison also cast doubt on capital regimes in Florida, Alabama, Indiana and Delaware, where juries issue advisory sentences that judges are free to follow or override. According to the ABA, all nine states account for 797 of the nation's 3,700 death row inmates. Indiana juries will now have the sole voice in capital sentencing, bringing the state in line with the federal government and the 29 other death penalty states.

No sooner had the justices issued Ring than eyes turned toward Florida and Alabama and their variations on judge-controlled sentencing. The high court had stayed two Florida executions and a third in Alabama pending resolution of Ring. In addition, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has stayed another execution there, and one condemned Florida inmate has a cert petition on file with the supreme court raising similar issues.

In light of Ring, lawyers involved in the cases expect the justices to send them back to the state courts for reconsideration before the high court's current term ends today.

The supreme court's second major pronouncement on capital punishment in less than a week promises that lower courts and legislators will have to put in plenty of overtime fine-tuning or overhauling their laws in many, if not most jurisdictions that use the death penalty.

On June 20, the justices held 6-3 that executing the mentally retarded violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Atkins v. Virginia, No. 00-8452. That decision directly affected 20 states that allow executions of the retarded and could affect even more as they grapple with procedures to determine who's retarded.

As it also did in Atkins, the court in Ring did a relatively quick about-face on a major aspect of capital punishment. Just 12 years ago, the court held constitutional the very statute it erased Monday. Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 (1990).

But the justices in Atkins looked outside themselves to state legislatures, opinion polls and trends in other countries to find a "national consensus" against executing the retarded. In contrast, the decision in Ring largely reflected a court internally coming to grips with an inescapable course of reasoning it charted in 2000 with Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466.

In Apprendi, the justices struck a hate crime statute that allowed a judge to increase a defendant's maximum sentence after the jury's verdict by making an additional factual finding by a preponderance of the evidence that racial bias motivated the defendant. The court held that, other than a prior conviction, a jury had to find beyond a reasonable doubt any fact that would increase the sentence.

The extension to the death penalty came in the case of Timothy Stuart Ring, condemned for the 1994 armed robbery and shooting of an armored truck driver in Glendale, Ariz. To sentence Ring to death, the trial court had to find on its own at least one aggravating factor that separated that murder from lesser ones.

"The right to trial by jury guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment would be senselessly diminished if it encompassed the fact-finding necessary to increase a defendant's sentence by two years, but not the fact-finding necessary to put him to death," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for six justices in Ring. Joining her were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas. Concurring Justice Stephen G. Breyer would have decided the case under the Eighth Amendment.

But Scalia and Thomas, members of the Apprendi majority but strong supporters of the death penalty, had to drag themselves to Ring's side of the table. Lawyers who attended oral arguments in April say Scalia appeared uncomfortable even then. Scalia acknowledged his discomfort in a concurring opinion joined by Thomas.

Scalia complained that the court had caused the problem in the first place in the line of cases beginning with Furman v. Georgia, which abolished the death penalty in 1972 and coerced states into developing aggravating factors to narrow the field of murderers eligible for death. As Scalia put it, those decisions had no constitutional foundation and would have been better if the court had "invented" a judge-sentencing regime at the time rather than bringing jurors into the picture.

But Scalia concluded that recently he has been bothered even more by "the accelerating propensity of both state and federal legislatures to adopt 'sentencing factors' determined by judges that increase punishment beyond what is authorized by the jury's verdict." The trend, Scalia beefed, "cause[s] me to believe that our people's traditional belief in the right of trial by jury is in perilous decline."

In a terse concurrence, Kennedy wrote that he still believes Apprendi was wrongly decided, but now that it’s the law, it "must be implemented in a principled way."

In her dissent in Apprendi, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had pointed to the Arizona death penalty law as just the type of mess the court could wade into by tinkering with fact-finding and sentencing responsibilities. Dissenting again in Ring with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, O'Connor predicted the wave of litigation that already has inundated the courts since Apprendi would grow even worse.

"By expanding on Apprendi, the court today exacerbates the harm done in that case," O'Connor wrote.

In another case decided Monday, the justices left the door closed to even more litigation when they decided that judges by themselves can find facts that increase mandatory minimum sentences, as opposed to the increases in maximums at issue in Apprendi and Ring. Harris v. United States, No. 00-10666.

In any event, both prosecutors and defense lawyers agree that Ring leaves many questions unanswered and will cause huge increases in litigation.