Supreme Court rejects challenge to Arizona death penalty law

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court is rejecting a challenge to Arizona’s death penalty law.

The justices on Monday let stand the convictions and death sentences of Abel Daniel Hidalgo. He’s in a federal prison in Arizona serving life sentences for two other killings committed on an Indian reservation in Idaho.

Hidalgo says the law doesn’t sufficiently narrow eligibility for a death sentence.

Arizona law includes 14 aggravating circumstances that prosecutors can put forward to justify a death sentence. Jurors then deliberate between a sentence of death or life in prison.

The court’s four more liberal justices say they would be willing to take up the issue Hidalgo raised but in a different case in which lower courts could more thoroughly explore it first.