One Ring mind, turning him into the creature known as Gollum. The Ring, which Sauron had endowed with a will of its own, manipulated Gollum into hiding in a cave under the Misty Mountains near Mirkwood, where Sauron was beginning to resurface. There Gollum remained for nearly 500 years, until the Ring tired of him and fell off his finger as he was hunting an orc. As is told in "The Hobbit", Bilbo found the Ring shortly afterward while lost in the tunnels near Gollum's lair. When "The Hobbit" was written, Tolkien had not yet conceived of the Ring's sinister history. Thus,
Ring v. Arizona provided that the judge alone would make these findings. After a sentencing hearing, at which Ring's accomplices testified, the judge found that two aggravating factors applied: that Ring had committed the murder in expectation of pecuniary gain and that he had committed the murder in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner. Although he found that Ring had a "minimal" criminal record, the judge concluded that this did not outweigh the aggravating factors, and sentenced Ring to death. Writing for the majority, Justice Ginsburg began with an important characterization of Arizona's capital sentencing scheme. Based solely on the jury's verdict