He was convicted at a court martial held at Ft. Hood in March 1989. He was found guilty on April 3, 1989. He made several attempts to have his sentence invalidated. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of his death sentence on June 3, 1996, in a decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Loving's attorneys had contended that the doctrine of separation of powers allowed only Congress rather than the President to define the "aggravating factors" that weighed in his sentencing. He lost a subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court in 2001. The lack of executions in the intervening decades was due to a Supreme Court decision in 1969 had held that the military did not have jurisdiction over crimes committed off-post by military personnel. The Supreme Court's reversal of that decision in 1987 made the possibility of military death sentences more likely. As they had in 1996, attorneys from the Cornell University Law School's Death Penalty Project were seeking further Supreme Court review of his case in November 2009, following his failure to persuade the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces that he had lacked adequate representation during the sentencing phase of his trial. Loving was not executed because neither President George W. Bush nor President Barack Obama authorized his execution. According to the "New York Times", "Military executions require presidential approval". On January 17, 2017, three days before leaving office, President Obama commuted Loving's death sentence to life imprisonment without parole.