The Supreme Court on Tuesday night refused to stay the execution of Johnny Johnson, scheduled for 6 p.m. CDT. The court’s liberal justices dissented from the decision to allow the execution to go forward, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor arguing that Johnson was entitled to a hearing to determine whether he is mentally competent to be executed. “There is no moral victory,” Sotomayor wrote, “in executing someone who believes Satan is killing him to bring about the end of the world.”

Johnson was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m. CDT.

Johnson was sentenced to death for the 2002 attempted rape and murder of six-year-old Casey Williamson. Johnson argued that executing him would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because he suffers from serious mental illness and does not understand the reason for his execution.

After the Missouri Supreme Court declined either to put his execution on hold or to give him a hearing to develop his claims, Johnson went to federal court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit initially put his execution on hold, but the state appealed to the full court, which lifted the stay on Saturday.

Johnson came to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking the justices to put his execution on hold and take up his appeal. In a pair of brief unsigned orders issued shortly before 5:30 p.m. CDT, the justices declined to do so.

In a 10-page opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor contended that, under the Supreme Court’s case law, Johnson was entitled to a hearing on his competency to be executed because he had provided “extensive threshold evidence of incompetency — including voluminous medical records documenting his decades-long struggle with mental illness and a 55-page report from his psychiatrist.” Instead, she complained, the court’s orders “pave[] the way to execute a man with documented illness before any court meaningfully investigates his competency to be executed.”

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court. 

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On Friday morning the Supreme Court declined to block the execution of James Barber, who was sentenced to death in 2003 for the brutal murder of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps. Barber died by lethal injection at a prison in southern Alabama a few hours later. Barber’s execution followed a trio of botched lethal injections in 2022, two of which went so badly that they were eventually called off.  

The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision to allow Barber’s execution to proceed. In an 11-page opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s “decision denying Barber’s request for a stay allows Alabama to experiment again with a human life.”

Barber came to the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon, asking the justices to block Alabama from executing him by lethal injection. In the wake of the three botched executions in 2022, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey had ordered a moratorium on executions by lethal injections, as well as a review of the state’s lethal injection protocol. However, Barber contended, that review “led to no meaningful changes” in the protocol other than an extension of the time to set an IV line for the lethal injection.

Barber argued that executing him by lethal injection would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. He had a “history of medical personnel being unable to access his veins, as well as physical conditions that” increase his risk for experiencing additional pain. In light of the botched 2022 executions and the failure by the Alabama Department of Corrections in its review to take any real steps to address the problems in its lethal injection protocol, Barber contended, he faced a substantial risk of serious harm at the state’s hands, and should be executed by nitrogen gas instead.

In a brief unsigned order issued shortly after 1 a.m. on Friday morning, the Supreme Court turned down Barber’s request to intervene.

Emphasizing that the “Eighth Amendment demands more than the State’s word that this time will be different,” Sotomayor criticized Alabama’s lack of transparency in its internal review of its lethal injection protocol. “Clearly,” she wrote, “something went wrong in Alabama in 2022.” But the state’s “top-to-bottom review” did not produce a published report; instead, she noted, it yielded only a “one-and-a-half page letter to the Governor, without reporting any flaws or explanations for the prior failures.”

The “piecemeal changes” that the corrections department did make in response to the review, Sotomayor added, “appear designed only to ensure that” it “has an even greater period of time in which to search the bodies of its prisoners for IV access. They do not address the unnecessary pain those prisoners may experience.” “Without any evidence about what went wrong and only the State’s word that it has been fixed,” Sotomayor concluded, “Barber’s allegations that he will experience the same ‘needless suffering’ as” the prisoners in the 2022 executions “are more than justified.”

Sotomayor also flagged what she characterized as a broader problem with the court’s decisions allowing executions to go forward. In particular, she suggested, when the Supreme Court lifts stays of execution that the lower courts have granted, the lower courts rely on those rulings, even when they are only brief, unsigned orders that do not contain any legal reasoning, to reach erroneous conclusions. If the Supreme Court continues to do so, she wrote, some questions arising from executions “may never be answered.”

John Hamm, the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, said after Barber’s execution that medical personnel were able to set two IV lines – one in each of his hands – within six minutes.

Steve Marshall, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement that Barber was pronounced dead at 1:56 a.m. central time on Friday. “Justice has been served,” Marshall said.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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The Supreme Court put the execution of Richard Glossip on hold on Friday afternoon to give the justices time to consider the Oklahoma man’s appeals. Glossip was scheduled to be executed on May 18. The court’s brief unsigned order came four days after Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a highly unusual brief supporting Glossip’s request to stay his execution. Drummond explained that state officials now believe that Glossip’s conviction should not stand and that it would be “unthinkable” to allow his execution to go forward – but that the Oklahoma courts nonetheless refused to block the execution.  

Glossip was sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, who owned the Oklahoma City motel where Glossip worked as a manager. Justin Sneed, a handyman at the motel, told jurors that Glossip paid him $10,000 to kill Van Treese. Sneed’s testimony was the only evidence implicating Glossip; in exchange, prosecutors assured Sneed that he would not be sentenced to death.

In March of this year, Glossip filed a new petition for post-conviction relief, seeking to set aside his conviction and sentence. He pointed to new information – primarily notes from prosecutors – that he had received for the first time in January, indicating that Sneed had testified falsely about whether he had seen a psychiatrist. In fact, Sneed had been treated by a prison psychiatrist for bipolar disorder and had been prescribed lithium. 

On April 3, an independent counsel appointed by Drummond to review Glossip’s case urged the state to vacate his conviction. Rex Duncan, a former district attorney in Oklahoma, wrote that he believed that “Glossip was deprived of a fair trial in which the State can have confidence in the process and result.” There were so many errors in that process, Duncan stressed, both at trial and on appeal, that a new trial was necessary.

In the wake of Duncan’s report, Drummond joined Glossip in asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases, to set aside Glossip’s conviction, but that court rejected the request on April 20. Less than a week later, by a vote of 2-2, the state’s Pardon and Parole Board turned down Glossip’s request for clemency, which the attorney general – apparently for the first time in the state’s history – had also supported.

Glossip came to the Supreme Court last week, asking the justices to put his execution on hold to give them more time to consider his appeals.

In an 11-page filing on May, Drummond – joined on the brief by Paul Clement, who served as the U.S. solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration – noted that he “does not agree with everything Glossip has said in this case or in this Court and [he] continues to oppose” an earlier petition for review, filed in January. But, Drummond continued, he was “troubled” by the state’s failure to correct Sneed’s false testimony about whether he had seen a psychiatrist. Because he had “reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by the State’s key witness,” Drummond explained, he planned to agree with Glossip that the court should review the most recent ruling by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, rejecting Glossip’s request to set aside his sentence.

Friday’s order was not the first time that the Supreme Court has agreed to put Glossip’s execution on hold. In 2015, the court blocked his execution so that it could consider a challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol. In that case, Glossip v. Gross, the court eventually rejected the challenge by a vote of 5-4.

Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in Friday’s order, presumably because he was part of the panel that ruled on Glossip’s lethal-injection challenge while he was still a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday revived the case of a man on death-row in Texas who is seeking DNA testing to provide evidence that he asserts will clear him. By a vote of 6-3, the justices reversed a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that Rodney Reed had filed his challenge to the Texas law governing DNA testing too late.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court’s six-page opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and the court’s three liberal justices – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented in a solo opinion; Justice Samuel Alito dissented in an opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Reed was sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites. He has insisted that he was in a secret relationship with Stites and did not kill her. Instead, he suggested, Stites’ fiancé, a white police officer, had found out about her relationship with Reed, who is Black, and was actually responsible for her death.

Reed went to state court, seeking to have DNA testing conducted on several items found on or near Stites’ body and in the truck she often drove. When those efforts were unsuccessful, Reed then went to federal court in Texas, where he argued that the Texas law governing post-conviction DNA testing violates his right to due process by requiring him to comply with unconstitutional procedures before he can use the testing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Reed should have filed his lawsuit within two years of the trial court’s decision denying his request for DNA testing. On Wednesday, the court reversed that decision.

Both Reed and Texas agree, Kavanaugh observed, that the statute of limitations for his claim is two years. The question before the Supreme Court is when the clock on that two-year statute of limitations began to run. Normally, Kavanaugh explained, that occurs when a plaintiff has a “complete and present cause of action” – that is, when the plaintiff can actually file a lawsuit and obtain relief.

Reed contends that the state’s process to consider his request for DNA testing was fundamentally unfair, Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, Kavanaugh continued, in this case, Texas’s “alleged failure to provide Reed with a fundamentally fair process was complete,” and the statute of limitations began to run, only once “the state litigation ended and deprived Reed of his asserted liberty interest in DNA testing.” That end, Kavanaugh wrote, came when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Reed’s motion for rehearing on his request for DNA testing, making Reed’s federal lawsuit timely.

Such a rule, Kavanaugh reasoned, makes sense, particularly when compared with the consequences of the state’s proposed rule. If the statute of limitations began to run after the state court denied a request for DNA testing, then the plaintiff would likely file his federal claim even while his state appeals continued, leading to “senseless duplication.” And allowing the state appeals process to play out could focus or even eliminate the need for a federal lawsuit, Kavanaugh added.

Thomas argued in dissent that, even if Reed had filed his federal challenge on time, the district court did not have the power to review Reed’s claim because his lawsuit boils down to an appeal of the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals – which does not fall within the federal courts’ jurisdiction.

Alito, joined by Gorsuch, disagreed more directly with the core of the majority’s decision. He conceded that there is “room for debate about exactly when Reed’s DNA testing claim accrued.” But Alito was unconvinced in particular that the statute of limitations begins to run when a state’s highest court refuses to rehear and overturn its interpretation of the state testing statute. At the very least, Alito concluded, the limitations period begins to run when the highest state court issues that interpretation in the first place. “One need not have ‘supernatural foresight,’” Alito posited, “in order to predict that rehearing is unlikely to be granted. And it is hard to see how requiring” plaintiffs like Reed “to sue within two years after a state high court decision is issued is unfair.”

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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The Supreme Court declined to block the execution of Texas man Arthur Brown, who is scheduled to die on Thursday for his role in the 1992 shooting deaths of four people. Brown had asked the justices to put his execution on hold and direct a state court to consider his claim that he should not be executed because he is intellectually disabled. In a brief unsigned order, the justices on Thursday afternoon denied that request.

If any of the justices dissented from the denial of Brown’s plea for a stay of his execution, they did not note their disagreement publicly.

Brown was sentenced to death in November 1993 for his role in a robbery in Houston in which six people were shot; four of those people – Jessica Quinones, Jose Guadalupe Tovar, Audrey Brown, and Frank Farias – were killed. Brown’s initial challenges to his conviction and sentence were unsuccessful.

Nine years after Brown’s trial, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Relying on Atkins, Brown went back to state court, seeking to overturn his death sentence.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases, dismissed Brown’s request for relief on procedural grounds, without reaching his contention that he is intellectually disabled.

That prompted Brown to come to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. He told the justices that if the TCCA’s decision stands, he will be “executed without any court having considered the strong evidence that he is intellectually disabled.”

The state countered that, in deciding Brown’s case, the TCCA had effectively reviewed the merits of Brown’s claim. Brown had simply not shown, the state wrote, that he is intellectually disabled. Noting that the victims’ families “have waited 30 years for justice,” the state urged the court not to delay Brown’s execution “to review a claim that could have been raised years before.”

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court. 

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the execution of Donald David Dillbeck to move forward in Florida, denying his request for a stay in a brief, unsigned order. There were no recorded dissents.

Dillbeck was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of Faye Vann during a carjacking outside a Tallahassee shopping mall. He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on Thursday.

In his appeal to the court, Dillbeck argued that the Eighth Amendment bars his execution for two reasons. First, he suffered from a neurobehavioral disorder associated with prenatal alcohol exposure, a diagnosis that did not exist at the time of his trial. Second, a non-unanimous jury recommended that he receive the death penalty. In almost every other state that uses the death penalty, a jury must decide the sentence unanimously. But in 1991, when Dillbeck was sentenced, Florida law allowed juries to recommend the death penalty by a simple majority vote. Dillbeck’s jury voted 8-4 to recommend that he be executed.

Florida’s law on non-unanimous juries was partially struck down by the Supreme Court in Hurst v. Florida, and the Florida Supreme Court ruled that jurors must agree unanimously on the decision. Four years later, a more conservative state supreme court ruled that a jury only needed to be unanimous on one part of their decision: establishing an aggravating factor.

In response to Dillbeck’s appeal, Florida provided the justices with a detailed picture of that aggravating evidence. Vann was stabbed to death as Dillbeck attempted to escape from a life sentence he was already serving for a 1979 attempted-murder charge and the subsequent murder of Deputy Dwight Lynn Hall on a Fort Meyers beach. Dillbeck was 15 when he shot and killed Hall in his attempt to flee.

The state argued that the Florida Supreme Court had already addressed the Hurst claim but found it was not retroactive and that Dillbeck’s diagnoses did not qualify him for an exemption from execution.

In recent weeks, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican legislators in Florida have called for a return to a split jury system for recommending the death penalty. The same day he signed Dillbeck’s death warrant, DeSantis said in a speech at a Florida Sheriffs’ Association conference that eight jurors should be the minimum required to vote for a death-penalty recommendation. “[W]e can’t be in a situation where one person can just derail this,” he said. A bill echoing this idea was introduced in the state House and Senate this month.

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After a Texas court reinstated his execution Wednesday, John Lezell Balentine took his final appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that his death sentence should be reassessed in light of new evidence of juror misconduct and racial bias. The justices declined to block the execution in a brief, unsigned order with no recorded dissents.

Texas executed Balentine by lethal injection on Wednesday evening.

The court’s order denying Balentine’s appeal was the second time in two days that the court green-lighted an execution without comment.

John Balentine in 1999.

Balentine, a Black man, was sentenced to death in 1999 for shooting and killing three white teenagers in Amarillo, Texas. One of the victims, Mark Caylor, was the brother of Balentine’s ex-girlfriend and had been openly hostile about the couple’s interracial relationship. Caylor used racist slurs and at one point threatened to kill Balentine after stealing multiple guns.

Balentine confessed to the murders but argued that he may have been spared the death penalty if not for pervasive racial bias at his trial. The jury that convicted and sentenced Balentine was all white except for one juror of Hispanic descent. Lawyers for Balentine told the Supreme Court they had uncovered new evidence of animosity toward Black people and interracial couples by the jury’s foreperson, who said during jury deliberation that he would personally hunt down and kill Baletine if he was paroled.

The foreperson, Balentine’s lawyers argued, also did not disclose disqualifying violent incidents in his past and intimidated jurors who said that they did not want to give the death sentence. One juror, when asked by prosecutors after the verdict if she had been able to express her views, pointed to the foreperson and said, “He wouldn’t let us!”

Balentine’s trial counsel also demonstrated racial hostility toward their client. A handwritten note between Balentine’s attorneys from the penalty phase reads, “Can you spell justifiable lynching?”

A Texas judge ruled last week that Balentine’s execution should be delayed because his lawyers were not properly notified of the execution date. But on Wednesday morning, a Texas appeals court reinstated the execution, prompting Balentine to seek emergency relief at the Supreme Court. Balentine urged the justices to take his case to determine whether the evidence of racial bias and disqualifying omissions violated his constitutional rights under Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado and Buck v. Davis. He wrote that the case should at least be held pending the court’s decision in Cruz v. Arizona, a death penalty case involving state procedural rules that was argued at the Supreme Court in November.

Texas countered that Balentine raised “highly fact-bound questions” at a stage where there is no fact finding and that the court did not have jurisdiction over claims adequately dismissed by state courts. The state denied that any of the juror declarations demonstrate that the verdict was directly “animated by racial stereotypes or animus” and, therefore, Balentine’s case did not satisfy the Peña-Rodriguez standard. Further, the state said, the jury foreperson’s claims about his past were so “far-fetched” that his declaration could not be relied on.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to block the execution of Missouri inmate Leonard Taylor, who was sentenced to death for the 2004 murder of his live-in girlfriend and her three children. Taylor had asked the justices to put his execution on hold and give him a new hearing where a state court could consider evidence that he said would prove him innocent.

The justices turned down Bailey’s request in a brief, unsigned order. There were no dissents recorded.

Shortly after the court’s order, Missouri executed Taylor by lethal injection.

Taylor was convicted in 2008 on four counts of first-degree murder. The bodies of Taylor’s girlfriend, Angela Rowe, and her three children – 10-year-old Alexus, 6-year-old Acqreya, and 5-year-old Tyrese – were discovered on Dec. 3, 2004, in the house that she shared with Taylor.

In his filings in the Supreme Court, Taylor pointed to a variety of evidence that he said demonstrated his innocence. The case against Taylor rested in part on statements made by his brother, who initially told police that Taylor had confessed to the murders, but Taylor said that those statements were coerced. Prosecutors also relied on testimony by the medical examiner about precisely when the victims were killed, but Taylor asserted that the medical examiner changed his testimony to undermine Taylor’s alibi. And Taylor offered evidence that the victims were still alive when he left Missouri in November 2004 to travel to California to meet his daughter for the first time. That daughter, Deja Taylor, is now an adult, and both she and her mother say that they spoke on the phone with Rowe and one of her children while Taylor was in California.

Taylor urged the justices to take up his case to decide whether the Constitution bars the execution of an innocent person or, at the very least, whether an execution should go forward when there are “reasonable and substantial doubts” about the inmate’s guilt.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey countered that “Taylor’s claims of innocence present nothing new and nothing that could raise doubts about the jury’s verdict.” The state provided “ample review” of Taylor’s assertions, both in the courts and through his efforts to seek clemency from the governor, Bailey wrote. And in any event, Bailey added, Taylor waited until just four days before his execution to try to stop it.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to block the execution of a Texas man who contended that jurors relied on racist stereotypes and anti-Hispanic prejudices in sentencing him to death.

In a brief, unsigned order, the justices turned down a request from Wesley Ruiz, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the fatal 2007 shooting of Mark Nix, a Dallas police officer. There were no public dissents from Wednesday’s order.

Ruiz was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday evening.

Ruiz’s initial efforts to overturn his death sentence were unsuccessful. But Ruiz returned to court last month with signed affidavits from two jurors. One juror, the foreman at his trial, described Ruiz as “like an animal,” “a mad dog,” and “a thug & punk.” Another juror attributed an increase in crime to the growing number of Hispanic residents in her own neighborhood, and she disclosed that her sister had been violently assaulted by a man whom she believed to be Hispanic. The jurors relied on these stereotypes, Ruiz argued, to conclude that Ruiz was likely to be violent in prison and therefore should be sentenced to death.

After he failed to obtain relief in both the state courts and a federal district court, Ruiz sought emergency relief at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. He asked the justices to put his execution on hold and decide whether the court’s 2017 decision in Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado, carving out an exception for evidence that a juror was racially biased to a state rule that generally bars jurors from testifying about statements that might call the verdict into question, applies to sentencing proceedings in death-penalty cases.

Lawyers for Texas urged the justices to allow the execution to go forward as scheduled, dismissing Ruiz’s appeal as too little, too late. “Corporal Nix’s family,” the state concluded, “has waited for justice for sixteen years.”

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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The justices declined to block the execution of Robert Fratta, whose lethal injection in Texas was scheduled for Tuesday evening.

Fratta was sentenced to die for the 1994 murder-for-hire of his estranged wife, Farah. He was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1997. A federal court threw out that conviction, but in 2009 he was convicted and sentenced to death for a second time.

After a series of unsuccessful challenges to his conviction and sentence, Fratta came to the Supreme Court last year, asking the justices to put his execution on hold and take up his appeal. The justices denied two of his petitions for review as part of the regular order list that they issued on Monday. Later that morning, the court turned down two of Fratta’s emergency requests to put his execution on hold.

Fratta filed a third petition for review, accompanied by an additional request to block his execution, last week. In those appeals, Fratta’s legal team argued that the state failed to disclose the fact that a key witness had been hypnotized to refresh her memory.

The justices denied those appeals on Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before the execution was scheduled to begin.

There were no public dissents from any of the orders denying review.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

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