It’s another week at the Supreme Court that started with Democratic-appointed justices calling out their colleagues for refusing to address a perceived injustice.
Last week began with Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamenting the rejection of a petition from Rodney Reed. She said the effect of the denial is Texas will likely execute Reed without ever knowing whether his or another person’s DNA is on the murder weapon.
This week started with Sotomayor writing again in protest as the court declined to review yet another criminal appeal.
Monday’s denial came in the case of James Skinner, who was tried in Louisiana for the 1998 murder of Eric Walber. A co-defendant, Michael Wearry, was tried for the same crime. Wearry was convicted and sentenced to death, while Skinner’s initial trial ended with a hung jury, and then he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
In 2016, the Supreme Court vacated Wearry’s conviction because the prosecution violated its duty to disclose evidence to him.
Yet the high court declined on Monday to review Skinner’s appeal, even though, as Sotomayor wrote, “the prosecution failed to disclose the same favorable evidence to him in connection with his case.” She said the court should have granted review rather than “leaving that injustice in place,” and the court failed to “treat like defendants alike.”
The upshot, the Obama appointee wrote, is Skinner “risks spending the rest of his life in prison while Wearry walks free,” and by refusing to get involved, the high court “refuses to enforce its own precedents” stemming from the landmark 1963 ruling in Brady v. Maryland, regarding prosecutors’ duty to disclose favorable evidence to the defense.
Opposing review, state officials said Wearry’s case doesn’t help Skinner because the latter “has no viable challenge to his confessions and the other corroborating evidence that squarely support the jury’s verdict.” Skinner’s lawyers said in his final reply brief to the justices that the state “insinuates the jury heard Mr. Skinner himself confess,” but what the jury “actually heard was two informants (themselves the subject of Brady violations) claim Mr. Skinner confessed.”
It takes four justices to grant review. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor on Monday. Even when they are joined by the court’s third Democratic appointee, Elena Kagan (as they were in the Reed case last week), it will still be one vote short of securing review — to say nothing of how the Republican-appointed majority would rule if review were granted.
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