Justices' Misplaced Priorities in Reviewing Capital Cases

             John Henry Ramirez committed a senseless and savage murder in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 2004 when he was twenty years old. He killed a convenience store clerk by stabbing him more than two dozen times and then robbing him of the paltry sum of $1.25.

            Nothing about Ramirez’s offense or the trial and death sentence four years later cries out for special consideration in the courts. Even so, the Supreme Court granted Ramirez a reprieve on Wednesday [Sept. 8] based solely on a religious freedom claim that he is entitled to be ministered to by his spiritual adviser as he is being put to death.

            The justices granted Ramirez a stay of execution on Wednesday night, three hours after the scheduled start of the lethal injection protocol. Along with the stay of execution, the Court also agreed to hear Ramirez’s substantive appeal in Ramirez v. Collier that the state must allow his spiritual adviser to lay hands on him and pray aloud inside the execution chamber once the execution begins.

            As an opponent of capital punishment, this writer cannot begrudge Ramirez the reprieve that the Court granted last week. But the justices’ solicitude for Ramirez’s plea is in stark contrast with the justices’ usual indifference toward pleas from death row inmates based on claimed legal errors in their convictions or sentences.

            As one example, the Court refused on April 19 to hear Frederick Whatley’s effort to challenge the death sentence he received in Georgia for killing a liquor store clerk during an armed robbery. Whatley asked the justices to review his sentence because he had been shackled with leg irons while testifying in his capital sentencing hearing. Dissenting from the Court’s refusal to hear the case in Whatley v. Warden, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the shackling was “unnecessary” and “plainly prejudicial” based on the Court’s precedents and evident grounds for finding the death sentence unconstitutional.

            Sotomayor had dissented three months earlier from the Court’s order in United States v. Higgs (January 15) that brushed aside questions about the lethal injection protocols that the federal government was using as it resumed federal executions after a seventeen-year hiatus.

            Referring to a succession of cases, Sotomayor minced no words in complaining. “This Court has consistently rejected inmates’ credible claims for relief," she wrote. "The Court has even intervened to lift stays of execution that lower courts put in place, thereby ensuring those prisoners’ challenges would never receive a meaningful airing.”

            Earlier, Sotomayor and Kagan had joined in dissent when the Court refused to hear Alfred Bourgeois’ effort to avoid execution for the killing of his infant daughter based on an intellectual disability defense. The majority in Bourgeois v. Watson (December 12, 2020) refused to hear the case on the ground that Bourgeois could not raise the issue a second time after a lower federal court had rejected the defense.

            “Bourgeois presents a serious question that is likely to recur,” Sotomayor wrote in dissenting from the denial of certiorari. “Waiting to grant certiorari may mean permitting the illegal execution of people with intellectual disabilities.”

            Sotomayor dissented again, along with Breyer and Kagan, when the Court refused in Johnson v. Precythe (May 24) to consider an Eighth Amendment challenge brought by a Missouri inmate, Ernest Johnson, who claimed that because of a brain tumor, he would suffer “excruciating seizures” if put to death by lethal injection of the drug pentobarbital. Sotomayor argued that the federal appeals court that rejected Johnson’s plea had abused discretion by refusing permission for him amend his appeal. “We should not countenance the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment simply for the sake of expediency,” she wrote.

            The stay of execution for Ramirez marked the second time this year that the Court had granted a reprieve for a death row prisoner based on a religious freedom claim. The Court’s ruling in Dunn v. Smith (February 6) effectively upheld a ruling by the Eleventh Circuit that Alabama could not execute inmate Willie Smith without granting his last wish to have his pastor with him during the execution.

            Four justices – Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Barrett – joined in an opinion decrying Alabama’s policy of leaving inmates to die without spiritual attendance. “Alabama’s policy,” Kagan wrote, “substantially burdens Smith’s exercise of religion.”

            With that opinion in the books, it would have been inconsistent at the least for the Court last week to have denied Ramirez the solace of his spiritual adviser during the planned execution. By granting certiorari in Ramirez’s case, the Court is now preparing to lay down guidelines for states to follow when a condemned prisoner asks for a chaplain at his side.  

            In Ramirez’s case, Texas argued that his request for his spiritual adviser’s presence would jeopardize security and detract from the decorum of the execution. In the Alabama case, Kagan rejected that concern. “[P]ast practice, in Alabama and elsewhere, shows that a prison may ensure security without barring all clergy members from the execution chamber,” she wrote.

            After considering Ramirez’s religious freedom claim, the justices would do well to give just as much attention to their responsibility to guard against legal errors in capital trials and sentencings rather than brush those issues aside.