The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority refused to halt another execution Wednesday night, over dissent from its three Democratic appointees who lamented the majority’s refusal to step in and resolve “an important constitutional issue that this Court has not addressed and has divided courts around the country.”
Writing for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority “abandons its duty to resolve this important question” raised by Charles Crawford. He had argued that his conviction for murdering 20-year-old Kristy Ray in 1993 must be vacated because his Sixth Amendment right to maintain his innocence was violated by his counsel’s concessions of his guilt at trial.
The justices previously ruled in a 2018 case, McCoy v. Louisiana, that a criminal defendant has the right to insist that their lawyer refrain from admitting guilt, even if the lawyer’s experience-based view is that doing so would give the defendant the best chance to avoid the death penalty. Sotomayor noted that Crawford had “vigorously objected” to his counsel’s concessions. So, it might seem, at first glance, that the McCoy decision should get him a new trial.
But McCoy was decided after Crawford had already mounted and lost an initial round of appeals. His latest appeal raised the question of whether that 2018 precedent retroactively applies in situations like his. The question has divided the lower courts and the Supreme Court hasn’t resolved it, Sotomayor observed.
The majority nonetheless refused to do so in Crawford’s case, “even though a man’s life is in the balance,” the Obama appointee wrote. He was executed by injection Wednesday in Mississippi, The Associated Press reported.
Successfully opposing Crawford’s bid to stay his execution, state officials wrote that he was pressing “yet another weak claim” that “does not justify delaying petitioner’s execution and justice for Kristy or the Ray family any longer.” The high court majority seemed to agree, though it didn’t explain the denial. Sotomayor’s dissent for the Democratic appointees in Crawford’s case follows another one earlier this week in a capital case in which she deemed “tragic” the majority’s decision to permit “a death sentence tainted by a single juror’s extraordinary misconduct to stand.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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