The court took different stances in cases involving Muslim and Buddhist death-row inmates.
By Robert Barnes Robert Barnes Reporter covering the U.S. Supreme Court Email Bio Follow March 30 at 7:00 AM It’s difficult to say with certainty why the Supreme Court on Thursday night stopped the execution of a Buddhist inmate in Texas because he was not allowed a spiritual adviser by his side, when last month it approved the execution of a Muslim inmate in Alabama under the almost exact circumstances.
“That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality,” Kagan wrote then. But the court in just the last few years has ruled for Muslim petitioners who claimed discrimination: an inmate who was not allowed to grow a short beard because of prison policies, and a woman who was denied a job at Abercrombie & Fitch because of her hijab.Ilya Somin, a law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and a sharp critic of the court’s decision in Dunn v.
It is not clear from the ruling what role Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who were in the majority in the Ray case, played in the Murphy case. They did not join Kavanaugh’s opinion, nor did they note, as Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch did, that they would have allowed the execution to proceed.Somin said he is “fairly confident Alito and Roberts switched” because they did not record themselves as objecting, as Thomas and Gorsuch did.
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