A simple DNA test could halt an upcoming execution. The Supreme Court refused to order it.
, a weekly newsletter that surfaces under-the-radar stories about what Trump is doing to the law—and how the law is pushing back., both a refuge for those seeking to escape abuses of power and a trap in which their claims of justice get lost in a maze of statutory intricacies.
Nowhere has this been more clearly on display than in the world of capital punishment.from championing the rights of capital defendants and death row inmates to deflecting and denying their pursuit of justice. Where once the court carefully scrutinized procedures used in death cases, insisting that they had to conform to the dictates ofis just the latest example of the way legal complexities can be deployed to facilitate the state’s desire to get on with the business of executing people. Reed. He contends that Stites was killed by her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, because he suspected that she was having an affair with Reed. He wants a chance to prove that he was not the killer by testing Stites’ belt, which was used to strangle her, for DNA. The belt is in the state’s possession, and Reed has offered to pay for the cost of the test.In the new world of capital jurisprudence, however, nothing is simple, even when it could help determine the guilt or innocence of someone who faces execution. Justice Sonia SotomayorThis dissent is another reminder that Sotomayor has assumed the mantle of those justices who, over the past 50 years, have made lasting contributions to the effort by persuading their colleagues to end the death penalty altogether or to provide justice and equal treatment for those caught up in the death-penalty system.: “Justice Sonia Sotomayor … maintains a sort of vigil in the capital cases other justices treat as routine.” She has used her dissents in capital cases like Reed’s “to speak to many audiences.”She recognizes the institutional limits of the court in correcting every injustice or every misreading of federal law, yet she wants to communicate the wrongness of those injustices and misreadings despite the court’s inability to intervene. Sotomayor is writing, Steiker noted, “to institutional actors—judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers—to make clear that the court, or least some portion of it, is keenly aware of problems that it is not presently able to correct.”Her predecessors in this role include Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, and Stephen Breyer. Recall that after 1976, when SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, Brennan and Marshall made a regular and consistent practice of using dissents to register their belief that it could not be reconciled with the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.some might find his repeated dissents on the issue “simply contrary, tiresome or quixotic.” … But he said that when it came to the death penalty, “I hope to embody a community striving for human dignity for all, although perhaps not yet arrived.”dissent 32 years later. He took his colleagues to task for their “futile effort” to achieve “consistency and rationality” in capital cases. He accused the court of “replacing … with mere aesthetics, and abdicating its … duty to provide meaningful judicial oversight to the administration of death by the States.”in raising Blackmun-like arguments. “The circumstances and the evidence of the death penalty’s application … taken together with my own 20 years of experience on this Court,” he observed, “lead me to believe that the death penalty, in and of itself, now likely constitutes a legally prohibited ‘cruel and unusual punishmen.’ ”In the Reed case, Sotomayor did not go that far, preferring instead to point out the court’s dereliction of duty and the failure of others in the death-penalty system to stop what seems to be a manifest injustice. She highlighted the unwillingness of the court’s conservative majority to interpret a Texas law,, that provides for postconviction DNA testing in a way that would achieve its purpose, even when this refusal has dire consequences for Reed., when he asked the district attorney in Bastrop County to consent to DNA testing of Stites’ belt. The DA refused., which states: “A convicting court may order forensic DNA testing … if: the court finds that: the evidence: still exists and is in a condition making DNA testing possible.” However, as Sotomayor notes, this regulation restricts relief to cases in which the defendant can show “a chain of custody sufficient to establish that has not been substituted, tampered with, replaced, or altered in any material respect.”Reed’s suit failed when Texas courts ruled that the victim’s belt had been “contaminated after being handled by ungloved attorneys, court personnel, and possibly the jurors,” and that, as a result, any DNA testing in the case could not satisfy the chain-of-custody requirement. ReedHe pointed out that the purpose of the chain-of-custody requirement was to ensure that DNA testing could be conducted reliably. And, as Sotomayor notes, since Article 64 was adopted, “laboratories, including in the Texas Department of Public Safety, have protocols for detecting and accounting for contamination that can ensure reliable results.”Trump DOJ Refuses to Rule Out Second Amendment Right to Nuclear Weapons Markwayne Mullin Vacating His Senate Seat Has Had a Domino Effect. If a New Contender Gets His Way, It’ll End at Christian Nationalism., did not, as Sotomayor puts it, “squarely confront the argument that the non-contamination requirement itself serves no legitimate purpose because DNA testing is now capable of generating accurate results even when the evidence has been contaminated.” She concludes her dissent by noting that it is “inexplicable” that legal officials and courts in a capital case would refuse to allow DNA testing “despite the very substantial possibility that such testing could exculpate Reed and identify the real killer.” Because of the refusal of the Supreme Court to take up the case, she adds, “the state will likely execute Reed without the world ever knowing whether Reed’s or Fennell’s DNA is on the murder weapon, even though a simple DNA test could reveal that information.” Inexplicable, indeed, to a justice like Sotomayor, who cannot bear the thought of executing the innocent. Her dissent exemplifies her belief that law should be a refuge for those who, like Reed, seek to escape the abuses of power and indifference that often play out in capital
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