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Tonight, the Trump administration is trying to carry out the last scheduled execution of this administration. Dustin Higgs's execution is currently stayed, but DOJ is asking #SCOTUS to let them proceed tonight with killing Higgs.
Here's the case docket at #SCOTUS: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/20-927.html
There's an issue that could be relevant coming out of Terre Haute relating to COVID precautions, which @RDunhamDPIC is tracking here: https://twitter.com/RDunhamDPIC/status/1350220988412284928
Not clear if we'll be getting an appeal/stay request at #SCOTUS off this Brady-related challenge, which Higgs lost at the 7th Circuit: https://twitter.com/RDunhamDPIC/status/1350175494822621192
If #SCOTUS allows Higgs's execution to proceed, it would be the 13th execution by the Trump administration, an appalling record. Joe Biden can stop such inhumanity, as @RepCori discussed earlier today: https://twitter.com/theappeal/status/1350169351761113091
Follow @LilianaSegura, who is at Terre Haute (again), for more on the ground at the prison: https://twitter.com/LilianaSegura/status/1350230873258520577
Still no word from #SCOTUS, meaning there remains a stay in place preventing Dustin Higgs's execution.
Still waiting to hear whether #SCOTUS will vacate the Fourth Circuit's stay of execution preventing the US gov't from killing Dustin Higgs tonight — a request from DOJ, which is still trying to make the execution happen.
Breaking: #SCOTUS has vacated the stay preventing Dustin Higgs's execution, and ordered other relief that DOJ sought. The execution of Dustin Higgs will be allowed to proceed. The 3 liberal justices dissent, and Breyer and Sotomayor write. https://www.scribd.com/document/490905772/20-927-20A134
Justice Breyer is not happy. "How just is a legal system that would execute an individual without consideration of a novel or significant legal question that he has raised?"
We also get a lengthy dissent from Justice Sotomayor. "To put [this moment] in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades."
![We also get a lengthy dissent from Justice Sotomayor. "To put [this moment] in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades."](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er01pFDXAAAuGzi.png "We also get a lengthy dissent from Justice Sotomayor. \"To put [this moment] in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades.\"")
Justice Sotomayor lays out the abhorrent reality of the past year, mincing no words and refusing to leave her thoughts in the form of a question: "This is not justice. ... I dissent."
I almost tweeted earlier that, if the execution were to proceed, I wanted us to get writing from the liberals that was up to the moment. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and, in his professorial way, Stephen Breyer delivered tonight.
TELL THEM. "Over the past six months, this Court has repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes, often at the Government’s request, allowing it to push forward with an unprecedented, breakneck timetable of executions."
Sotomayor calls out her colleagues not only for allowing the executions to go forward in this way, but also for preventing the lower courts from actually doing their job and developing interpretations of the law.
She went through it: "These findings with respect to Purkey and Montgomery raised significant questions as to whether their executions comported with the Constitution. We will never have definitive answers to those questions because this Court sanctioned their executions anyway."
This has been an opinion in the works for a while. Sotomayor details problems throughout these 13 cases — problems relating to the protocol, the interpretation of federal law, and constitutional issues — in a 10-page decision that is damning of the Trump admin and her colleagues.
Justice Sotomayor, in conclusion: "Those whom the Government executed during this endeavor deserved more from this Court. I respectfully dissent."
And, as @steve_vladeck notes (and Stephen Breyer suggested as well), procedurally, this decision was not the Court's norm. https://twitter.com/steve_vladeck/status/1350298120849158144
Breyer doesn't specifically call out the merits resolution of the cert before judgment via one-paragraph decision without merits briefing combined aspect of this — which, for non-lawyers, is as much of a procedural WTF as it sounds like it is — but he does raise broader issue.
There is no doubt that the only moral thing that Joe Biden can do, after having lived through this killing spree, is to stop executions, stop new death cases, commute death row, and work with Congress to end the federal death penalty once and for all.
RIP, Dustin Higgs. https://twitter.com/mikebalsamo1/status/1350328802816176129
Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and Jeffrey Rosen killed 13 people by way of legal executions—many of whom had serious mitigating, constitutional, or competency claims—under a sped-up process that ultimately was authorized by the Supreme Court, often over the objection of lower courts.
And while the Trump administration’s killing spree ended these 13 people’s lives, prior administrations, prior attorneys general, tried and and then defended all of these cases — taking actions that led to these 13 killings, rather than preventing them.
