Source: https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2005/05/are_four_justic.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 06:56:02+00:00

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Sentencing Law and Policy: Are four Justices ready to grant cert. on the constitutionality of lethal injection protocols?
Missouri has not countered Brown's medical evidence with any medical evidence of its own, but rather relied solely on procedural and legal defenses to this action. The state's failure to counter Brown's medical evidence leaves Brown's evidence uncontroverted. Thus, this case is unlike those in which similar challenges to this three-drug protocol were rejected, because in those cases the state presented medical evidence to counter the prisoner's claim he would be conscious and suffer extreme, unnecessary pain during an execution. On the current state of this record, where the State of Missouri has not presented any evidence to counter Brown's medical evidence, I believe it is clear Brown is entitled to a stay of his execution.
This is not the first time that a prisoner facing imminent execution has been able to muster four votes for cert but not the fifth vote necessary to obtain a stay. In 1985 in Darden v. Wainwright, the Court voted 5-to-4 against a stay of execution; but out of deference and respect for the views of his four colleagues who wanted to hear the merits of the challenge, Justice Powell switched his vote at the last minute (despite his view that the petition was not meritorious) in order to permit plenary consideration of the case. In a post-Darden case (Straight v. Waingwright), Justice Brennan construed Darden to mean that, when there are four votes for cert., one of the justices not voting for cert will switch his vote and thereby enter the necessary stay. In view of yesterday's SCOTUS action, it appears that the practice described by Justice Brennan is no longer followed as a matter of course.
This is not the first time this practice has not been followed; see, e.g., Rook v. Rice, 107 S. Ct. 30, 33 (1986) (Brennan, J., dissenting from denial of stay).
The practice (an adverse Justice's switching sides to guarantee a stay when four Justices want to grant cert.) has been dead (no pun intended) for some years. In 1990, for example, the court granted cert in a case involving incompetency to be executed (I think the style(s) of the case(s) were Hamilton v. Texas and Hamilton v. Collins; they involved a mentally ill Texas DR prisoner named James Smith and were brought by his mother (Hamilton) as "next friend"), but could not muster four votes for a stay; Smith was executed (this was during the summer recess) and the cases remained on the docket until the Justices returned in October, at which time they were dismissed as moot. Similarly, in Herrera v. Collins (the infamous case in which the USSC held that "actual innocence," standing alone, is not a ground for federal habeas relief), the Court granted cert but no fifth vote for a stay was forthcoming; Herrera would have been executed before the Court heard his case but for the grant of a stay by a single judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. At a minimum, the practice is "no longer followed as a matter of course," and it might be better to say it's history.

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