sonia sotomayor is again pressing the Supreme Court to confront what she described as an unresolved injustice, after the justices declined to review another criminal appeal at the start of the week.
What happens when Sonia Sotomayor says the Court is “leaving that injustice in place”?
The Court’s Monday denial centered on the case of James Skinner, who was tried in Louisiana for the 1998 murder of Eric Walber. A co-defendant, Michael Wearry, was tried for the same crime. Wearry was convicted and sentenced to death, while Skinner’s first trial ended with a hung jury before he was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor objected to the Court’s decision not to take up Skinner’s appeal, writing that the prosecution failed to disclose the same favorable evidence in Skinner’s case that had been at issue in Wearry’s. In 2016, the Supreme Court vacated Wearry’s conviction on the ground that the prosecution violated its duty to disclose evidence to him. Sotomayor wrote that the Court should have granted review in Skinner’s case rather than “leaving that injustice in place, ” and she criticized the refusal to “treat like defendants alike. ”
In Sotomayor’s framing, the practical effect is stark: Skinner “risks spending the rest of his life in prison while Wearry walks free. ” She also wrote that the Court, by declining review, “refuses to enforce its own precedents” tied to Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 ruling addressing prosecutors’ duty to disclose favorable evidence to the defense.
What if the Court’s refusal to review criminal appeals keeps splitting the justices?
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor in dissent from the denial of review on Monday. The threshold to grant review is four justices, and the episode highlighted the structural challenge for the Court’s Democratic-appointed members. Even when they are joined by the Court’s third Democratic appointee, Justice Elena Kagan—as they were in the Rodney Reed petition that Sotomayor lamented the week prior—they remain one vote short of securing review.
The pattern surfaced across consecutive weeks. In the Reed matter, Sotomayor said the effect of the denial is that Texas will likely execute Reed without ever knowing whether his or another person’s DNA is on the murder weapon. In Skinner’s case, Sotomayor again wrote in protest after the Court declined to step in.
State officials opposing review argued that Wearry’s case does not help Skinner because Skinner “has no viable challenge to his confessions and the other corroborating evidence that squarely support the jury’s verdict. ” Skinner’s lawyers countered in a final reply brief that the state “insinuates the jury heard Mr. Skinner himself confess, ” while what the jury “actually heard was two informants (themselves the subject of Brady violations) claim Mr. Skinner confessed. ”
What if public debate around the justices intensifies even when rulings cross ideological lines?
Separate commentary about the Court’s work underscored how disputes around Supreme Court decisions can spill beyond the legal questions and into broader claims about legitimacy and qualifications.
In a Colorado case involving the state’s ban on so-called “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ minors, the Court ruled 8 to 1 that the law constituted an “egregious assault” on First Amendment rights. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued the lone dissent, while Justices Elena Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor were described as siding with the majority, illustrating that the decision crossed ideological lines.
The dissent drew commentary that included statements asserting that Justice Jackson’s “primary qualifications” were that she is Black and a woman—claims criticized as racist, sexist, and false. The same commentary emphasized that former President Joe Biden did not say Justice Jackson’s identity was her primary qualification and argued that her career and experience are comparable with those of many other justices.
Justice Jackson’s dissent in the Colorado case argued that “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes speech instead of scalpel, ” and warned that the majority’s decision “risks grave harm to Americans’ health and well-being. ”
Across these threads—criminal appeals and constitutional disputes—sonia sotomayor’s latest dissent signals a continued push by some justices to revisit claims of unequal treatment and alleged Brady violations, even as the Court repeatedly declines to take up the appeals that would allow those arguments to be tested on the merits.
