The Supreme Court Has a New Leading Moral Light on the Death Penalty

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October 2025 has not been a happy month for death penalty opponents. A total of seven people have been^[2] or are scheduled to be executed between Oct. 1 and the end of the month.

That is a lot of executions^[3] in a short period of time. Several of the cases in which executions occurred this month involved^[4] truly egregious miscarriages of justice. But courts refused to intervene.

Not surprisingly, the conservative-dominated, pro-death-penalty majority on the Supreme Court was not interested in righting those miscarriages of justice. They avoided^[5] doing so by invoking procedural barriers as reasons to avoid addressing the substantive claims raised by the death row inmates.

In two of those cases, Justice Sonia Sotomayor staked out her position as the court’s leading anti-death-penalty spokesperson. Her dissenting opinions cut through to the heart of the matter.

She insisted^[6] that injustices in capital cases should be confronted directly. Sotomayor asked her colleagues and the American public not to turn a blind eye to the harsh realities that haunt the death penalty system in the United States. The cases in which she dissented last week offer stomach-turning examples of what often happens in that system.

Let’s look at what Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinions.

The first involved^[7] Stacey Humphreys, who was convicted of murdering two women inside a construction company’s model home. He allegedly forced the two women to undress before robbing them at gunpoint.

During his trial, Humphreys’ defense lawyers tried to convince the jury to consider the fact that he suffered from mental disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as Asperger’s syndrome. They hoped that the jury would spare him a death sentence.

They failed in that endeavor.

Unbeknownst to Humphrey and his lawyers, one of the jurors did not answer truthfully^[8] when asked about her experience as a crime victim. She stated that she had been the victim of an attempted rape and robbery, but that she was not physically harmed in any way.

During jury deliberations, she quickly contradicted that statement. She told fellow jurors about her experience and added that her attacker had assaulted her in her bed while she was naked.

After the jury voted 11–1 to impose sentence of life without parole, this juror doubled down on her belief that Humphreys should get a death sentence and said she would “stay here till forever if it takes it for him to get death.” And on the third day of deliberations, she managed to sway her fellow jurors to hand down a death sentence.

It is hard to imagine any clearer violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury^[9]. But after the facts came to light, the courts in Georgia ruled that they were inadmissible under a state law that forbids^[10] the use of juror testimony to call into question a jury verdict.

In her dissent from the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Humphreys’ appeal, Sotomayor decried the mechanical application of that rule in a capital case. She debunked the claim that because Humphreys’ lawyers failed to raise the issue of juror misconduct in his first set of appeals, he could not do so now.

As she explained, the Humphreys case is “squarely among ‘the gravest and most important’ cases in which the no-impeachment rule should yield to avoid ‘violating the plainest principles of justice.’ ”

Sotomayor reminded her colleagues of the long-standing principle that there is a heightened “need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.” To no avail.

Humphreys remains on Georgia’s death row.

“Tragically,” she concluded, “the Court … [is] allowing a death sentence tainted by a single juror’s extraordinary misconduct to stand.”

Tragedies like the one Sotomayor described are all too common in capital cases^[12], as is the unwillingness of the Supreme Court to prevent them from happening or to remedy those that they can.

On Oct. 15, one day after the court’s refusal to act in the Humphreys case, Sotomayor again raised her voice to decry her conservative colleagues’ indifference^[13] to another death penalty tragedy.

Charles Crawford had been convicted in Mississippi of murder in 1993^[14]. From the moment he was arrested, he insisted he was not guilty.

He was represented by two court-appointed lawyers who seemed to have their own agenda in handling his case. Crawford was clear with them that he had a single goal that he wanted them to pursue; namely, to secure an acquittal.

“Any mistake,” Crawford told them, “made by the prosecution in preparing its case against me must be brought before the court and put on the record!” His lawyers ignored this instruction.

As Justice Sotomayor explained, “they did the exact opposite of what Crawford asked of them: They conceded to the jury that Crawford had killed Ray and pursued an insanity defense.” She noted that, as Crawford put it, his lawyers “might as well [have] been sitting over there with the prosecution.”

Here again, the courts ignored the substance of Crawford’s allegations because they were not raised in a timely fashion. The Supreme Court refused to hear his case.

In doing so, Sotomayor contended, it ignored both its own precedents and the clear violation of Crawford’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel. As she put it, “The right to direct the goals of one’s criminal defense plainly includes the right to decide whether to pursue freedom rather than confinement.”

She called out the court for failing to prevent Crawford from being “sent to his death without ever having had the real opportunity to hold the state to its burden of proving him guilty.” In her view, her conservative colleagues were turning a blind eye to a truly shocking violation of the Constitution “even though a man’s life is in the balance.”

Several hours after Sotomayor filed her dissent, Crawford was executed^[19].

Something is really wrong when people who have suffered miscarriages of justice are condemned to death nonetheless, and when those responsible for ensuring the integrity of the death penalty system stand idly by.

Sotomayor has done^[20] what all great dissenters on the United States Supreme Court have done before her. Having failed to persuade her colleagues, she is speaking to a broader audience and to the future.

She wants the American public to know what is being done in our name and to understand our responsibility for injustice. She made a record so that history may judge what the court has refused to do and what states like Georgia and Mississippi are willing to tolerate in their commitment to carry out death sentences.

While Sotomayor’s conservative colleagues were not moved by the clarity and force of her arguments, we should be. America’s death penalty will continue to be an embarrassment until the American people say that it is long past time to abolish it.

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