SCOTUS NEWS
on Jan 23, 2025
at 3:04 pm
The courtroom issued orders on Tuesday after the vacation weekend. (Katie Barlow)
The Supreme Courtroom on Tuesday gave Brenda Evers Andrew one other probability to problem her demise sentence and conviction for the homicide of her estranged husband. Andrew, who was sentenced to demise in 2004, has lengthy maintained that she is harmless, and her boyfriend James Pavatt, who confessed to the killing, insisted that she was not concerned within the crime. Andrew argues that her proper to a good trial was violated as a result of prosecutors at her 2004 trial relied on proof about her sexuality, together with presenting the jury together with her thong throughout closing arguments.
Andrew and Pavatt had been each charged with capital homicide primarily based on proof that that they had plotted the homicide collectively to acquire the proceeds of a life insurance coverage coverage. However Andrew’s intercourse life and sexual historical past turned a focus at her trial. Prosecutors informed the jury (as one state choose wrote) that she was a “unhealthy spouse, unhealthy mom, and a nasty lady.”
The courtroom issued an unsigned 10-page opinion vacating a ruling by the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the tenth Circuit in Andrew’s case and ordering the courtroom of appeals to take one other look. The transfer got here as a part of an inventory of orders from the justices’ non-public convention on Friday, Jan. 17. After including 5 new instances to their docket on Friday afternoon, the justices didn’t – as anticipated – grant overview in any further instances on Tuesday.
Andrew, who’s the one lady on demise row in Oklahoma, got here to the Supreme Courtroom in January 2024, asking the justices to reverse her conviction. She contended that the Supreme Courtroom’s instances prohibit the usage of proof that, as in her case, makes the trial essentially unfair. “Certainly,” she contended, “to convict and condemn a lady to demise as a result of her clothes, look, demeanor, and sexual historical past doesn’t adjust to stereotypes of womanhood is ‘odious in all elements [and] particularly pernicious within the administration of justice.’”
After contemplating the case at 11 consecutive conferences, the courtroom on Tuesday despatched the case again to the decrease courts in order that they will think about whether or not the improper introduction of proof in opposition to her was so “unduly prejudicial” that it made her trial essentially unfair. The courtroom of appeals, it defined, rejected Andrew’s declare “as a result of, it thought, no holding of this Courtroom established a normal rule that the misguided admission of prejudicial proof might violate due course of. That was incorrect,” the courtroom concluded.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a one-paragraph opinion by which he concurred with the courtroom’s resolution to ship the case again to the decrease courts. He agreed that the Supreme Courtroom’s “case legislation establishes {that a} defendant’s due-process rights will be violated when the correctly admitted proof at trial is overwhelmed by a flood of irrelevant and extremely prejudicial proof that renders the trial essentially unfair.” He made clear, nonetheless, that he was not expressing any “view on whether or not that very excessive commonplace is met” in Andrew’s case.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the courtroom’s resolution and would have rejected Andrew’s plea for reduction. He recommended that prosecutors had “introduced ‘overwhelming proof’ that Andrew participated within the homicide of her husband,” and that “[s]ex and marriage had been unavoidable points at Andrew’s trial.” And Thomas faulted his colleagues for framing the authorized ideas at situation within the case at too excessive a degree of generality, contending that Tuesday’s resolution is the primary time the courtroom has “ever summarily put aside a decrease courtroom resolution for failing to search out {that a} authorized rule is clearly established underneath” the 1996 federal legislation governing efforts to acquire post-conviction reduction.
Thomas concluded by complaining that the reduction supplied to Andrew on Tuesday is a “uncommon disposition” that the courtroom “has historically reserved” for “the unusual ‘conditions by which the legislation is settled and steady, the information aren’t in dispute, and the choice beneath is clearly in error.” In contrast, he posited, in Andrew’s case “the Courtroom turns this strategy on its head, steamrolling settled AEDPA ideas to put aside a completely right Tenth Circuit resolution.”
The justices on Tuesday didn’t act on a number of high-profile petitions for overview that they thought of at Friday’s convention, together with a problem to Maryland’s ban on assault rifles, a problem by Native People to the switch of land that they regard as a sacred website to a mining firm, and a problem to a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Courtroom that blocked the opening of publicly funded non secular constitution faculty.
The justices will meet once more for an additional non-public convention – the final usually scheduled one for almost a month – on Friday. Orders from that convention are anticipated on Monday, Jan. 27, at 9:30 am.
This text was initially revealed at Howe on the Courtroom.
