Justice Barrett dissents to stop/prevent an execution

[politicallefty]

What do we suppose happened here?

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday evening allowed Alabama to execute a man who argued that the state had failed to give him proper accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act so that he could select his method of execution. In doing so, the justices overturned two lower-court rulings that had barred Alabama from performing the execution by lethal injection. The vote was 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s three liberal justices dissenting.

While the main dissent was from the three liberals and Justice Barrett did not join it (and did not otherwise expatiate upon her thoughts), I thought it was quite interesting that she dissented on a death penalty case and broke away from the other conservatives. When she first joined the Court, my first assumption was that she'd be something like a less acerbic version of Justice Scalia, albeit with her own idiosyncrasies. I wouldn't have expected one of those idiosyncrasies to be a death penalty case. I mean, Justice Scalia was probably the most polar opposite of the anti-death penalty jurisprudence of Justices Brennan and Marshall.

[politicallefty]

I felt this was worth bumping in light of a very recent SCOTUS decision, Nance v. Ward. It appears her vote in January may have been misleading in terms of her potential death penalty jurisprudence. This decision was mostly overshadowed by the gun case on Thursday, but it's quite notable as being a rare "win" for a death-row inmate. The majority opinion was written by Justice Kagan, joined by Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kavanaugh. As the opinion starts:

In several recent decisions, this Court has set out rules for challenging a State's proposed method of execution under the Eighth Amendment. To prevail on such a claim, a prisoner must identify a readily available alternative method of execution that would significantly reduce the risk of severe pain. In doing so, the prisoner is not confined to proposing a method authorized by the executing State's law; he may instead ask for a method used in other States. See Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 19).

This case concerns the procedural vehicle appropriate for a prisoner's method-of-execution claim. We have held that such a claim can go forward under 42 U. S. C. §1983, rather than in habeas, when the alternative method proposed is already authorized under state law. See Nelson v. Campbell, 541 U. S. 637, 644-647 (2004). Here, the prisoner has identified an alternative method that is not so authorized. The question presented is whether §1983 is still a proper vehicle. We hold that it is.

Justice Barrett wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. Her dissent in this case would leave the inmate with only a federal habeas challenge, which is essentially a de facto automatic loss.

This doesn't guarantee a win for Nance. It merely opens up a Section 1983 civil rights challenge in federal court. If the dissent had won, he would've been relegated to habeas challenge, which have been massively curtailed and restricted under the AEDPA. There's virtually no chance to win a federal habeas challenge under that law. I think the composition of the majority is exceptionally noteworthy considering where Roberts and Kavanaugh have been in the past on these types of cases.