Supreme Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson are in a tight competition for most flagrantly incompetent liberal member of the Supreme Court. Jackson appears to be well ahead, but Sonia let her inner sensitive Latina run wild in her recent emotional dissent in Boyd v. Hamm, in which the Supreme Court turned down the plea of a condemned prisoner to force Alabama to execute him by firing squad rather than by the relatively new method of nitrogen gas asphyxiation. (Sotomayor’s lame dissent was joined by her two Democratic, reflex-Left wing colleagues because they are nice.)
Some salient facts: Anthony Boyd was convicted of murder in the first degree because he and two drug-dealing comrades killed another drug dealer by binding him and setting him on fire. I’d say Boyd was ethically estopped from complaining that his own execution method was “cruel and unusual,” but he did, even though he had earlier been given a choice between death by firing squad and death by nitrogen, and picked the latter. This is more consideration than his victim was given; at least nothing in the trial transcript indicates that the victim was offered a choice between being roasted alive or having his head bashed in with a rock.
Sonia, however, want us all to feel horror that Boyd, who was executed after his last-ditch appeal to SCOTUS failed, suffered pain in the process of dying. “Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch,” Sotomayor opens her October 23 dissent. “Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.”
Wow. That’s some impressive legal argument.
My dissent from the dissent: I don’t care, and nobody should. The endless obstacles bleeding heart judges and ethically-confused death penalty activists have thrown in the way of our society’s obligation to set and enforce standards of conduct are destructive and costly. Boyd had a choice, and may have chosen the nitrogen method specifically so his lawyers could use it to stall the arrival of his day of reckoning. The murder he was convicted of committing was particularly heinous and cruel: I might be persuaded to endorse a system in which convicted murderers are executed in the same manner as their victims. But for such an individual to beg for a less “cruel” form of punishment is Death Row chutzpah. Yet Sotomayor fell for it.
Ethics Alarms 