The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the appeal of James Skinner, a Louisiana man serving life without parole for the 1998 murder of Eric Walber. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.
Her argument: the Court already vacated the conviction of Skinner's co-defendant for the same crime on nearly identical grounds, and now it won't even look at Skinner's case.
Newsweek reported that the Court's refusal to grant certiorari leaves in place a Louisiana lower court ruling that denied Skinner post-conviction relief. Every level of Louisiana's court system turned him away. The Louisiana Court of Appeal and the Louisiana Supreme Court both denied review.
Sotomayor framed the stakes in blunt terms:
"Here, because the Louisiana courts refused to apply this Court's Brady precedents, including a decision by this Court involving the very same evidence, Skinner risks spending the rest of his life in prison while Wearry walks free."
The case hinges on a comparison that is difficult to ignore, regardless of one's judicial philosophy. In 2016, the Supreme Court vacated the conviction of Michael Wearry, Skinner's alleged accomplice in Walber's murder. Wearry had been sentenced to death. The Court held that the prosecution had withheld evidence that "would have undermined the prosecution and materially aided Wearry's defense at trial."
Skinner now argues that prosecutors withheld the same kind of exculpatory evidence from his trial. The star witness in both cases was Sam Scott, an inmate who contacted police and implicated Wearry in the killing.
Scott gave what Sotomayor described as "many significantly different accounts of Walber's murder." He admitted at trial that he had changed his testimony repeatedly, had often lied, and was receiving a deal in exchange for his cooperation.
A second witness, according to Sotomayor's dissent, "admitted at trial that he had first told the police a different story" and "testified that Skinner had confessed to a version of the crime much different from the one in Scott's telling." The prosecution offered no physical evidence of guilt against either defendant. Scott was the state's "star witness."
If that evidence was constitutionally insufficient to sustain Wearry's conviction, Skinner's lawyers argue it shouldn't sustain his either.
In June 2023, the post-conviction court denied Skinner relief, ruling that the "statements presented, on their face, without further evidence of credibility, are not sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome of the trial."
The Louisiana Court of Appeal and Louisiana Supreme Court followed suit by declining review.
Sotomayor called this reasoning a refusal to apply existing Brady precedents, the constitutional rule requiring prosecutors to turn over material evidence favorable to the defense.
She argued that the Supreme Court's own decision in Wearry v. Cain, involving the very same underlying evidence, "makes resolution of Skinner's petition especially straightforward and important."
Conservatives should pay close attention here, and not because Sotomayor said it.
The question at the center of this case is not ideological. It is structural. When the Supreme Court establishes a precedent, lower courts are supposed to follow it. When they don't, the Court's refusal to intervene sends a message: precedent is optional, depending on who's asking.
Sotomayor put it this way:
"Equal justice under law, the phrase engraved on the front of this Court's building, requires that two co-defendants, convicted of the same crime, who raised essentially the same constitutional claims, receive the same answer from the courts."
That principle is not a liberal one. It is the foundation of a legal system that conservatives have long defended against the left's preference for outcome-driven jurisprudence. The rule of law means the rules apply equally. If Brady requires disclosure in Case A, it requires disclosure in Case B when the evidence, the witnesses, and the prosecutorial conduct are materially the same.
Prosecutorial misconduct is not a partisan issue. Conservatives who champion limited government understand that the state's power to imprison a citizen for life demands the highest standards of procedural integrity.
A prosecutor who hides evidence is not "tough on crime." He is an agent of the government abusing his authority. That should concern anyone who takes the Sixth Amendment seriously.
By declining to hear the case, the majority said nothing. No opinion. No explanation. That is the Court's prerogative with certiorari denials, but the silence lands differently when a sitting justice publicly accuses her colleagues of abandoning their own precedent.
Sotomayor argued that at minimum, the Court should have summarily reversed the Louisiana courts. Failing that, she wrote:
"Alternatively, if fuller briefing and oral argument were required to explore the important question presented adequately, the Court should have granted certiorari to do so, not denied review."
The Court chose neither option.
Two men convicted of the same murder, tried on the same evidence, built on the same compromised witness testimony. One walks free because the Supreme Court intervened. The other serves life without parole because it didn't. Whatever your view of Sotomayor's broader jurisprudence, the factual asymmetry she identifies deserves an answer.
The Court chose not to give one.
