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Supreme Court Denies Execution Stay in D.C. Sniper Case
The National Law Journal
November 10, 2009
The planned execution tonight of John Allen Muhammad remains set following the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to stay the death sentence.
Justices John Paul Stevens, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a two-page statement (pdf), saying: "This case highlights once again the perversity of executing inmates before their appeals process has been fully concluded."
The three justices said that Muhammad's petition for certiorari, which was timely filed, would have been reviewed at the Court's conference Nov. 24. Stevens, Sotomayor and Ginsburg, however, did not disagree with the Court's decision to deny certiorari.
"By denying Muhammad's stay application, we have allowed Virginia to truncate our deliberative process on a matter -- involving a death row inmate -- that demands the most careful attention," Stevens wrote in the statement, joined by Sotomayor and Ginsburg. "This result is particularly unfortunate in light of the limited time Muhammad was given to make his case in the District Court."
Stevens said in the statement that he believes "that the Court would be wise to adopt a practice of staying all executions scheduled in advance of the completion of our review of a capital defendant’s first application for a federal writ of habeas corpus." Such a practice, he said, would preserve "basic fairness in ensuring death row inmates receive the same procedural safeguards that ordinary inmates receive."
Muhammad was convicted in 2003 in state court in Virginia for his role in the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks that killed 10 people. His execution, by lethal injection, is scheduled for tonight at 9 p.m.
This article first appeared on The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.
