Thread by @LemieuxLGM

Today's episode of Unanswerable Sotomayor Dissents involves the Supreme Court allowing Bill Barr's execution of Brandon Bernard (who, unlike Barr, has never killed anyone) to proceed supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…

Bernard was 18 when he was with a group of young men who murdered two people. The capital sentence was based on the (ludicrously false) premise that he was a full and equal member of a violent gang:

The prosecution knew that Bernard was in fact at the very bottom of a 13-tier hierarchy at trial:

But they did not only did not disclose Bernard's low status in the gang but elicited knowingly false testimony in spite of it, giving us two material constitutional violations:

But the consistently authoritarian 5CA has created a Catch-22 that allows prosecutors to get away with Brady and Napue violations if they cover up their misconduct until the defendant has pursed habeas relief on different grounds:

"Under this rule, prosecutors can run out the clock and escape any responsibility for all but the most extreme violations."

The death sentence was so marginal that 5 of the 9 jurors would not object to (or actively support) a commutation of the death sentence

This case, then, is an object illustration of the freakish arbitrariness of the death penalty. It most definitely does not single out the worst of the worse. Here, a rare federal execution was carried out against someone whose role in a murder was so limited the state had to lie

This case is also another example of the wages of McCleskey v. Kemp. If the victims in this case were Black young men of a similar age rather than white youth ministers there is a 0.0% chance anyone involved would have been executed.

Given different results in the 2014 midterms and more symmetrical strategic retirements, the death penalty might be categorically unconstitutional by now. Instead, this will be the most pro-death-penalty Court in decades.

This is the first federal execution during the lame duck period since the first Cleveland administration

https://twitter.com/MikeSacksEsq/status/1337224751941619712