Thread by @LemieuxLGM

Tonight we have dissents from both Sotomayor and Breyer in the last instance of the Supreme Court waving the matador's cape for Trump's machinery of death without so much as a word of reasoned justification

Trump's DOJ has moved with unseemly haste in order to preempt credible legal challenges, and the Court has happily gone along

"This is not justice"

The execution of Dustin Higgs does not comply with federal statutory standards

The Supreme Court did not meet the standard required to grant cert before a judgment by the lower court

The actual reason for the extraordinary haste is that the people have chosen a president who opposes the death penalty, and the 6 bloodthirsty Republican-nominated justices want the executions to happen. But this is not a *legal* reason.

And this is a consistent theme with Trump's flurry of last-minute executions. People are executed with important and material legal questions being unresolved because the Court won't allow them to be

The Supreme Court, without explanation, allowed the execution of two prisoners who the state allowed to get COVID-19, increasing the risk that lethal injection tortured them to death.

Brandon Bernard did not kill anybody, and almost certainly only got a capital sentence because the prosecution withheld evidence and elicited false testimony, but was unable to get these claims adjudicated before Trump, Barr, and the Roberts 6 killed him.

Two of the Trump/Barr/Roberts executions almost certainly violated the federal statutory prohibition on executing mentally handicapped people

More on Corey Johnson's case here: nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opi…

Two of the Trump/Barr/Roberts executions involved prisoners so mentally ill they probably didn't understand wt they were being killed, and who once again did not get a fair hearing for their claims:

A reminder that Lisa Montgomery's mental illnesses and disabilities were largely the product of having her spent her teenage years being gang-raped by her stepfather and abused and trafficked by her mother. Executing her is an unspeakably vile act slate.com/news-and-polit…

The Republican majority of the Roberts Court has, quite simply, refused to adequately perform one of its gravest responsibilities because it fears a democratically elected president will not share their appetite for death. Absolutely appalling.

And keep this in mind when Republican elites give the "but muh judges" defense of supporting 4 years of Trump's depravity. What they want judges to do is stuff like "allow the state to kill a bunch of people, many of them severely mentally handicapped, without due process."

Also worth adding that Dustin Higgs also did not kill anybody. These cases illustrate the idea that the death penalty is applied only to the most serious offenders is farcical

https://twitter.com/LilianaSegura/status/1350236276688097280

Dustin Higgs has officially become the 13th person executed in a last minute flurry of arbitrary violence by the worst president in American history

https://twitter.com/TribStarLisa/status/1350330157664509952