Impact of Recent SCOTUS Decisions on Death Row Inmates

The Supreme Court on Monday in Whitton v. Dixon sided with a death row inmate for the second time in less than a week, holding in an unsigned opinion that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit improperly included DNA evidence that was not presented to the jury in its assessment of whether a witness’ false testimony during the trial of Gary Richard Whitton had violated Whitton’s due process rights. The justices tossed out the 11th Circuit’s opinion and sent the case back to that court for additional proceedings, allowing Whitton’s challenge to go on.

Last Thursday, in Pitchford v. Cain, a divided court threw out the conviction and death sentence of Terry Pitchford, who had spent approximately two decades on Mississippi’s death row. In an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court held that the judge in Pitchford’s 2006 trial had not properly analyzed whether the prosecutor had violated the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection.

And one week before that, in another 5-4 ruling, the court announced that it had dismissed Hamm v. Smith as “improvidently granted,” a decision that left in place Joseph Smith’s win before the 11th Circuit, which held that Smith is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed. The Supreme Court was considering how to assess intellectual disability when a defendant has taken multiple IQ tests, but five justices – Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson – sidestepped the question, leaving it up to states, at least for now, to draw their own conclusions. 

These three recent rulings continued a trend that SCOTUSblog columnist Daniel Harawa highlighted last year – namely, that death row inmates find more success on the court’s oral argument docket than on its emergency docket, where the justices address requests for stays of execution. Indeed, “more success” might be an understatement. The court has not paused an execution since July 2024 and has denied more than 75 such requests since then, typically without a noted dissent.

Read more: The state of the death penalty at the Supreme Court | SCOTUSblog

Source: Kelsey Dallas, The state of the death penalty at the Supreme Court, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 2, 2026, 9:30 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/the-state-of-the-death-penalty-at-the-supreme-court/