WASHINGTON (CN) — Nearly two years to the day after it offered the possibility of habeas relief to a Texas man facing capital punishment, the Supreme Court quietly turned down his latest appeal Monday, drawing a fiery dissent from the justices appointed by Democrats.
The case stems from a botched carjacking outside a Kroger supermarket in 2008. High on marijuana laced with PCP, Terence Andrus fired multiple shots, killing both the owner of the car he was trying to steal and a woman in a nearby car.
Andrus was sentenced to death, but the Supreme Court noted in a June 15, 2020, opinion that the performance of his defense attorneys at trial had been constitutionally deficient in that they neglected to show the jury “the grim facts of Andrus’ life history.”
The 2020 ruling noted that Andrus was one of five children, and that their upbringing largely fell to him while his mother would spend entire weekends or weeks away binging on drugs. Since Andrus had been 6, his mother sold drugs out of the apartment and turned to prostitution to support her habit.
“When she did spend time around her children, she often was high and brought with her a revolving door of drug-addicted, sometimes physically violent, boyfriends,” the unsigned ruling went on.
Andrus wound up in juvenile detention where the justices said “he was steeped in gang culture, dosed on high quantities of psychotropic drugs, and frequently relegated to extended stints of solitary confinement.” He left that 18-month incarceration “all but suicidal."
Instead of presenting these facts at his 2008 murder trial, however, an attorney for Andrus offered no opposition to testimony from Andrus’ mother that there were no drugs in her house.
The Supreme Court had ordered the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to consider on remand whether Andrus was prejudiced by his lawyer's performance.
In a 25-page dissent Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the the state court does not appear to have gotten the message, having failed to properly weigh the habeas evidence as a whole.
The Texas court ruled against Andrus based on what Sotomayor called "its disagreement with, and rejection of, the determinations underlying this Court’s holding that Andrus’ counsel had rendered deficient performance."
"As a result, the dissenting judges below explained, the Texas court’s opinion was irreconcilable with this Court’s prior decision and barred by vertical stare decisis and the law of the case," she continued.
Sotomayor called it plain that Andrus is entitled to relief. Joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, she dissented because the majority instead opted to deny Andrus a writ of certiorari.
“Such defiance of vertical stare decisis, if allowed to stand, substantially erodes confidence in the functioning of the legal system,” the Obama appointee wrote.
Monday's dissent repeats many of the 2020 findings about Andrus’ childhood and mental health that could have helped him during the penalty phase of his trial but was not presented to the jury.
“In sum, effective counsel would have painted a vividly different tableau of aggravating and mitigating evidence than was presented at trial,” Sotomayor wrote.
“Given that sea change," the ruling continues, "I find it clear that the ‘tidal wave,’ of ‘available mitigating evidence, taken as a whole, ‘might well have influenced the jury’s appraisal’ of [Andrus’] moral culpability.' Because there is a reasonable probability that ‘at least one juror would have struck a different balance,’ I would summarily reverse.”
Sotomayor says the rare decision to reverse summarily would be appropriate response here as it is both a capital case where a man's life is on the line and as the lower court here flagrantly refused to follow court precedent.
“Summary correction is particularly necessary where, as here, a lower court clearly and directly contravenes this Court’s settled precedent,” Sotomayor wrote.
Andrus can still seek relief, Sotomayor noted, on the basis that the state court's ruling against him "plainly 'was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established' precedents of this Court."
“The Court’s refusal today to exercise its discretionary certiorari jurisdiction must not be misinterpreted to foreclose such relief,” Sotomayor wrote. “Nevertheless, the Court’s refusal is lamentable. In view of the egregious nature of the errors below, the overwhelming record evidence, the unparalleled stakes for Andrus, and the importance of protecting and enforcing vertical stare decisis, I would not leave such errors unresolved, and I respectfully dissent.”
Monday's order list did not grant any new writs of certiorari. As the court heads into its final weeks of the term, it decided five pending cases.
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