Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberal, dissenting minority opinion Thursday night, which failed to block a death penalty execution for a convicted triple-murderer in Alabama.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to allow the execution of death-row inmate Alan Eugene Miller, as Justice Barrett joined the liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent to stop the execution by lethal injection.
Barrett, who was nominated to the Supreme Court to replace late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the final weeks before the 2020 presidential election, has voted with the liberal justices in more than half of the cases in 2020-2021, the Washington Examiner reported.
Barrett has agreed with Sotomayor 53% and Kagan 63% in 2020 and 2021, according to the report. Jackson did not join the Supreme Court officially until June 2022.
While Barrett voted against liberal dissent in March 2022 Supreme Court case that reinstated the death penalty against convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, she has sided with liberal justices in other death penalty cases.
In February 2021, Barrett sided with Sotomayor, Kagan, former Justice Stephen Breyer, and a justice who did not disclose his vote in another Alabama death penalty case of death-row inmate Willie Smith.
In January 2022: Barrett sided with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer to block the execution of Alabama death-row inmate Matthew Reeves.
Despite the reinstatement of Miller's execution by lethal injection, the state stopped it before the midnight deadline. Alabama GOP Gov. Kay Ivey said the execution by nitrogen hypoxia will be rescheduled at the "earliest opportunity," according to local reports.
Miller was sentenced to death for killing three men where they worked at Ferguson Enterprises just south of Birmingham, in 1999.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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