SCOTUS NEWS
by Amy Howe
on 23 January 2025
at 15:04
The court made its rulings on Tuesday after the holiday weekend. (Katie Barlow)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave Brenda Evers Andrew another chance to challenge her death sentence and conviction for the murder of her estranged husband. Andrew, who was sentenced to death in 2004, has long maintained her innocence and her boyfriend James Pavatt, who confessed to the murder, insisted she was not involved in the crime. Andrew claims her right to a fair trial was violated because prosecutors at her 2004 trial relied on evidence about her sexuality, including presenting her thong to the jury during closing arguments.
Andrew and Pavatt were both charged with capital murder based on evidence that they had planned the murder together to get the proceeds of a life insurance policy. But Andrew’s sex life and sexual history became a focal point of her trial. Prosecutors told the jury (as a state judge wrote) that she was a “bad wife, bad mother and a bad woman.”
The court issued an unsigned 10-page opinion vacating a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Andrew’s case and ordering the appeals court to take another look. The move came as part of a list of rulings from the judges’ private conference on Friday, January 17. After adding five new cases to their dockets Friday afternoon, the justices did not — as expected — grant review in any additional cases as of late. Tuesday.
Andrew, who is the only woman on death row in Oklahoma, came to the Supreme Court in January 2024 and asked the justices to overturn her sentence. She argued that Supreme Court cases prohibit the use of evidence that, as in her case, makes the trial fundamentally unfair. “Indeed,” she argued, “to judge and sentence a woman to death because her dress, appearance, behavior and sexual history do not conform to stereotypes of womanhood is ‘abhorrent in every aspect.’ [and] especially prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
After hearing the case in 11 consecutive conferences, the court on Tuesday sent the case back to lower courts to consider whether the improper introduction of evidence against her was so “unduly prejudicial” as to render her trial fundamentally unfair. The appeals court, it explained, rejected Andrew’s claim “because it held that no decision of this court established a general rule that the erroneous admission of prejudicial evidence could violate due process. That was wrong,” the court concluded.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a one-paragraph opinion concurring with the court’s decision to send the case back to the lower courts. He agreed that the Supreme Court’s “jurisprudence establishes that a defendant’s right to a fair trial may be violated when the properly admitted evidence at trial is overwhelmed by a flood of irrelevant and highly prejudicial evidence that renders the trial fundamentally unfair.” However, he made it clear that he expressed no “view as to whether the very high standard has been met” in Andrew’s case.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, rejected the court’s ruling and would have rejected Andrew’s plea for leniency. He suggested that prosecutors had “presented ‘overwhelming evidence’ that Andrew participated in her husband’s murder,” and that “[s]ex and marriage were inescapable issues during Andrew’s trial.” And Thomas accused his colleagues of framing the contested legal principles in the case at too high a level of generality, arguing that Tuesday’s ruling is the first time the court has ever “summarily overruled a lower court decision for not finding that a legal rule was clearly established under” the 1996 federal law governing efforts to obtain post-conviction relief.
Thomas concluded by complaining that the relief granted to Andrew on Tuesday is a “rare disposition” that the court has “traditionally reserved” for “those unusual” situations where the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in doubt, and the decision below is clearly erroneous.” In contrast, he argued, in Andrew’s case, “the court turns this approach on its head, steamrolling clarified AEDPA principles to override a perfectly proper Tenth Circuit Decision.”
The justices on Tuesday did not respond to several high-profile review petitions they considered at Friday’s conference, including a challenge to Maryland’s assault rifle ban, a challenge by Native Americans to the transfer of land they consider sacred to a mining company and a challenge to a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that blocked the opening of publicly funded religious charter school.
The justices meet again for another private conference — the last regularly scheduled one for nearly a month — on Friday. Orders from this conference are expected on Monday, January 27 at 9.30.
This article was originally published on Howe on the Court.
