SCOTUS FOCUS

Abortion, the death penalty, and the shadow docket

Lee Kovarsky is the Bryant Smith chair in law and co-director of Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Most people following the litigation over S.B. 8 — the new Texas ban on nearly all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy — have heard some version of the argument. The Supreme Court could neither enjoin the flagrantly unconstitutional abortion restrictions nor lift the circuit court’s unexplained order pausing lower-court litigation, the “rule-of-law story” goes, because the Supreme Court’s hands were tied. In this telling, the Supreme Court’s procedural doctrines required that it refuse emergency relief unless the party seeking it is reasonably certain to prevail in the litigation. And procedural uncertainties admittedly lurked. Sovereign immunity precluded suit against Texas itself, S.B. 8 privatized enforcement and circuit precedent foreclosed suits against state executive-branch officers, and there were lingering questions about whether the plaintiffs could sue the judicial personnel named in the complaint. But this ode to rule-of-law values sounds some pretty false notes.

The Supreme Court issued its S.B. 8 order on the so-called “shadow docket,” where it hands down orders and summary decisions that did not receive full briefing and oral argument. In the past several years — and especially in the past 18 months — the court has increasingly used its shadow docket to award emergency relief in politically charged cases. I have niche expertise in one category of shadow-docket activity: the death penalty. There were 13 federal executions during the last six months of the Trump administration, and the pertinent shadow-docket interventions disclose anything but a court abstaining in close cases.

I have written about the “Trump executions” at length elsewhere, and a little background is in order here. Before the summer of 2020, the federal government hadn’t executed anyone since 2003. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department decided to get the federal government back in the execution business, and it began announcing execution dates during the summer of 2019. The federal lethal-injection protocol called for the use of a single drug, pentobarbital, that was developed to euthanize animals. The first volley of planned executions took place in July 2020, with the possibility of a Trump-to-Biden transition looming six months later. There is usually 11th-hour litigation in the shadow of executions, and the relevant federal law ensures that the Supreme Court will almost always receive applications for execution stays (from prisoners) or applications to vacate them (from the government).

The Supreme Court granted emergency relief to the government, on the shadow docket and pursuant to the same norms about restricting relief to reasonably certain litigation winners, in seven of the 13 Trump execution cases. In each of these cases, the Supreme Court’s intervention overturned a lower-court disposition on a contested legal question. As a practical matter, the relief allowed the executions to go forward while the cases were pending, and courts dismissed the litigation as moot after the prisoners were dead. Let me tell you a bit more about how “certain” the government’s success was in those cases.

Start with Eighth Amendment litigation over the use of pentobarbital, which culminated in a shadow-docket order vacating a lower-court injunction affecting four of the 13 prisoners (Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken, and Keith Nelson). In Barr v. Lee, the Supreme Court grounded its decision to vacate that injunction on an earlier case involving a materially different issue that the Supreme Court nonetheless seemed to read as a categorical rule that the Eighth Amendment permitted pentobarbital-only executions. Several months later, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit squarely held that a claimant could state an Eighth Amendment claim against such executions. The legal rule forming the basis for the Supreme Court’s intervention was anything but settled.

Next consider the Orlando Hall execution. Hall asserted that the use of un-prescribed pentobarbital violated the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The district court stayed his execution after a D.C. Circuit decision that such use of pentobarbital was in fact an FDCA violation. The Supreme Court vacated the stay. What bears emphasis is that the Supreme Court granted emergency relief on its shadow docket not just when the party seeking it had uncertain prospects for success, but when that party would almost certainly lose on the underlying legal question — and even though likelihood of success on the merits is supposed to be a necessary condition for such relief.

Perhaps the most shocking of all the shadow-docket orders was the last one, in the Dustin Higgs case. The federal death-penalty statute has a provision requiring that federal sentence implementation mimic that of the state in which the federal court sits. In situations where the federal court sits in a state that has abolished the death penalty, the statute directs the sentencer, at the time of sentence, to designate some other state for implementation-parity purposes. Higgs had been sentenced by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in 2001, at a time when Maryland retained the death penalty, and so there was no other-state designation in the sentencing judgment. But Maryland abolished the death penalty in 2013; the implementation parity rule would thus have mooted the capital sentence.

At the very least, Higgs raised a novel question about how the statute should apply in such a case. As Higgs’ execution date approached — which also coincided with the very end of Trump’s term — the federal government rather sloppily (and tardily) asked that the non-designating judgment be amended or “supplemented” (whatever that means) so that a practicing state could be designated retroactively. The (exasperated) district judge held that he had no power to alter the judgment in that way, and the government appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which aggressively expedited the appellate calendar so that oral argument could take place on Jan. 22 (two days after President Joe Biden’s inauguration). Without offering any substantive reasoning, the Supreme Court used its shadow docket to vacate the lower-court stay, grant certiorari before judgment, summarily reverse on the merits, and order the lower courts to retroactively designate Indiana. I have been able to locate no comparable maneuver (a summary merits decision on a petition for certiorari before judgment) before or since, and neither has my colleague Professor Steve Vladeck, who meticulously tracks the court’s shadow-docket activity. (Vladeck also has argued persuasively that the Supreme Court’s handling of the Texas abortion law is inconsistent with its recent shadow-docket practice in another area: emergency requests related to religious liberty.)

I should mention that the Supreme Court’s criteria for adjudicating stays and those for adjudicating injunctions have some meaningful differences. There is express statutory authority for stays, whereas the authority for court injunctions traces to a more general authority specified in the All Writs Act. Those differences notwithstanding, both require the party seeking emergency relief to establish some elevated likelihood of prevailing on the merits alongside the injury justifying immediate intervention. Uncertainty, whether procedural or substantive, is supposed to be a powerful weight against shadow-docket relief.

The comparison between the Supreme Court’s federal-execution interventions and its S.B. 8 abstention exposes the problems with the rule-of-law story. The court’s treatment of the death-penalty litigation was less about the clear merits of the government’s claims than it was about the justices’ frustration with execution delays and their desire to prevent the Biden administration from influencing sentence implementation. (The Biden administration later declared an execution moratorium.) There is a reasonable debate to be had about whether considerations like those justify more aggressive shadow-docket intervention, and two wrongs don’t make a right. But nobody can reasonably argue that the court’s federal-execution interventions sided with a party that would clearly prevail on the underlying claims, at least based on existing law. The rule-of-law storytelling flooding cable news and social media is therefore farcical. The court refused to enjoin S.B. 8 because five justices chose not to; not because the modern law and norms of shadow-docket practice foreclosed it from doing so.