What happened
The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in James Skinner's Louisiana case, leaving in place state-court rulings that refused to give him relief from a murder conviction despite a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Justice Sotomayor said Skinner and codefendant Michael Wearry were both tried for the 1998 murder of Eric Walber on similar evidence centered on the same two eyewitnesses, but only Wearry obtained relief after the high court held in 2016 that prosecutors violated Brady by withholding favorable evidence. Skinner, she wrote, remains incarcerated even though prosecutors failed to disclose the same favorable evidence in his case.
Skinner was convicted by an 11-to-1 vote and sentenced to life in prison after his first capital trial ended with a hung jury. Wearry, who had been sentenced to death, later had his conviction vacated by the Supreme Court and, according to the dissent, is now off death row and free after a plea deal.
The dissent focused on undisclosed evidence bearing on the credibility of Sam Scott and Eric Brown, the two eyewitnesses at the center of both trials, along with additional evidence Skinner says would have weakened the State's case. Justice Sotomayor said the prior Wearry decision made the legal error in Skinner's case more obvious because the cases involved the same crime and substantially overlapping witnesses and suppressed evidence.
Justice Sotomayor also rejected the State's procedural arguments, saying sparse lower-court analysis should not insulate what she viewed as obvious error. She wrote that "Equal justice under law" required the courts to give the same answer to similarly situated codefendants raising essentially the same constitutional claims.
The denial does not decide the merits of Skinner's Brady claim. The dissent noted that Skinner may still seek relief in federal court because the Fifth Circuit recently authorized him to file a successive habeas application.