Hispanic Heritage Month: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15), DPI is posting a weekly feature on Hispanic or Latino/a people who have had a significant impact on the death penalty in the U.S. The final entry in this series is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  

Sonia Sotomayor was born on June 25, 1954, in the Bronx borough of New York, to parents of Puerto Rican descent. A White House press release announcing her Supreme Court nomination in 2009 said, “She has been hailed as ‘one of the ablest federal judges currently sitting’ for her thoughtful opinions, and as ‘a role model of aspiration, discipline, commitment, intellectual prowess and integrity’ for her ascent to the federal bench from an upbringing in a South Bronx housing project.”  

She earned a scholarship to attend Princeton University to study history and pursued her senior thesis on Puerto Rican politics and history. Following Princeton, she attended Yale Law School, where she co-chaired the Latin American and Native Student Association and served as an editor for the Yale Law Journal. Throughout her time in college and law school, she advocated for the rights of Latinos, including by filing a complaint against Princeton for “an institutional pattern of discrimination” due to the lack of Latino students, faculty, and staff.

Justice Sotomayor’s judicial career is characterized by several historic tenures. After being nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, she became the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State, first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S. federal court, and the youngest judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. When President Bill Clinton appointed Judge Sotomayor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1998, she then also became the first Latina to serve on that court. Upon her appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 2009 by President Barack Obama, she became the first Hispanic individual, the third woman, and first woman of color to serve on the high court. 

Throughout her fifteen years on the Supreme Court, Justice Sotomayor has regularly scrutinized the practices and laws surrounding capital cases. In the 2015 case of Glossip v. Gross, she dissented from the ruling by the conservative majority that the use of drug midazolam did not violate the Eighth Amendment, despite the painful accounts of its use during execution. She wrote “…it leaves petitioners exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”.  

Justice Sotomayor remains a key figure on the Court in highlighting many systemic problems with the death penalty. For example, when the Court denied the application for a stay of execution and writ of certiorari for James Barber in 2023, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elana Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. In a detailed and graphic dissent, she outlined how Alabama failed to properly investigate the failures of three consecutive botched executions where she described, “Two of the men survived and reported experiencing extreme pain, including, in one case, nerve pain equivalent to electrocution.” She went on to discuss Alabama’s internal “top-to-bottom” review of its lethal injection process after these attempts and wrote, “During this review, conducted by the very agency that botched the executions, the State offered no explanations for the failures and reported ‘[n]o deficiencies’ in its protocols.”. 

In January 2024, the Court denied another stay and cert petition from Kenneth Smith, an individual who survived a botched execution attempt in Alabama and was facing a second attempt through nitrogen hypoxia, a novel method. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson all dissented from this decision. “Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before,” wrote Justice Sotomayor. She continued, “With deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment, I respectfully dissent,” and she added, “The world is watching.”