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.”