Law Reviews: The Capital Shadow Docket and the Death of Judicial Restraint

A recent law review arti­cle crit­i­cizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of its ​‘shad­ow dock­et’ in cap­i­tal cas­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly in recent years. The Capital Shadow Docket and the Death of Judicial Restraint, by Professor Jenny-Brooke Condon, explains that the Court ​“invokes judi­cial restraint to jus­ti­fy its refusal to sec­ond-guess the cru­el­ty of chal­lenged exe­cu­tion meth­ods or when Justices cite fed­er­al­ism-based ratio­nales for refus­ing to delay state enforce­ment of a death sen­tences … And yet on the Supreme Court’s shad­ow dock­et, the Court’s death penal­ty jurispru­dence is any­thing but restrained.” 

The Supreme Court’s ​“shad­ow dock­et” refers to motions and orders by the Court in cas­es which have not yet reached a final judge­ment, deci­sion on appeal, and oral argu­ment in the Court. As applied to death penal­ty cas­es, this includes the Court’s con­sid­er­a­tion of a request by a pris­on­er for a stay of exe­cu­tion, or a request by the gov­ern­ment to vacate a low­er court’s stay or injunc­tion so an exe­cu­tion can pro­ceed. Prof. Condon writes that “[w]hile deci­sions address­ing death penal­ty cas­es on the Court’s emer­gency orders dock­et is noth­ing new, the Court’s will­ing­ness to issue momen­tous, dis­pos­i­tive rul­ings in death cas­es through the shad­ow dock­et has emerged as an impor­tant fea­ture of the Court’s con­sti­tu­tion­al reg­u­la­tion of the death penalty.” 

The arti­cle describes judi­cial restraint as a type of judi­cial phi­los­o­phy ​“that judges should respect their lim­it­ed role, the will of the peo­ple, and the respec­tive pow­ers of coor­di­nate branch­es … [judi­cial restraint] ​‘prop­er­ly under­stood’ does not have a polit­i­cal valence.” Prof. Condon dis­cuss­es how inter­pre­ta­tions of what judi­cial restraint means can ​“reflect a spec­trum of ide­o­log­i­cal views,” cit­ing non-cap­i­tal cas­es that illus­trate ​“the vagaries of judi­cial restraint giv­en the mul­ti­ple ways the Justices [invoke] the prin­ci­ple in sup­port of diver­gent ratio­nales and out­comes.” Historically, how­ev­er, judges have relied on the refrain ​“death is dif­fer­ent,” to jus­ti­fy ​“mean­ing­ful con­sti­tu­tion­al reg­u­la­tion” of the death penal­ty under the Eighth Amendment, while still com­port­ing with the­o­ries of judicial restraint. 

Prof. Condon argues that the Court’s shad­ow dock­et deci­sions on whether to lift injunc­tions put in place by a low­er court, in par­tic­u­lar, demon­strate a lack of judi­cial restraint and “[clear] the way for state killing with­out full brief­ing, oral argu­ment, and writ­ten deci­sions explain­ing the Justices’ ratio­nales in mat­ters of life and death,” and that the result is, in part, that low­er courts ​“read mid­dle-of-the-night shad­ow dock­et deci­sions as sub­stan­tive judge­ments about mer­its issues affect­ing death penal­ty chal­lenges, rather than as deci­sions enforc­ing norms relat­ed to stay requests.” 

Prof. Condon cites 2018 as a turn­ing point on the Court’s shad­ow dock­et, when ​“the Court denied or vacat­ed stays in sum­ma­ry fash­ion” in two cas­es ​“with­out expli­cat­ing the nature or basis for the shift.” She notes that the Court only made brief state­ments about the defen­dants’ tim­ing, cre­at­ing a ​“hyper­fo­cus on delay and [the] pre­sump­tion that death penal­ty lawyers and their clients engage in improp­er lit­i­ga­tion tac­tics.” She also argues that “[t]he [Court’s] will­ing­ness to pro­ceed … in secre­cy and the rejec­tion of the pos­si­bil­i­ty for fur­ther dis­cus­sion adds to the pic­ture of an embold­ened Supreme Court unde­terred by the norms of cau­tious­ness and public accountability.” 

Prof. Condon also dis­cuss­es the 2020 fed­er­al exe­cu­tions and the claim raised by sev­er­al of the pris­on­ers about the government’s exe­cu­tion method, which was dis­missed in a per curi­am opin­ion. She argues ​“that the Court cleared the path for exe­cu­tions with­out requir­ing res­o­lu­tion on the mer­its of the claims pre­sent­ed. … The low­er courts want­ed time to address and eval­u­ate the issue, but the Supreme Court cut off that process before it began, effec­tive­ly accept­ing the government’s claim without testing.” 

Prof. Condon con­cludes that ​“If the long-exist­ing approach to cap­i­tal stay requests on the Supreme Court’s orders dock­et is a ver­sion of judi­cial min­i­mal­ism — that is, a pref­er­ence for pro­ceed­ing cau­tious­ly, def­er­ence to deci­sion­mak­ers with the bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op the record, and only decid­ing cas­es on the nar­row­est pos­si­ble grounds — then the Court’s will­ing­ness to dis­pense with those stan­dards in mat­ters bear­ing upon life or death should be rec­og­nized as a form of judi­cial max­i­mal­ism.” She cau­tions that this max­i­mal­ism could mean that ​“in the few remain­ing states where the death penal­ty oper­ates, the Court will large­ly endorse and facil­i­tate exe­cu­tions with lit­tle wor­ry about the legal­i­ty of the sen­tences and exe­cu­tion meth­ods com­ing before the Court.”