By a vote of 5 – 4, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a low­er court’s grant of relief to Tennessee death row inmate Gregory Thompson. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had announced that its ini­tial denial of Thompson’s appeal was mis­tak­en. After first deny­ing Thompson’s habeas cor­pus peti­tion, the Sixth Circuit dis­cov­ered pre­vi­ous­ly uncon­sid­ered evi­dence that Thompson was suf­fer­ing from schiz­o­phre­nia at the time of the offense. The court recon­sid­ered the case in light of the evi­dence of major men­tal ill­ness, and issued a cor­rect­ed deci­sion find­ing that Thompson’s tri­al was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. The Supreme Court held that the Sixth Circuit had abused its dis­cre­tion by with­draw­ing its first opin­ion and issu­ing a sec­ond opin­ion. In dis­sent, Justice Breyer wrote, ​“When we tell the Court of Appeals that it can­not exer­cise its dis­cre­tion to cor­rect the seri­ous error it dis­cov­ered here, we tell courts they are not to act to cure seri­ous injus­tice in sim­i­lar cas­es. The con­se­quence is to divorce the rule-based result from the just result. The American judi­cial sys­tem has long sought to avoid that divorce. Today’s deci­sion takes an unfor­tu­nate step in the wrong direc­tion.” The case is Bell v. Thompson, No. 04 – 514. 

(Washington Post, June 28, 2005). 

See Supreme Court and Representation.

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