Texas carried out its first execution in nearly a year after the Supreme Court on Wednesday night shut down an attempt to appeal the sentence.
The court, which released its decision in an unsigned order, allowed the state to put to death Quintin Jones, a man convicted of the 1999 murder of his great aunt. Shortly after the decision came down, Texas put Jones to death by lethal injection.
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Jones had appealed to the court on the ground that he was intellectually disabled, arguing that the state had used outdated methods to evaluate his mental health and that the testimony of a psychiatrist at his trial has since been discredited.
The state countered that the execution should proceed because Jones had never proved that he was intellectually disabled. With regard to the claim about the psychiatrist, the state told the court that Jones had not shown that Texas “knowingly presented false testimony through an expert whose methods may have been discredited at some time after trial.”
The court did not explain its reasoning in releasing the order, and none of the justices wrote dissents. The state carried out its last execution in July 2020.
At the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, the administration pushed the court to shut down a series of delays in several scheduled executions. The court, at the time, allowed the executions to proceed, drawing outrage from liberals on the court, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote a long dissent against federal execution.
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When President Joe Biden came into office, the federal government resumed a long-standing hold on federal executions that was in place before Trump’s tenure. But at the same time, the Supreme Court took up a case that could reopen the possibility of the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon Bomber.
