The Supreme Court got it horribly wrong this week when it vacated a stay of execution for a Muslim inmate whose request that his imam be at his side in the death chamber was blocked by Alabama state officials.
Adding insult to injury, the five Supreme Court justices who failed to advocate for Domineque Ray’s reasonable religious accommodation offered no detailed explanation for their decision.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh didn’t even sign their names to the application vacating the stay of execution entered by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta, which found that denying Imam Yusef Maisonet access to the execution chamber while allowing the same for a Christian pastor raised legitimate questions about religious discrimination.
For an explanation of the Supreme Court’s decision this week, we have to look to Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion, where she mentions that a majority of her colleagues agreed that Ray waited too long to bring his request before the Alabama Department of Corrections. Kagan is joined in her dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
Ray, 42, was found guilty in 1999 of the brutal rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, whose decomposing remains were discovered in a cotton field near Selma, Ala. Ray was also involved in the murder of two brothers, 13-year-old Reinhard Mabins and 18-year-old Ernest Mabins. In 2006, as he awaited death, Ray reportedly converted to Islam. Ten days before his scheduled execution this month, he requested that his imam be present in the chamber with him. State officials declined Ray’s request, arguing that it was both submitted too late and that it was also an obvious delay tactic. Officials offered Ray a Christian pastor for his execution. He declined the offer.
Prison officials said it was fine for Ray to meet with his imam before his execution. They also said that the imam could stand in the viewing room looking into the execution chamber. But they absolutely would not allow the imam to be in the execution chamber.
The Supreme Court’s you-snooze-you-lose reasoning for allowing Ray’s execution to go forward sans religious accommodations is identical to what was argued in an emergency application filed by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall following the 11th Circuit’s ruling.
Marshall claimed Ray’s request for an imam was obviously timed to stall the proceedings. The state attorney general argued that allowing the imam into the chamber posed a security risk to the “execution team.” Marshall also explained that the prison allows a Christian pastor to enter the death chamber, and only a Christian pastor, because he is a member of the staff who has been trained in execution protocol.
Lastly, Marshall argued that the requested stay “would substantially harm the public and the State’s interest in the timely enforcement of criminal judgments.”
First, Ray had been on death row since 1999. Timely enforcement indeed. Surely, Alabama could have spared a few more weeks, months even, to allow for more time to sort out the imam issue. After all, it’s not like Ray was going anywhere. Also, there’s the important point that the 11th Circuit placed the prisoner’s appeal on a “fast track,” as the New York Times put it, “with briefing to have been completed in a little more than a month.” It’s not as if the stay of execution was primed to languish in a multiyear limbo.
Secondly, as noted in the Supreme Court’s dissent, Ray’s request for an imam was indeed late, but there’s a reasonable explanation for that: He was denied a copy of the prison’s own practices and procedures, which clearly defines who is and isn’t allowed in the chamber. Ray was notified when his execution date was set in Nov. 6, 2018, but “the relevant statute would not have placed Ray on notice that the prison would deny his request. To the contrary, that statute provides that both the chaplain of the prison and the inmate’s spiritual adviser of choice ‘may be present at an execution,'” Kagan and the 11th Circuit found.
The statute “makes no distinction between persons who may be present within the execution chamber and those who may enter only the viewing room,” Kagan added, noting the prison “refused” to give Ray a copy of its procedures. “So there is no reason Ray should have known, prior to January 23 [when Ray’s request was denied by the warden], that his imam would be granted less access than the Christian chaplain to the execution chamber.”
Ray’s request was denied on Jan. 23. He followed up five days later, asking in more forceful terms for the presence of his imam. That doesn’t sound like the behavior of someone who was intentionally dragging his feet.
Lastly, the idea that Imam Yusef Maisonet posed a security risk is absurd. He has spent years volunteering at that facility. He goes to the Death Row at Holman Correctional Facility about once a month to lead the Muslim inmates in prayer. For the prisoners and the prison staff, he is a known and trusted entity.
Perhaps Ray was trying to game the system. Perhaps he was legitimately confused and assumed wrongly that his spiritual adviser would be allowed in the execution chamber. In cases like this, the most prudent option is to err on the side of liberty. Even if Ray’s request was a delay tactic, the biggest downside to granting it would have been the mere delaying of the inevitable. But if Ray was sincere in his ask, well, the state of Alabama and the Supreme Court just denied him a basic, protected right. That’s a much greater danger to the public than any inmate’s temporary gaming of the system could ever hope to accomplish.
Kagan got it right when she said, “Ray has put forward a powerful claim that his religious rights will be violated at the moment the State puts him to death. The Eleventh Circuit wanted to hear that claim in full. Instead, this Court short-circuits that ordinary process—and itself rejects the claim with little briefing and no argument – just so the State can meet its preferred execution date. I respectfully dissent.”
Ray, who was pronounced dead at a little past 10:00 p.m. EST Thursday evening from lethal injection, was, by all accounts, a monster. He was in prison for three brutal murders.
But even monsters deserve equal treatment under the law.
