Copy Link Share Comment

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

October 2025 has not been a happy month for death penalty opponents. A total of seven people have been or are scheduled to be executed between Oct. 1 and the end of the month.

That is a lot of executions in a short period of time. Several of the cases in which executions occurred this month involved truly egregious miscarriages of justice. But courts refused to intervene.

Not surprisingly, the conservative-dominated, pro-death-penalty majority on the Supreme Court was not interested in righting those miscarriages of justice. They avoided doing so by invoking procedural barriers as reasons to avoid addressing the substantive claims raised by the death row inmates.

In two of those cases, Justice Sonia Sotomayor staked out her position as the court’s leading anti-death-penalty spokesperson. Her dissenting opinions cut through to the heart of the matter.

She insisted that injustices in capital cases should be confronted directly. Sotomayor asked her colleagues and the American public not to turn a blind eye to the harsh realities that haunt the death penalty system in the United States. The cases in which she dissented last week offer stomach-turning examples of what often happens in that system.

Let’s look at what Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinions.

The first involved Stacey Humphreys, who was convicted of........

© Slate