The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a plea to undertake a historic reassessment of the constitutionality of the death penalty nationwide.

The court denied certiorari in Hidalgo v. Arizona, which challenged the constitutionality of that state's death penalty statute but also attacked capital punishment generally “in light of contemporary standards of decency.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan issued a separate statement agreeing that the Hidalgo case should be denied because the record in the case was not fully developed, but hoping a future case would be a better platform for reviewing capital punishment.

“The opportunity to develop the record through an evidentiary hearing was denied,” Breyer wrote. “As a result, the record as it has come to us is limited and largely unexamined by experts and the courts below  in the first instance.” Breyer went on to express hope that a future case with a fuller record “will be better suited for certiorari.”

The court did not act Monday on Evans v. Mississippi, another petition that would have set up a full review of the death penalty.

The Arizona case was appealed to the Supreme Court last August by former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, who hoped it would be a vehicle for the broader review. In 2000, Abel Hidalgo killed two people in a gang-related shooting in Phoenix.

In a tweet on Monday, Katyal responded to the court's action. “Unfortunately the Supreme Court denied review in our death penalty challenge. I remain convinced that SCOTUS will come to recognize that the death penalty, as practically administered in this country, is unconstitutional. It may be lawful in theory, just not in practice.”

In an interview when he filed the petition, the Hogan Lovells lawyer said his firm has a long history of significant death-row representations, and “we redoubled our efforts” after Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, said in a 2015 dissent that the court should revisit whether the penalty is constitutional.

“The Arizona death penalty statute is deeply unconstitutional, as it does not in practice narrow who is subject to the death penalty,” Katyal said, adding that “the death penalty as a whole, after decades of experience, is flatly unconstitutional as well.”

The main flaw in the Arizona death-penalty statute, Katyal wrote, is that so-called “aggravating factors” have been added over the years to the point where 99 percent of those who commit first-degree murders are eligible to be executed. In his statement, Breyer said that data pointed to a “constitutional problem.”

One of Katyal's arguments was that with the sharp drop in death sentences and executions nationwide, capital punishment has become “a rare and freakish punishment” that the Eighth Amendment forbids.

The brief notes that only 31 people were sentenced to death in 2016, down 90 percent from 20 years before.

In a brief opposing review, Arizona solicitor general Dominic Draye told the justices, “This Court has repeatedly affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment, and Hidalgo's case does not provide any reason to overrule decades of voluminous capital jurisprudence to hold for the first time that capital punishment is per se cruel and unusual.”