For death-penalty advocates, the last six weeks have seen one dramatic development after another. Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a Texas execution because the state would not permit the condemned to have a Buddhist spiritual advisor present while allowing Christian and Muslim advisors. The week before, in a Mississippi death-penalty case, every member of the Court save its sole African-American one seemed poised to expand protections against racially-biased juror exclusions. Two days earlier, on March 18, the Court agreed to address the scope of its recent jurisprudence severely limiting the imposition of life-without-parole sentences on juveniles in a case arising out of a notorious string of random shootings around Washington, D.C.

Remarkable as March was, perhaps the most dramatic development came at the end of February, when the Supreme Court vacated the death sentence of an Alabama man who had developed dementia while awaiting execution. Though the Court described itself as applying well-settled principles, the line-up of Justices in the majority was striking and, as the dissent makes clear, what that surprising line-up did was highly unusual. The February 27 ruling and the subsequent developments about juvenile sentencing and jury selection warrant particular attention given their potential impact on death-penalty cases.

Striking Black Jurors