Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has lashed out at his bench colleagues in a furious dissent about a decision that didn’t go his way.
On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with a death row inmate in Florida who was blocked from challenging his sentence even though a lower court ruled that a key witness lied on the stand.
The decision was dissented to by Thomas and Samuel Alito, with Thomas penning the dissent, and Alito excusing himself from just one section.
In an unsigned opinion, the majority of justices found that death row inmate Gary Whitton’s appeal was decided by a lower court on DNA evidence that was not heard by the jury that convicted him.
His appeal was knocked back more than once because both state and federal higher courts determined that the jury’s decision wouldn’t have been changed by knowing the witness’s criminal history.
But when the case reached the Florida Eleventh Circuit Court, the decision to refuse it was also based on new DNA evidence that the jury had not considered.
That decision, the Supreme Court found, was faulty.
Thomas, 77, wrote that he could not understand how the court could overturn the appeal verdict “based on the Eleventh Circuit’s inconsequential foot fault.”
He said he could not comprehend why the Supreme Court had even chosen to hear the case, let alone find in favor of a convicted murderer.
In his dissent, Thomas laid out the evidence against Whitton and argued that he did not deserve the chance to have his case heard at the highest level.
“It is unfortunate that the Court chose to intervene at the request of a convicted murderer,” he wrote.
“What makes it even worse is that the Court does so even while it refuses to correct far more consequential errors for law-abiding citizens,” Thomas continued, suggesting he does not think a convicted murderer on death row should have access to a Supreme Court appeal.
Thomas also nominated three cases he thought the court should have been considering instead—on pet issues popular among MAGA.
One was a college admissions case alleging discrimination against white and asian applicants. One was a “university censorship” case, and the third—which Alito omitted from his dissent—involved compensation for a military widow.
