Moore v. Texas
The Court granted a stay of execution for a Texas death-row inmate pending the outcome of his petition asking the Court to review his case, tied to a separate pending case about whether executing people with mental retardation is unconstitutional.
Three justices — Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas — dissented from earlier, related stay orders in this case and a companion case, arguing the inmates raised their mental-retardation claims too late and that Texas courts had already rejected the claims on procedural grounds that the Supreme Court normally cannot second-guess.
How it got here: Texas courts dismissed the inmates' successive habeas petitions as an abuse of the writ under state procedural rules; the inmates asked the Supreme Court to stay their executions pending its decision in Atkins v. Virginia.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Curtis Moore and Brian Edward Davis were Texas inmates convicted of separate brutal murders and sentenced to death. Years into their appeals, and only on the eve of their scheduled executions, each raised for the first time a claim that executing a person with mental retardation violates the Eighth Amendment, pointing to IQ test scores from years earlier that had not been used to support that specific claim before.
The question before the Court
Should two Texas death-row inmates get to keep their executions on hold while the Court decided a separate case on executing people with mental retardation?
Why it matters
The stay keeps two men off death row a little longer while the Court resolves a related case on whether executing people with mental retardation violates the Constitution. The dissent's objection signals a broader fight over how last-minute claims and state procedural rules interact with federal death-penalty review, affecting how other states' courts and death-row inmates approach similar timing issues.
What changes now
The stay remains in place while the Court considers the cert petition; if certiorari is denied, the stay ends automatically, and if granted, it lasts until the Court issues its final mandate. The broader mental-retardation question was to be resolved in the pending case of Atkins v. Virginia, which would determine whether executing people with mental retardation is constitutional going forward.
What this does not decide
This order does not decide whether executing people with mental retardation is unconstitutional — that question was pending separately in Atkins v. Virginia. It also does not resolve whether these particular inmates are in fact mentally retarded; it only pauses their executions while further review occurs.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Scalia
“The Court’s action is unprecedented.”Scalia's characterization of the majority's decision to stay the executions.
Justice Scalia argued the Court had no legal basis to stay these executions because the Texas courts' rejection of the inmates' late-filed claims rested on adequate and independent state procedural grounds that bar Supreme Court review. He contended the inmates could have raised their mental-retardation claims years earlier, had not shown the constitutional issue would have changed their sentencing, and that granting stays under these circumstances would invite an flood of meritless last-minute execution applications.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- A stay of execution is appropriate only when there is a reasonable probability the Court will agree to hear the case, a significant possibility it will reverse the decision below, and a likelihood the applicant will suffer irreparable harm without the stay — the standard used for emergency requests like this one.
- The dissent argued that the Texas court's rejection of the inmates' petitions rested on an adequate and independent state ground — Texas's rule barring second or later habeas petitions raising claims that could have been raised earlier — which ordinarily blocks Supreme Court review entirely.
- The dissent explained that under Texas law a claim is only 'previously unavailable' if it could not have been reasonably formulated from earlier court decisions, and that the mental-retardation argument had already been raised in Texas cases years before these inmates filed their first habeas petitions.
- Because the alleged constitutional violation could not have changed the jury's answers to the specific sentencing questions it was asked, the dissent reasoned there was no realistic chance the state court's judgment would be reversed, so the legal conditions for a stay were not met.