Supreme Court declines to take up death row inmate’s case

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene Monday in the case of death row inmate Terence Andrus, reversing course after finding just two years ago that a “tidal wave” of evidence raised questions about his sentence.

It’s the latest in a yearslong back and forth between the Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which the high court previously said “may have failed” to consider crucial information before upholding Andrus’ 2012 death sentence in the fatal shootings of two Sugar Land residents in a Kroger parking lot in 2008.

But last year, the state court rejected those criticisms and upheld Andrus’ death sentence. On Monday, the Supreme Court relented, declining without explanation to take up Andrus’ case again.

It was a striking reversal by the high court that previously found evidence about Andrus’ past revealed “a childhood marked by extreme neglect and privation, a family environment filled with violence and abuse” and raised significant questions about whether the jury that found him to be a danger to society in 2012 might have had second thoughts before sentencing him to death.

Monday’s decision not to reconsider sparked a lengthy and sharp rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that Texas’s "defiance” of the high court’s orders to reconsider that evidence “substantially erodes confidence in the functioning of the legal system."

“That is precisely what this Court permits today,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by the court’s other two liberal judges, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer.

The majority of the Supreme Court, however, was appeased by the state criminal appeals court’s 5-4 ruling in May 2021, that the evidence in Andrus’ favor was “not particularly compelling” and that much of it was “double-edged.” The evidence against Andrus, the state court ruled, “was strong and substantial, and notably, extensive with respect to violence during incarceration.”

Sotomayor torched that ruling in her dissent, saying the Texas appeals court “unmistakably erred” as it “rejected or ignored this Court’s conclusions.” The court of criminal appeals “declined to account for substantial record evidence that undercut its conclusions and misapplied the relevant legal standards,” she wrote.

The Texas court’s opinion “cannot be reconciled with this Court’s prior opinion, let alone with the habeas record,” Sotomayor wrote. “In fact, the Texas court repeatedly indicated its disdain for this Court’s conclusions.” “If summary reversal is ever warranted, it is warranted here,” she wrote.

Gretchen Sween, the attorney who represents Andrus before the Supreme Court, called the high court’s decision a “crippling blow to the rule of law.”

“It is shocking that a majority of the Supreme Court did not feel compelled to defend the integrity of its own previous opinion in this very case — which is only 2 years old,” Sween said.

The decision is not the end for Andrus’ case. He has a separate federal appeal pending, as well, that was on hold awaiting the ruling from the Supreme Court.