The U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked yet again Thursday night, and this time the tie vote spared a death row inmate in Alabama from execution.
The court, which is evenly split between liberal and conservative justices, denied a request from the Alabama attorney general to allow the state to proceed with the execution of Vernon Madison, a man sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of a police officer.
These eleventh-hour requests arrive at the high court regularly, and the justices typically deny them without comment or revealing how they voted.
But Thursday's order put the ideological divide among the justices in stark contrast, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito publicly dissenting -- and providing a sense that the death penalty is still a divisive area for the Supreme Court.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia joined that same group last summer, when a conservative majority upheld the legality of Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol. If Scalia were still alive, there's little doubt his vote would have tipped the balance in favor of Alabama and Madison would have been executed.
Earlier on Thursday, an appeals court had placed Madison's execution on hold to allow his lawyers to mount a formal appeal to the state's decision to put to death a man they say suffers from "vascular dementia" and thus is too mentally incapacitated to withstand the lethal procedure.
"Mr. Madison now speaks in a slurred manner, is legally blind, and can no longer walk independently as a consequence of damage to his brain," the lawyers said in a statement, and added that it's "unconstitutional to execute an individual who is mentally incompetent."
The case is now with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which will hold oral arguments in June to determine the weight of these arguments.
Would Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's nominee to replace Scalia, have sided with liberals or conservatives at the Supreme Court? It's hard to tell, since his record as an appellate judge sheds little light on the issue of capital punishment.
But in 1995, during his confirmation hearing to occupy a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where he has served for nearly 20 years, Garland did say that, "as a personal matter," he viewed the constitutionality of the death penalty as “settled law" and that "lower courts are to follow that rule."
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