Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, confirmed earlier this month after a bruising battle with Republicans, has cast her first vote on the court in a case that’s sure to leave Republicans saying, “I told you so.”
Sotomayor voted with Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissenting from the majority’s denial of a stay of execution for Jason Getsy, an Ohio man who was hired to kill another man but accidentally killed the target’s mother instead. Justice David Souter, who Sotomayor replaced, often voted with the same liberal wing of the court.
Getsy had argued that he didn’t deserve the death penalty because the person who hired him and others who participated in the shooting had received more lenient sentences. But the majority of the court rejected that argument, and yesterday the 33-year-old man was executed by lethal injection in Lucasville, Ohio.
