## Facts

- Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, a Texas death-row inmate, was prosecuted for the 1986 abduction and murder of Etta Urdiales.
- After arrest, Jacobs gave a videotaped statement admitting he abducted and fatally shot Urdiales and led police to the body.
- At trial, Jacobs repudiated the confession and testified that his sister, Bobbie Hogan, shot Urdiales, and that he did not know she planned to kill the victim.
- Texas prosecuted Jacobs on the theory that Jacobs was the shooter, obtaining a capital murder conviction and a death sentence.
- In Hogan’s later prosecution for the same murder, Texas called Jacobs as a witness and treated as truthful his account that Hogan was the shooter, effectively disavowing its earlier position about Jacobs being the triggerman.
- Jacobs sought Supreme Court intervention, arguing that executing him after the State advanced contradictory factual theories about the identity of the killer raised federal constitutional concerns.

## Issues

1. Whether due process and the Eighth Amendment permit a State to maintain materially inconsistent factual positions about who committed the actual killing across related prosecutions, when the inconsistency bears on the justification for a death sentence.
2. Whether the Supreme Court should grant a stay of execution and review where the State later vouches for a version of events that conflicts with the theory used to obtain the capital sentence.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court, by per curiam order, denied the application for a stay of execution and denied certiorari.
- Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Ginsburg, dissented from the denial, arguing the Court should have stayed the execution and granted review to examine the constitutionality of the State’s contradictory positions.
- Justice Breyer noted he would grant the stay but did not join the dissenting opinion.

## Legal Principles

- A denial of certiorari and a denial of a stay leave the lower-court judgment in place and do not constitute a merits determination on the constitutional questions presented.
- The dissent reasoned that prosecutors have a duty to seek justice and that advancing mutually contradictory factual theories to secure convictions may conflict with due process.
- The dissent further reasoned that capital sentencing demands heightened reliability; a death sentence may be called into question where the State later repudiates, in another prosecution, the factual premise used to justify execution.

## Conclusion

The Supreme Court declined to halt Jacobs’s execution or review his case, despite a dissent arguing that the Constitution may not tolerate imposing death after the State secured the sentence by asserting Jacobs was the killer and later obtained a related conviction by treating as true the opposite account that someone else fired the fatal shot.


Jacobs v. Scott, 513 U.S. 1067 (1995)