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
- 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.
- 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.