“Justice Elena Kagan’s stinging dissent last week (see below for details) backing an Alabama death row inmate who was executed despite an unresolved religious discrimination claim highlighted her evolving role as a key voice in religion-related cases at the U.S. Supreme Court,” writes Marcia Coyle at the National Law Journal.
In a 5-4 decision last week, the Supreme Court rejected a Muslim inmate’s request for an imam to be with him during his execution instead of the state-provided Christian chaplain, suggesting that the inmate’s request was a last-minute attempt to delay execution. Kagan, who wrote the dissenting opinion, called the majority’s decision “profoundly wrong.”
Kagan was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor in the dissent. Alabama’s treatment of this prisoner “goes against the establishment clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality,” Kagan wrote.
Coyle explains that “Ginsburg, as the senior justice in dissent, assigned the opinion to Kagan” and it was just “the latest instance of Ginsburg picking Kagan to write on sensitive issues involving religion.”
Read the full story here: Kagan’s Scathing Death Row Dissent Highlights Central Voice on Religion
Coyle’s article looks at Kagan’s writing on an Arizona case challenging tax credits for scholarships to religious schools, a case challenging a town council’s practice of opening council meetings with a prayer and her “nuanced view of the role of religion” in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case.
The article also includes an interview with Ginsburg, in which the senior justice relates a story about Kagan’s fight to be the first girl bat mitzvahed in her Orthodox synagogue. Ginsburg thinks that experience of being “an outsider even in her own religion” gives Kagan “sensitivity” that her colleagues do not have.
Coyle ends her piece by noting that later this month the Supreme Court will face “another major religion case” when they hear arguments Feb. 27 in a challenge to a 93-year-old war memorial cross on public land.
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Photo above by Steve Petteway, photographer for the Supreme Court of the United States.) http://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/press/investiture/investiture_kagan.aspx, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11687923
Dennis Coday 