Following a Texas prosecutor’s extraordinary concession that his office used false evidence to secure a death sentence, the Supreme Court last year ordered a Texas appeals court to reconsider the case.

It’s not every day that a prosecutor “admits fault,” as attorneys say, and joins a defendant in asking for a conviction to be overturned, let alone in a capital case in Texas. The Supreme Court, generally impatient with death penalty appeals, noticed.

It sent the case of a death row inmate named Areli Escobar back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, “for further consideration in light of Texas’ admission of error.”

But that court, in a 6 to 3 decision, had other ideas. “Although the admission of wrongdoing by the state in a criminal case is important and carries great weight, we are not bound by it.” Judge Sharon Keller wrote for five judges, citing an earlier ruling and paving the way for Mr. Escobar’s execution.

This was not the first time that this court, also known as the CCA, appeared to defy the Supreme Court, the court said Jordan M. Steikerprofessor of law at the University of Texas.

“The CCA has a notable history of treating Supreme Court opinions as optional guideposts rather than as orders from a higher tribunal,” he said. “People often continue to cling to reasoning that the Supreme Court has implicitly or even explicitly rejected. And the Supreme Court has, on more than one occasion, had to exercise jurisdiction multiple times in the same case, not just to clarify a point in federal constitutional law, but to reaffirm the hierarchy of courts in our federal system.”

Mr. Escobar’s lawyers sent back to the Supreme Court last month to ask to intervene again in light of the state court’s failure to show what it said was “any deference to the considered judgment of the law enforcement officers who secured the guilty verdict.”

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — not to be confused with the Texas Supreme Court, which hears civil cases — has tested the justices’ patience in past cases. For example, in 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the state court had applied the wrong standard in determining that a death row inmate, Bobby J. Moore, was not intellectually disabled. That determination made Mr. Moore eligible for execution.

As in Mr Escobar’s case, the judges sent the case back to the Court of Criminal Appeals for rehearing. As in Mr. Escobar’s case, the prosecutor changed his position and the prisoner’s side, saying that Mr. Moore was indeed intellectually disabled. And as in the case of Mr. Escobar, the Court of Appeal reaffirmed his earlier statement.

When Mr. Moore’s case returned to the Supreme Court in 2019, it scolded the state court for reversed his ruling.

“We have found, in its opinion, too many cases where it repeats, with minor variations, the analysis we previously found inadequate, and these same parts are critical to the final conclusion,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who dissented from the 2017 decision, now joined the majority. He said in a unanimous opinion that the state court had “repeated the same errors that this court had previously condemned.”

Mr. Moore was sentenced to life in prison. He was granted parole in 2020.

The central question in Mr. Escobar’s case — what weight to give to prosecutors’ admissions of error — is already before the judges. In January, the court agreed to decide whether Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma, deserves a new trial following an admission of wrongdoing by the state’s Republican attorney general.

The judges will hear arguments in Mr Glossip’s case in the autumn. There is reason to believe that they might decide to have Mr. Escobar’s case argued on the side.

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch is disqualified from the Glossip case after hearing part of it as an appeals court judge. Allowing review in Mr. Escobar’s case would ensure that the court will not be evenly divided on the issue.

The Texas case has other features that could interest the justices. They include the state court’s dismissal a decision of 86 pages by a judge who concluded that Mr. Escobar’s conviction was based on junk science produced by a police DNA lab that was so riddled with problems that it had to be shut down.

In nevertheless upholding Mr. Escobar’s conviction, the state appeals court cited other evidence linking him to the 2011 murder of Bianca Maldonado Hernandez, including cell tower data and a partial fingerprint. But the centerpiece of the case was evidence from the DNA lab.

During a hearing on the challenge to Mr. Escobar’s conviction, a juror said the DNA evidence was crucial.

“I was on the fence, if you will, about whether he was guilty or not guilty, all the way up to the point when the DNA evidence was presented to the jury, and for me that was the deciding factor,” it said juror. .

Jose P. Garzathe prosecutor whose office obtained the conviction said it took him some time to reconsider his position.

“But as more evidence came to light about how flawed the evidence was that the jury relied on, we had to reevaluate that position,” he said in a 2022 interview. “While it is the instinct of every prosecutor to seek convictions to defend it, it is our job to ensure that justice is done.”

Daniel Wooftera lawyer for Mr. Escobar, said the gist of the case was simple.

“I don’t understand how anyone could think it’s just to put this man to death,” he said, “based on a conviction that the prosecution cannot support.”

Everton, a storied English soccer club trying to weather a serious financial storm, secured a modest victory Monday when a record penalty that sent the club to the bottom of the Premier League standings was reduced on appeal.

Everton’s original penalty, a ten-point deduction for breaches of financial rules, was reduced to six points, boosting its chances of staying in the division – and retaining access to the tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue that brings with it a place in the Premier League. brings.

The successful appeal immediately lifted Everton to 15th in the standings and allayed the club’s fears of relegation and possible financial ruin. However, the reprieve could be short-lived.

The Premier League announced in January that Everton and Nottingham Forest, another club at risk of relegation, faced additional charges for breaching cost control rules. If the teams are found guilty, the new case will almost certainly lead to another points deduction.

Everton, a founding member of the Premier League, has become a symbol of poor management and financial risk-taking in recent years. Crippled by expensive contracts and the cost of building a new stadium, the club faces debts of around $1 billion and continues to regularly require millions of dollars in outside financing to keep its operations afloat.

One of the largest creditors is 777 Partners, an American investment company. That company began lending money to Everton around the time in September that 777 announced a deal to buy the club from Farhad Moshiri, a British-Iranian businessman who has owned the club since 2016.

But the change of ownership has shown little sign of completion amid increasing scrutiny of 777 Partners by the Premier League, which must approve the deal before it can go ahead.

The Everton case is also important in other respects. The original charges against Everton came when the British government wanted to impose a regulator for the football industry. The Premier League has reluctantly accepted the idea of ​​a regulator, but is trying to shape the powers of such a body. Until now, the league has been largely self-run, owned by and for the twenty teams that play in it each season.

For Everton, the prospect of relegation from the Premier League to the Championship, the second tier of English football, would most likely escalate the sporting and financial crisis even further. Relegation would trigger a massive sell-off of players and almost certainly lead to administration, a form of protection against bankruptcy. Nevertheless, recent news reports have said there are potential alternative investors for the club, which is building a 53,000-seat stadium on the banks of the River Mersey in home city Liverpool.

Under a process agreed by Premier League teams last year, all cases related to breaches of so-called profit and sustainability rules, including any appeals, must be decided before the start of next season. The rules were changed because Everton’s original breach came in a season in which they narrowly avoided relegation, leading to the threat of legal action from a group of clubs who believe they lost as a result.

Everton were originally punished for violating rules that state clubs can lose a maximum of 105 million pounds (about $133 million) over three seasons, excluding spending on infrastructure, youth programs and other specific elements. Everton exceeded that limit by £19.5 million.

The Premier League said Everton’s 10-point penalty, imposed by an independent review panel, had been reduced because the club had successfully refuted two of the nine justifications underpinning the original deduction. “This revised sanction has immediate effect and the Premier League table will be updated today to reflect this,” the league said. The league had arbitrarily arrived at the penalty of 10 points, and the new one of six points; it has no set schedule for deductions for financial violations.

Part of the league’s original punishment was based on the claim that Everton had not acted in good faith with the league. The reduction in the points penalty was partly because the appeals panel rejected that assessment, Everton said.

“That decision, together with reducing the points deduction, was an incredibly important point of principle for the club on appeal,” Everton said said in a statement.

Robert Badinter, a French lawyer and former justice minister who led the fight for the abolition of the death penalty in France and became one of the country's most respected intellectual figures, died early Friday. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by Aude Napoli, his spokeswoman.

“Robert Badinter has never stopped advocating the Enlightenment,” said President Emmanuel Macron wrote on social mediaand called him a “figure of the century” who embodied the “French spirit.”

Mr. Badinter was a respected lawyer for decades but was best known for passing the 1981 law that abolished the death penalty in France, one of his very first acts as justice minister in President François Mitterrand's socialist government.

“Thanks to you, tomorrow French justice will no longer be justice that kills,” Mr Badinter told lawmakers in 1981, a fiery, hour-long speech defending the law.

He achieved this despite widespread public support for the death penalty at the time. The fight against the death penalty was at the heart of his lifelong defense of human rights against oppression and cruelty.

In 'The Execution', a 1973 book, he vividly recalled 'the sharp blow' of the guillotine knife when he witnessed the execution of one of his clients, a traumatizing experience which he said led him to campaign against death penalty. Decades later, in a 2010 interview with The New York Times, he still called the guillotine “my old enemy.”

Mr Badinter was Minister of Justice from 1981 to 1986 and then became President of the French Constitutional Council, a position he held for nine years. The council is the institution that reviews laws to ensure they comply with the Constitution. He also served in the Senate as a Socialist MP from 1995 to 2011, gradually coming to resemble the conscience of the republic, a staunch defender of the rule of law.

“Deeply committed to justice, a supporter of abolition, a man of justice and passion, he leaves behind a void that matches his legacy: immeasurable,” Éric Dupond-Moretti, the French Minister of Justice – and himself a long-time lawyer in the defense – said on social media.

Born in Paris, the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, a region in Eastern Europe that now borders Moldova and Ukraine, Mr. Badinter was raised to respect the liberal values ​​and tolerance of the French republic.

But in 1943, when he was fifteen, his father, Simon, was deported from Lyon and never returned from the Nazi death camps. Several other members of his family, including one of his grandmothers, were also murdered by the Nazis.

The lesson for Mr. Badinter was not that the promises of the republic were empty, but that constant vigilance was necessary to fulfill and defend them. The wartime Vichy government in France, which collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews, represented the ultimate betrayal of the republic.

Describing himself as “republican, secular and Jewish,” he carried with him for the rest of his long life the mark of the loss of his family during a moment of French betrayal.

“I am French, a French Jew – the two cannot be separated,” he said in 2018. “These are not just words, this is lived reality.”

Mr Badinter had a particularly close relationship with Mr Mitterrand and worked with him to reform the Socialist Party as a centre-left movement that moved away from the large-scale nationalization of industries.

It was to Mr Badinter that Mr Mitterrand turned in 1984 to sign, in strict secrecy, the document in which the President recognized Mazarine Pingeot, his daughter from an adulterous relationship.

Days after Alabama became the first state to put an inmate to death using nitrogen gas, officials elsewhere have begun considering the new execution method.

In Ohio, where no one has been put to death in five years, the state's attorney general and several Republican lawmakers are in attendance a new bill touted on Tuesday, that would allow execution by nitrogen hypoxia, in addition to lethal injection.

Oklahoma and Mississippi have adopted the new method, and Nebraska is considering it. The Governor of Louisiana also said the state must look for new ways to carry out executions, which have not taken place there since 2010.

The effort comes at a time when America is becoming increasingly divided over the death penalty. Opinion polls show that a majority still favors the death penalty, but the margin has narrowed in recent years from 80 percent in favor in 1994 to the mid-1950s. according to Gallup. Many states have failed to carry out the death penalty due to a series of botched executions and the increasing difficulty of obtaining lethal drugs.

That stalemate is especially evident in Ohio, where Republican Governor Mike DeWine said in a 2020 interview that lethal injection was 'impossible from a practical point of view'. The governor has repeatedly asked himself: as recently as last week – whether the death penalty, which he supported when the state introduced it in 1981, is an effective deterrent given the long delays in its implementation.

Efforts to abolish the state death penalty have failed in recent years, despite a coalition released a poll this week showing that a slim majority of Ohioans support replacing it with life without parole.

Mr. DeWine has urged lawmakers to seek an alternative to lethal injection, given a federal judge's ruling that the execution method in Ohio could cause “severe pain and unnecessary suffering.” However, his office declined to comment Tuesday on whether the governor would support nitrogen gas asphyxiation.

The Ohio bill was introduced five days after Alabama used nitrogen in the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, one of three men convicted of killing Elizabeth Sennett in 1988. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said it a textbook execution and suggested it could be an example for other states. “Alabama did it, and now you can do it too,” he said.

But critics continued to question its application, noting that descriptions from several witnesses contradicted the state's pre-execution claim that the use of nitrogen gas would cause unconsciousness “in seconds.”