Reed v. Louisiana

137 S. Ct. 787, 197 L. Ed. 2d 258, 85 U.S.L.W. 3409, 2017 WL 738127, 2017 U.S. LEXIS 1430

Opinion

Justice BREYER, dissenting from the denial of certiorari.

Marcus Dante Reed was sentenced to death in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, a county that in recent history has apparently sentenced more people to death per capita than any other county in the United States. See Aviv, Revenge Killing: Race and the Death Penalty in a Louisiana Parish, The New Yorker, July 6 & 13, 2015, p. 34. The arbitrary role that geography plays in the imposition of the death penalty, along with the other serious problems I have previously described, has led me to conclude that the Court should consider the basic question of the death penalty's constitutionality. See Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. ----, 135 S.Ct. 2726, 192 L.Ed.2d 761 (2015) (BREYER, J., dissenting). For this reason, I would grant Reed's petition for a writ of certiorari.