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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett described her struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with her duty to uphold the Constitution in an excerpt from her upcoming book “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” featured in The Free Press on Wednesday.
Barrett, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in October 2020 to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recalled the internal struggle she faced while presiding over one of her first cases on the Court.
Shortly after her appointment, Barrett and her colleagues considered a death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The U.S. Court of Appeals had vacated Tsarnaev’s sentence, but the Justice Department argued the decision was an error.
“For me, death penalty cases drive home the collision between the law and my personal beliefs. Long before I was a judge—before I was even a member of the bar—I co-authored an academic article expressing a moral objection to capital punishment,” she recalled. “Because prisoners sentenced to death almost always challenge their sentences on appeal, the tension between my beliefs and the law is not one that I could avoid as a young law clerk, much less now as a judge.”
Although she personally objects to capital punishment, Barrett sided with the government and ruled in favor of reinstating Tsarnaev’s death sentence.
She noted that this was not the only option available to her. Given her view on capital punishment, she could have “looked for ways to slant the law in favor of defendants facing the death penalty.” Nobody would have ever known whether she did so because she felt Tsarnaev had a stronger argument, or because she allowed her morals to creep into her decision-making.
“But that would have been a dereliction of duty. The people who adopted the Constitution didn’t share my view of the death penalty, and neither do all my fellow citizens today,” she wrote.
Barrett argued that if she distorted the law to affirm her stance on the death penalty, she would be interfering with voters’ right to self-government, and that her office doesn’t entitle her to align the legal system with her moral or policy views.
“I found the vote distasteful to cast, and I wish our system worked differently. Yet I had no doubt that voting to affirm the sentence was the right thing for me to do,” she asserted. “Had I concluded that casting such a vote was immoral or that I couldn’t fairly judge the case, the right thing to do would have been to recuse—not to cheat.”
The Supreme Court justice contended that the Court’s ruling did not affirm the morality of executing Tsarnaev, but rather, upheld that there was no legal impediment to imposing the death penalty on the convicted terrorist.
In closing, Barrett wrote that judges are referees, not kings, because “they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.”
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