Sotomayor Decries ‘Unfair’ Trial in Jail Informant Case

A man serving life-without-parole in South Carolina state prison “has a strong argument that his trial and resulting life sentence were fundamentally unfair because the State withheld material exculpatory evidence,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said June 28 in a criminal case that features, as she put it, “a lifetime of lost liberty hanging in the balance.”

It’s a fitting coda to the just-completed U.S. Supreme Court term for the justice who has written throughout it—and throughout her high court tenure—to call out what she sees as injustice in matters of crime and punishment.

Sotomayor’s latest writing came in the case of ...