Tennessee Electrocutes Inmate Despite Sotomayor Dissent

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to save a man from a Tennessee electric chair the night of Nov. 1 in spite of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s urging.

Her dissent from the denial of Edmund Zagorski’s appeals is the justice’s fifth separate writing already this term staking out her views on criminal justice issues.

Zagorski himself was the subject of one of those prior writings when the court rejected another one of his appeals last month challenging the state’s lethal injection procedure. Justice Stephen G. Breyer joined Sotomayor in that dissent.

After last month’s rejection, Zagorski, convicted of murder in 1984, ...