The Supreme Court declined to hear James Skinner’s challenge to his 1998 murder conviction even though the Court vacated the conviction and death sentence of his co-defendant, Michael Wearry, in 2016, leaving two men convicted on the same evidence with opposite outcomes.

The Court’s denial came without explanation, and only Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson registered dissent. The difference in outcomes raises plain questions about equal treatment when prosecutorial misconduct has been found in a companion case. This is a conservative concern about the rule of law, not a soft-on-crime position.

Both Skinner and Wearry were tried based on the same two eyewitness accounts from the 1998 killing of Eric Walber. In 2016 the Court vacated Wearry’s conviction and death sentence after finding prosecutors had suppressed evidence that undercut those witnesses, and Wearry walked free. Skinner raised the same constitutional claims, but Louisiana courts refused to extend the same relief.

“Equal justice under law, the phrase engraved on the front of this court’s building, requires that two co-defendants, convicted of the same crime, who raised essentially the same constitutional claims, receive the same answer from the courts.”

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, said the difference was unjust and illogical. The majority declined to explain why Skinner should be treated differently than Wearry. The silence from the Court leaves a basic fairness question unanswered.

The record shows a troubling pattern of withheld evidence that would matter in any honest criminal trial. One witness, Sam Scott, gave investigators shifting accounts and apparently testified to settle a personal score against Wearry, while medical records undercut key parts of his story. The other eyewitness, Eric Brown, had undisclosed motivation tied to sentence reduction and offered inconsistent identifications.

Undisclosed material revealed problems with Brown’s testimony beyond motive. Evidence suggested Brown had admitted to fellow prisoners that he participated in a carjacking that led to Walber’s death. The record also showed Brown wanted to pin the crime on Wearry and at one point identified a different man in a photo array.

• Admitted to fellow prisoners that he participated in a carjacking that led to Walber’s death
• Wanted to pin the crime on Wearry
• Identified another man as Walber’s killer in a photo array

Other undisclosed leads pointed to at least one repeated confessor and a separate prosecution for a similar carjacking a month later. The Supreme Court found this mix of suppressed and inconsistent evidence compelling enough to free Wearry. Yet the same facts did not prompt a hearing for Skinner, whose conviction rested on that identical, tainted record.

“Because Skinner was subject to the same constitutional violations that Wearry was (and more), he is entitled to the same relief that Wearry received. The Louisiana courts denied him that relief.”

The conservative, rule-of-law argument is straightforward: prosecutors cannot hide evidence and then pick which defendants benefit from a later disclosure. When the state uses its power to win convictions while suppressing facts, the problem is not legal hair-splitting. It is government misconduct that corrodes public trust and risks locking innocent people behind bars.

Sotomayor also pointed out that Skinner’s conviction was the product of a non-unanimous jury verdict, an issue that modern precedent would call unconstitutional. That alone could justify renewed review, especially when combined with the Brady violations the Court already found in Wearry’s case. Instead the Court declined to act, with only two justices objecting and no public explanation from the majority.

Only one petition for review was granted that same day, a procedural dispute over pleading standards in a workplace discrimination case involving a prosecutor’s office, but it lacks the constitutional heft of a man sitting in prison while his co-defendant walks free. “Rather than leaving that injustice in place, the court should have granted certiorari to uphold its obligations to ensure the supremacy of its own decisions and to treat like defendants alike.”

The result is stark and unsettling: James Skinner remains incarcerated while Michael Wearry is free, though both were convicted on the same evidence and the same prosecutorial misconduct tainted both prosecutions. That selective application of precedent looks less like fidelity to the rule of law and more like institutional inconsistency, and it deserves plain questions from those who believe government must be held to its own rules.