Washington | The Supreme Court of the United States examines Tuesday the request of a death row inmate who wants to be touched by his pastor during his execution and could take the opportunity to delimit the place of religion in the chambers of death.
John Ramirez, 37, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection on September 8 at Huntsville Penitentiary in Texas. Seized urgently, the Supreme Court had suspended in extremis its execution and fixed a hearing to examine the merits of the case.
At the age of 20, he stabbed a store worker in a burglary in the south of that conservative state. He had escaped the police for four years, but was finally apprehended in 2008 and sentenced to death a year later.
A few months before the date set for his execution, this Christian member of a Baptist church had taken the courts to demand that his pastor could put his hands on his body and pray aloud during his passage from life to death.
His spiritual advisor said under oath that these gestures were part of “the rites that he wishes to administer to John Ramirez as part of their common faith,” his lawyers explained in court documents. However, according to them, the Texas rules “oblige him to stay in the corner of a room like a potted plant”.
Texan prison authorities currently allow the presence of a spiritual advisor in the death chamber, but the latter must remain silent and at a distance for “security” reasons.
Imam refused
The Supreme Court could take advantage of this case to clarify its case law on the religious freedoms of those condemned to death, a subject that has been regularly seized of in recent years.
In 2018, she refused to block the execution of a Muslim detainee who demanded the presence of an imam by his side in the death chamber.
Faced with public outcry, she had a few weeks later suspended the lethal injection of another convict who wanted to be accompanied by a Buddhist spiritual advisor in his last moments.
Stressing that Christians were entitled to the support of a chaplain of their faith, she wrote that the prison authorities should not differentiate between religions.
Several states then excluded all spiritual advisers from the death chamber.
In 2021, however, the Supreme Court ruled that this radical solution infringed too much on the right to free religious exercise, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, and suspended two executions on this ground.
The new file should allow him to say what limits to this principle are legitimate in the prison world and even more, during the passage from life to death.