From [HERE] and [HERE] Terence Andrus’ childhood was horrific. From an early age, he faced heinous physical abuse and neglect at home; as a teenager, he was tormented by both peers and guards in juvenile detention. Andrus had a right to present this evidence to the jury at his capital trial, but his lawyer declined, ensuring that his client would be condemned to death. In 2020, the Supreme Court held that this failure, among others, violated the Sixth Amendment guarantee of effective counsel. Then, in an extraordinary act of defiance, five Republican judges on a lower court rejected SCOTUS’ finding, insisting that the higher court got it wrong. These judges all but dared the Supreme Court to bring them into line.

On Monday, the court refused. Instead, it rewarded this insubordination by allowing the lower court’s ruling to stand. This decision is devastating for Andrus, who will likely be put to death without vindicating the constitutional rights that were so egregiously violated at trial. It is also a disturbing signal to the lower courts that disobedience of binding precedent is permissible when it aligns with the majority’s hard-right ideology. There can be no “settled law” when SCOTUS lets rogue judges flout its own rulings and get away with it.

The story of Andrus’ case is tragic. His mother engaged in sex work and drug use when he was a child, selling and abusing drugs in front of her kids. She also beat her children with a board. At times, she disappeared for extended periods and left her kids without supervision or food. Her boyfriends were often violent, beating her and her children. In addition, one boyfriend raped Andrus’ younger half-sister. As a preteen, Andrus was diagnosed with affective psychosis. Sent into Texas’ notorious juvenile corrections system at age 16, Andrus was dosed with massive quantities of psychotropic drugs that were inappropriate for his condition and locked up in solitary confinement nearly 80 times. At the age of 20, during a carjacking he attempted while high on PCP, Andrus killed two people. Prosecutors charged him with capital murder.

In Texas, defendants can only be sentenced to death if the jury unanimously agrees that prosecutors have proved they pose a future danger to society. The state puts forth “aggravating evidence” showing why the defendant deserves to be killed; the defendants, in turn, have a constitutional right to present “mitigating evidence” showing why they deserve to live. Andrus’ attorney, James Crowley, had a duty to investigate and present mitigating evidence to the jury, and if he had looked, he would’ve found a mountain of it.

But he didn’t look. Rather, Crowley called Andrus’ mother to the stand, who lied about her son’s allegedly peaceful upbringing. Crowley then failed to rebut prosecutors’ aggravating evidence—even though they accused Andrus of committing a different violent crime of which he was probably innocent. Predictably, the jury interpreted this one-sided presentation as evidence that Andrus posed a threat of future violence and recommended the death penalty

Over the following years, Andrus obtained new lawyers who gathered ample mitigating evidence that never made it to the jury. They secured a hearing before a trial court, which ordered a new sentencing proceeding, finding that Crowley provided ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of the Sixth Amendment. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is made up of elected Republicans, overruled the trial court, declaring that Crowley did not fall “below an objective standard of reasonableness.”

This decision was too much for the Supreme Court, which threw out the Texas court’s ruling in 2020 by a 6–3 vote. (The majority opinion was not signed; Justices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.) “There is no squaring that conduct, certainly when examined alongside counsel’s other shortfalls, with objectively reasonable judgment,” the majority concluded. The Sixth Amendment was violated here.

But that wasn’t the end of the case: To get relief for ineffective counsel, a defendant must show that their ineffective counsel “prejudiced” them—meaning there’s a “reasonable probability” that it affected the outcome. SCOTUS suggested that Andrus was “prejudiced,” since this mitigating evidence probably would have convinced at least one juror to spare his life. It then sent the case back down so the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could apply its decision.

That’s not what the Texas court did. Instead, Judge Sharon Keller penned a belligerent 5–4 decision criticizing SCOTUS for questioning her own court’s work. Keller, who opposes freeing or compensating innocent people who are wrongly convicted, told the majority it was incorrect: The mitigating evidence that SCOTUS found “compelling,” she wrote, was actually “not particularly compelling.” Meanwhile, the aggravating evidence that SCOTUS found so weak and threadbare was, in her view, “strong” and “extensive.”

Keller would not even accept the justices’ bottom-line holding that, as a matter of law, Andrus received ineffective counsel: She pointedly referred to “alleged” failures of counsel that SCOTUS “believed” it had identified, then explained why she believed the higher court was mistaken. Based on this rejection of precedent, Keller found that Andrus faced no prejudice and upheld his capital sentence. Four judges dissented, writing that while they also thought SCOTUS got it wrong, they had no power to overrule it from below.