On July 18, 1965, a prisoner on Virginia’s death row wrote a letter to his lawyer. Melvin Davis Rees Jr. stood convicted in the 1959 case of the Jackson family of Louisa County, and his lawyer had just filed a petition asking the Supreme Court of the United States to review the case. Rees wanted it withdrawn. It was, he wrote, his "mature & considered decision" to give up all further proceedings. The lawyer, S. White Rhyne Jr. of Washington, refused to act on the letter until a psychiatrist had seen his client. That refusal started a case that sat on the Court’s docket for nearly thirty years and was still being argued about in 2013.
Most murder appeals never get that far. The Court picks its cases, and a petition for a writ of certiorari is a request, not a right. When the justices say no, they almost always say it in a single line. Yet the cases below show how much can turn on that line, and on the rarer occasions when the Court agrees to listen. Some produced opinions that lawyers still cite. Others ended with a denial that closed the last door, sometimes on the night of an execution. Together they trace sixty years of the Court’s dealings with men and women convicted of more than one killing.
Rees was convicted in a Spotsylvania County courtroom of the first-degree murder of Carroll Vernon Jackson Jr., and the jury fixed his punishment at death. A federal jury in Maryland had already convicted him of kidnapping Jackson’s wife, Mildred, and their daughter Susan, 5, and he was serving two life terms on those counts. The Supreme Court of Virginia refused his petition on October 8, 1962, calling the judgment "plainly right," and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review it in 1963. A federal habeas case followed. On February 1, 1965, the full Fourth Circuit affirmed the denial of relief, conceding that "there was publicity aplenty about the crime" but holding that the trial had been fair.
Then came the letter. A psychiatrist retained by Rhyne, Dr. Oscar Legault, examined Rees in September 1965 and judged him "psychotic, suffering from a schizophrenic disorder of a mixed type." On May 31, 1966, in Rees v. Peyton, a brief unsigned opinion, the Court kept the case and sent it back to the district court to decide whether Rees had the "capacity to appreciate his position and make a rational choice" about going on or giving up. Judge Oren R. Lewis held hearings that summer and fall. In January 1967 he reported that Rees suffered from "schizophrenic reaction, chronic undifferentiated type," and "cannot at this time make a rational choice with respect to continuing or abandoning further litigation in his behalf."
On April 10, 1967, the Court issued a one-sentence order. The petition would be "held without action" until further order. It gave no reason, and none ever came. The law professor Phyllis L. Crocker, who studied the justices' papers for a 2004 article in the Wayne Law Review, wrote that the Court chose to keep the stay in 1971 and looked at the case again in 1988, and that through three Chief Justices it treated the file the same way. Virginia told the Court it had no wish to execute an insane man. Rees died in prison of natural causes in 1995, and that October the Court dismissed the petition, by then captioned Rees v. Superintendent of Virginia State Penitentiary.
The 1966 opinion outlived him. For years, lawyers for death-row prisoners read it as a rule that a federal habeas case must stop until an incompetent client recovers. On January 8, 2013, in Ryan v. Gonzales, a unanimous Court said no. Writing for the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas held that Rees dealt only with whether an incompetent prisoner could withdraw a petition, "and it provides no clear answer even to that question," and that the 1967 order "offered no rationale" at all. Rees, the Court concluded, "offers no support for federal habeas petitioners seeking to stay district court proceedings." The legal journalist Lyle Denniston observed that the rulings had sat in the books for more than forty-six years with little explanation until that day.
Thomas Eugene Creech came to the Supreme Court as a respondent. In 1981, already serving two life sentences for first-degree murder in Valley County, Idaho, he was charged with killing a fellow prisoner, David Dale Jensen, 23. He pleaded guilty against his lawyer’s advice, and Ada County District Judge Robert Newhouse sentenced him to death. Among the aggravating circumstances the judge relied on was a clause in Idaho’s statute: that the defendant had shown "utter disregard for human life."
The Ninth Circuit held that phrase too vague to guide a sentencer. Idaho took the question to Washington. In Arave v. Creech, decided March 30, 1993, the Court reversed on that point in an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The Idaho Supreme Court had narrowed the phrase to mean a "cold-blooded, pitiless slayer," and the Court held that the narrowed version met constitutional standards on its face. Justice Harry Blackmun dissented, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens. The ruling did not hand Idaho its death sentence back. The Court left in place the Ninth Circuit’s separate grant of a new sentencing hearing, and the case returned to Ada County.
Arave v. Creech is also the document that fixed the numbers most often repeated about him. The opinion recorded that he had admitted killing or taking part in the killing of at least 26 people. His lawyers have long said his claims were grossly exaggerated, and the Associated Press reported that many early confessions came under so-called truth serum drugs since discredited. He stands convicted of five murders.
Newhouse sentenced him to death again on April 17, 1995. The appeals that followed ran nearly three decades. In Creech v. Richardson, filed in 2022 and amended in 2023, a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief, holding that the Court’s 2022 decision in Shinn v. Ramirez barred consideration of new evidence his federal lawyers had gathered. The Supreme Court denied review on October 10, 2023. Two days later an Ada County judge signed a death warrant.
What followed belongs to the record of the Court as much as to Idaho. On the morning of February 28, 2024, Justice Elena Kagan denied a stay. Later that day the execution was called off after the team could not set an IV line. A second warrant brought a new round of litigation. On November 5, 2024, the Idaho Supreme Court, relying on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1947 decision in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, held that a second attempt did not on these facts amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Senior U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow had by then stayed the second date, and in August 2025 he ruled against Creech on that claim and lifted the stay. As of October 1, 2026, Creech remained on Idaho’s death row with no execution date. Newhouse, the judge who sentenced him to death twice, had asked the state to spare him.
Jeffrey Joseph Daugherty was 20 and from Michigan when he traveled south with his girlfriend in early 1976. He was arrested in Dillwyn, Virginia, on March 12, 1976. In Pennsylvania a Blair County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Elizabeth Shank, a store clerk. In Florida he pleaded guilty in 1980 to the murders of Carmen Abrams, Betty Campbell and Lavonne Patricia Sailer. The Sailer case, a robbery that the federal appeals court valued at $15, brought a death sentence on April 27, 1981.
His was a case that reached the Supreme Court again and again without ever being heard. The Court denied review on February 23, 1983, after the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It denied review once more in 1984, and again on October 9, 1987, days before a scheduled execution that the Eleventh Circuit then stayed. When that court rejected his claims in 1988, holding that his trial lawyer’s decision not to call a psychiatric expert was a reasonable strategic choice, the Supreme Court declined review on October 3, 1988.
A second death warrant was signed four days later. His lawyers filed a last motion built on recent Supreme Court decisions, among them a claim that the jury had been told its sentencing verdict was only advisory, and the Florida Supreme Court rejected it on November 1. On November 7, 1988, the Court denied his final applications for a stay, which had been presented to Justice Kennedy and referred to the full Court. The order, reported as Daugherty v. Florida, 488 U.S. 936, carried dissents. Justice Brennan, joined by Justice Marshall, would have granted the stay. Justice Blackmun joined them in part, agreeing that the case should be held for Adams v. Dugger, a pending case that raised the same question about jurors told their verdict was advisory. Justice Stevens also said he would have granted it. Four justices, in other words, wanted to wait. Five did not.
The killings that terrorized the Washington region in October 2002 produced two prosecutions of John Allen Muhammad. A Virginia jury convicted him in November 2003 of capital murder in the death of Dean Harold Meyers, 53, on two theories: a killing in the commission of an act of terrorism, and the killing of more than one person within three years. A Maryland jury convicted him in May 2006 of six first-degree murders. He was sentenced to death in Virginia and to six consecutive life terms without parole in Maryland.
The central legal question went to Virginia’s highest court. Muhammad’s lawyers argued that only the person who fired a fatal shot could be sentenced to death, and that he was not that person. On April 22, 2005, in Muhammad v. Commonwealth, the Supreme Court of Virginia rejected the argument in an opinion by Justice Donald W. Lemons. Where two people carried out a killing as a team, it held, each could be an immediate perpetrator, and Muhammad "was an immediate perpetrator and as such was a principal in the first degree." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in 2006.
His federal habeas petition failed in the Fourth Circuit on August 7, 2009, and Virginia set an execution date. On November 9, 2009, the Court denied a stay and declined to hear the case. Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote separately. The case, he said, "highlights once again the perversity of executing inmates before their appeals process has been fully concluded," and he argued that the Court should stay executions set before its review of a first federal habeas petition was complete. SCOTUSblog noted that the three did not dissent from the denial itself. The statement changed nothing. Governor Kaine declined clemency the next day, and Muhammad was executed at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, on November 10, 2009. He was 48, and he never admitted the crimes.
The Court did return to the case, in a sense, through his co-defendant. Lee Boyd Malvo was 17 in 2002. After the Court barred the death penalty for anyone under 18 at the time of the crime, Prince William County announced in March 2005 that it would not try him there. Years later the Court agreed to hear Virginia’s appeal over his life sentences, then dismissed the case on February 26, 2020, two days after Virginia made people serving life for crimes committed as juveniles eligible for parole after 20 years.
Kimberly McCarthy was convicted of capital murder in the July 1997 death of her neighbor in Lancaster, Texas, Dorothy Booth, 71, a retired college psychology professor. Her first conviction did not hold. On December 12, 2001, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed it because police had questioned her after she asked for a lawyer. A jury convicted her again in 2002 and again sentenced her to death. The appeals court affirmed in 2004, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2005.
The issue that drew national attention arrived late. McCarthy is Black and Booth was white, and her retrial jury had eleven white members and one Black member, according to Amnesty International and the AP. Her trial lawyer had not objected to the prosecutors' strikes or asked for a hearing under Batson v. Kentucky, the 1986 decision that bars striking jurors because of race. In January 2013 the Supreme Court declined to review her case once more, and a Dallas judge granted a reprieve less than five hours before a scheduled execution so her lawyers could pursue the jury claim.
Her lawyer in the last months, Maurie Levin of the University of Texas, built a new application on Trevino v. Thaler, decided 5 to 4 by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 28, 2013, which opened a route for some ineffective-assistance claims in Texas. On June 24, 2013, the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed it as an abuse of the writ without reaching the merits. Judge Elsa Alcala dissented, writing that on the question Trevino raised "there is only the sound of crickets." Because the ruling rested on procedure, Levin said, nothing remained to carry to Washington. "If there was something to appeal, I would." McCarthy was executed in Huntsville on June 26, 2013, the 500th execution in Texas since the state resumed them in 1982.
The Court had the case twice and declined it twice, and the decision that might have helped her came from the justices a month before she died, in someone else’s appeal, in a form the state court held she could not use.
Gary Ray Bowles confessed in 1994 to killing six men in Florida, Maryland and Georgia. He was convicted of three of the Florida killings. He pleaded guilty in 1996 to the first-degree murder of Walter Hinton, 42, in Jacksonville, and was sentenced to death. Juries in Nassau and Volusia counties convicted him of the murders of Albert Morris and John Hardy Roberts, and he received life terms. The killings in Maryland and Georgia were never prosecuted.
His case touched the Court three times. It denied review of his direct appeal on June 17, 2002. It denied review again on November 29, 2010, after the Eleventh Circuit held, in an opinion by Judge Ed Carnes, that no Supreme Court decision barred prosecutors from striking prospective jurors who supported the death penalty but had doubts about imposing it. The third time came on the day of his execution.
Bowles had raised a claim of intellectual disability, which under the Court’s own decisions would bar his execution. His lawyers relied on a 2017 IQ score of 74 and earlier scores of 80 and 83. The Florida courts refused to hear it. A Florida rule had required such claims to be raised within 60 days after October 1, 2004, and on August 13, 2019, the Florida Supreme Court held the claim untimely, writing that his "inaction should not be ignored on the basis of the perceived futility of his claim." His petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bowles v. Florida, was filed on August 16, 2019, with a request for a stay. Disability rights groups filed briefs in support.
On August 22, 2019, the Court denied both. Justice Sotomayor wrote a statement respecting the denial. Florida, she wrote, had required prisoners to raise claims under Hall v. Florida by 2004, a decade before Hall was decided, and she called that a "Kafkaesque procedural rule." She said she would be prepared to revisit it in an appropriate case. She did not think his petition, as framed, was that case. Bowles was executed at Florida State Prison that night at 10:58 p.m. He was 57.
Federal capital cases follow the same last step. Jurijus Kadamovas, a Lithuanian national, and his business partner Iouri Mikhel were convicted in Los Angeles in January 2007 of conspiracy to take hostages resulting in death and of hostage taking resulting in death, in a ransom scheme in which five people were abducted and killed between October 2001 and January 2002. Judge Dickran M. Tevrizian sentenced both men to death in March 2007.
On May 9, 2018, a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed in an opinion by Judge Jay S. Bybee. It rejected the argument that the federal Hostage Taking Act reaches only conduct tied to international terrorism, holding that the statute says nothing about terrorism and was a valid use of Congress’s power to carry out a treaty. Kadamovas’s petition for certiorari, filed on January 14, 2019, by his lawyer Benjamin L. Coleman, pressed two questions. The first asked the Court to read the Act in light of its underlying treaty. The second asked whether Judge Tevrizian should have stepped aside after telling the parties, during a holiday break in the trial, that a search committee had asked him to seek the post of United States Attorney. The judge had denied the recusal motion and withdrawn his name.
The Solicitor General opposed the petition, and on October 7, 2019, the Court denied review. That was the end of the appeals but not of the sentence’s history. On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners, Kadamovas among them, to life without parole. As of October 27, 2026, the Bureau of Prisons listed him at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace was convicted in Fulton County in March 1996 of the malice murders of four Atlanta women, Lula Bell McAfee, Mattie Mae McLendon, Johnnie Mae Martin and Annie Kate Britt, with other charges. Three of them were in their late seventies or eighties. The jury recommended four death sentences.
The appeals have turned on what the prosecutor said at sentencing. He showed the jury a cartoon, compared Pace with other serial killers, asked jurors to imagine themselves as the victims and pretended to tear the death penalty out of a law book. On December 3, 1999, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed. Justice Hunstein, joined by Presiding Justice Fletcher, concurred in the convictions but would have set aside the death sentences. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review on October 2, 2000, in Pace v. Georgia, 531 U.S. 839.
The federal courts reached the argument and still left the sentences alone. On May 11, 2023, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of habeas relief. According to the state’s brief, the court reasoned that because the Supreme Court had never held that even a widely condemned closing argument violated due process, the law was not clear enough to call the Georgia ruling unreasonable, and that even under Darden v. Wainwright, the Court’s 1986 decision on improper prosecutorial argument, the Georgia court’s ruling stood. Judge Rosenbaum concurred only in the judgment, calling the remarks "squarely and obviously improper" and writing that she concurred because the law required it.
Pace’s lawyers at the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta filed a petition in Pace v. Emmons, No. 23-5996, on November 8, 2023. It asked whether the federal appeals courts are bound by Darden as clearly settled law, and whether the argument, taken as a whole and set against a jury note asking about life without parole, had denied him due process. The petition was set for conference and rescheduled several times. On May 13, 2024, the Court denied it, and on July 22, 2024, it denied rehearing. As of June 30, 2026, the Georgia Department of Corrections listed Pace among the 33 people under a death sentence in its custody.
The case of John Edward Robinson Sr. shows the Court shaping a serial case without ever hearing it. Robinson was convicted by a Johnson County jury in October 2002 of the capital murder of Suzette Trouten, and in October 2003 he pleaded guilty in Cass County, Missouri, to five first-degree murders and received life without parole on each.
In 2004 the Kansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty law in a case that did not involve him. Missourinet reported in March 2006 that federal prosecutors had indicted Robinson on a kidnapping charge that could carry a federal death sentence. Then, on June 26, 2006, in Kansas v. Marsh, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Kansas ruling. Writing for a 5 to 4 majority, Justice Thomas held that a state may direct a death sentence when mitigating circumstances do not outweigh aggravating ones, even when the two are in equal balance. Federal prosecutors then moved to drop their charge so that Robinson could be returned to Kansas, Missourinet reported that August.
On November 6, 2015, in a 415-page opinion by Justice Caleb Stegall, the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed his capital murder conviction for Trouten and the death sentence on it, while reversing two other murder convictions as multiplicitous with it. It was the first time that court had upheld a death sentence since Kansas restored capital punishment in 1994. In October 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, and Attorney General Derek Schmidt called it the first Kansas death penalty case to exhaust its direct appeals since 1994. Governor Kelly denied clemency on June 18, 2026. In September 2026 the Kansas Supreme Court heard argument on a post-conviction appeal and gave no decision that day. Kansas has carried out no execution since 1965.
Robert Carl Foley was convicted by a Laurel Circuit Court jury in 1993 of the murders of the brothers Rodney and Harry Lynn Vaughn, killed in August 1991, and by a Madison Circuit Court jury in 1994 of the murders of Kimberly Bowersock, Lillian Contino, Jerry McMillen and Calvin Reynolds, killed in Laurel County in October 1989. He received six death sentences. He has denied the 1989 killings and has said the Vaughn shootings were self-defense.
The Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed the Vaughn judgment on November 21, 1996, over a dissent by Justice Stumbo, joined by Chief Justice Stephens. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 1997, declined review of the 1989 case in 1998, and declined to hear his first federal habeas case in 2008. In October 2014 he petitioned the Court again, over his trial lawyer’s handling of the ballistics evidence.
His latest petition is still open. In Foley v. Plappert, No. 26-5670, filed on September 21, 2026, by David M. Barron of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, he asks the Court to review a Sixth Circuit ruling that treated his new claim, built on evidence of brain injury and on his lawyers' failure to present mitigating evidence, as a successive petition. The Kentucky Attorney General’s office answered on October 21 that the Court has no jurisdiction to review such a finding, that no conflict among the courts exists, and that evidence offered only in mitigation cannot meet the federal standard for a successive petition, which requires facts pointing to innocence. Foley’s reply was filed on October 27, 2026. At that date the petition was pending, and no execution date had been set.
Across sixty years, the Court issued an opinion of its own in only two of these cases. In Rees v. Peyton it asked a question it never answered, then spent nearly half a century letting lower courts guess at the answer until Ryan v. Gonzales supplied one. In Arave v. Creech it gave Idaho the legal point it wanted and the sentencing hearing it did not. Kansas v. Marsh changed the course of the Robinson prosecution without mentioning his name.
Everything else came by way of denial. A denial sets no precedent and usually explains nothing, but the written statements attached to some of them have a life of their own. Brennan’s dissent in Daugherty, Stevens’s statement in Muhammad and Sotomayor’s in Bowles each named a problem the Court as a whole declined to take up that day. McCarthy’s lawyer built a better argument on a decision issued a month before her client’s execution and could not bring it before the justices at all.
The sentences went different ways. Muhammad and Bowles were executed within a day of their last orders from Washington. McCarthy was executed two days after a Texas ruling her lawyer said could not be taken there. Rees died with his petition still held. Kadamovas’s sentence was commuted by a president. Creech outlived an execution attempt, and Pace, Robinson and Foley remain under death sentences, waiting on courts below or, in Foley’s case, on the next conference list. The case did not end at the Supreme Court for any of them in quite the way the phrase suggests.
• October 8, 1962: The Supreme Court of Virginia affirms Rees’s conviction; the U.S. Supreme Court declines review in 1963.
• July 18, 1965: Rees writes to his lawyer asking to withdraw his certiorari petition.
• May 31, 1966: Rees v. Peyton sends the competency question to the district court.
• April 10, 1967: The Court orders Rees’s petition "held without action."
• February 23, 1983: The Court denies review in Jeffrey Daugherty’s direct appeal.
• November 7, 1988: The Court denies Daugherty’s last stay applications, with four justices in favor of a stay.
• March 30, 1993: Arave v. Creech upholds Idaho’s narrowed "utter disregard" circumstance.
• October 1995: The Court dismisses the Rees petition after his death in prison.
• October 2, 2000: Pace v. Georgia, certiorari denied.
• June 17, 2002: The Court denies review in Gary Ray Bowles’s direct appeal.
• April 22, 2005: The Supreme Court of Virginia affirms John Allen Muhammad’s death sentences.
• 2005: The Court declines to hear Kimberly McCarthy’s case.
• June 26, 2006: Kansas v. Marsh reverses the Kansas Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling on the state’s death penalty law.
• November 9, 2009: The Court denies Muhammad a stay; Justice Stevens writes a statement. He is executed November 10.
• January 8, 2013: Ryan v. Gonzales explains the Rees orders.
• May 28, 2013: Trevino v. Thaler is decided; McCarthy’s new application on it is dismissed June 24, and she is executed June 26.
• October 2016: The Court declines to review John Edward Robinson’s Kansas case.
• August 22, 2019: Bowles v. Florida, certiorari and stay denied, with Justice Sotomayor’s statement; Bowles is executed that night.
• October 7, 2019: Kadamovas v. United States, certiorari denied.
• October 10, 2023: The Court denies review in Creech v. Richardson.
• February 28, 2024: Justice Kagan denies Creech a stay; the execution is called off that day.
• May 13, 2024: Pace v. Emmons, certiorari denied; rehearing denied July 22, 2024.
• December 23, 2024: Kadamovas’s death sentence is commuted to life without parole.
• June 18, 2026: Governor Kelly denies Robinson clemency.
• September 21, 2026: Foley v. Plappert is filed; the state’s brief in opposition follows October 21 and Foley’s reply October 27.