The Supreme Court on Oct. 8 lifted its temporary stay of a federal appeals court ruling requiring that Alabama death row inmate Michael Sockwell be retried for murder.

In an unsigned order, the high court lifted an administrative stay of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit that Justice Clarence Thomas granted on Sept. 26. Thomas, who oversees emergency appeals from Alabama, did not explain at the time why he granted the administrative stay, which gave the justices more time to consider the emergency appeal.

The new order specifies that the denial of the state’s emergency application is “without prejudice to a reapplication if a new trial is imminent.” In other words, Alabama is free to file a new application with the Supreme Court if a new trial of Sockwell is approaching.

A divided three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit had ruled on June 30 that Sockwell’s conviction was unconstitutional because prosecutors engaged in racial discrimination during jury selection.

The ruling made Sockwell eligible for retrial. He was convicted in the 1988 killing of Montgomery County Deputy Sheriff Isaiah Harris. Although Sockwell was sentenced to death, his lawyers said their client’s IQ is low enough to make him ineligible for the death penalty.

The panel majority specifically found that prosecutors violated Sockwell’s 14th Amendment rights when they “repeatedly and purposefully” turned away potential black jurors who were deemed more sympathetic to him because of their shared race.

Prosecutors said the sheriff’s wife hired Sockwell to kill Harris to conceal an affair in which she was involved and to collect her husband’s insurance money. No witnesses saw the shooting. Sockwell initially told authorities that police withheld food and water and threatened to beat and kill him before he confessed to the crime.

In the state’s emergency application to the Supreme Court filed on Sept. 25, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund G. LaCour Jr. said Sockwell is challenging his murder conviction by claiming that prosecutors violated Batson v. Kentucky (1986). President Donald Trump nominated LaCour in August to be a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.

In Batson, the Supreme Court held that a prosecutor may not use a peremptory challenge to exclude jurors because of their race. A peremptory challenge allows an attorney to reject a certain number of jurors without providing a reason.

Until the 11th Circuit ruled, every court that reviewed Sockwell’s claim had rejected it, LaCour said.

LaCour told the Supreme Court that it should stay the circuit court ruling because the state has a good chance of reversing the ruling.

If the circuit court ruling were allowed to take effect on Sept. 30 and a state court vacates the conviction, Alabama’s right to seek review may be “irreparably” harmed, as the state will be compelled to retry Sockwell for murder, he said.

Sockwell’s attorneys filed a response to the application on Oct. 3.

Sockwell, 62, who has been held on death row for 35 years, suffers from “horrific physical and mental disabilities,” and according to the 11th Circuit’s ruling, “has never received a trial free from constitutional error,” the brief said.

Despite this, the state wants to keep him on death row “while it pursues an entirely case-specific petition” for certiorari, or review, at the Supreme Court, the brief said.

The brief said the Supreme Court should deny Alabama’s stay request because it is unlikely the court will agree to grant certiorari or reverse the lower court’s judgment. The state has not identified any conflicts between the federal courts of appeals on relevant legal issues and has not argued the lower court’s ruling “will have broad implications.”

“The government’s arguments all turn on the specific facts of Sockwell’s case. This Court almost never grants certiorari in a situation like that,” the brief said.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Oct. 8, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Oct. 9, 2025.