Still waiting to hear whether #SCOTUS will vacate the Fourth Circuit's stay of execution preventing the US gov't from killing Dustin Higgs tonight — a request from DOJ, which is still trying to make the execution happen.

Breaking: #SCOTUS has vacated the stay preventing Dustin Higgs's execution, and ordered other relief that DOJ sought. The execution of Dustin Higgs will be allowed to proceed. The 3 liberal justices dissent, and Breyer and Sotomayor write. scribd.com/document/49090577…

Justice Breyer is not happy. "How just is a legal system that would execute an individual without consideration of a novel or significant legal question that he has raised?"

We also get a lengthy dissent from Justice Sotomayor. "To put [this moment] in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades."

Justice Sotomayor lays out the abhorrent reality of the past year, mincing no words and refusing to leave her thoughts in the form of a question: "This is not justice. ... I dissent."

I almost tweeted earlier that, if the execution were to proceed, I wanted us to get writing from the liberals that was up to the moment. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and, in his professorial way, Stephen Breyer delivered tonight.

TELL THEM. "Over the past six months, this Court has repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes, often at the Government’s request, allowing it to push forward with an unprecedented, breakneck timetable of executions."

Sotomayor calls out her colleagues not only for allowing the executions to go forward in this way, but also for preventing the lower courts from actually doing their job and developing interpretations of the law.

She went through it: "These findings with respect to Purkey and Montgomery raised significant questions as to whether their executions comported with the Constitution. We will never have definitive answers to those questions because this Court sanctioned their executions anyway."

This has been an opinion in the works for a while. Sotomayor details problems throughout these 13 cases — problems relating to the protocol, the interpretation of federal law, and constitutional issues — in a 10-page decision that is damning of the Trump admin and her colleagues.