Supreme Court Justice shrugs after prosecutors call a female death row inmate ‘slut puppy’ in Oklahoma

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a nearly unanimous decision that Brenda Evers Andrew, the only woman on death row in Oklahoma, may not have received a fair trial because prosecutors called her “slut puppy.”

Only two Justices dissented in the Andrew ruling, and we’ll give you three guesses about who one of them was, and the first two don’t count: Clarence Thomas, of the Anita Hill sexual harassment scandal in the 1990s, and more recently, the subject of massive conflict of interest allegations and other ethics violations.

The 2001 murder of Andrew’s husband

According to CounterPunch, in 2001, Andrew and her husband, Robert Andrew, were shot by two masked men in the Andrew’s garage. Robert died, and Brenda was injured. Brenda was having an affair with one of the men, James Pavatt, and they did run off to Mexico together after Robert was killed, but Pavatt later confessed he committed the crime with another man and said Brenda had nothing to do with it. Still, Brenda was convicted for conspiring to kill her husband with her boyfriend and sentenced to death. Pavatt was convicted, too, and remains on Oklahoma’s death row to this day.

After her conviction and sentencing, Brenda’s legal team filed a federal habeas petition stating her trial wasn’t fair, depriving her of due process, as guaranteed in the Constitution, and after several courts of appeal turned her down, the Supreme Court heard Andrew’s case Tuesday. The High Court said in its ruling, “Among other things, the prosecution elicited testimony about Andrew’s sexual partners reaching back two decades; about the outfits she wore to dinner or during grocery runs; about the underwear she packed for vacation; and about how often she had sex in her car.” The ruling also states prosecutors called Andrew a “slut puppy” during court proceedings.

Some dirty details were relevant, Thomas and Gorsuch said

Along with Thomas, Conservative Judge Neil Gorsuch disagreed with the court’s decision that the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals should reexamine Andrew’s trial and subsequent conviction and sentencing, and while some of the evidence about Andrew’s behaviors were irrelevant, like what she wore to dinner on occasion, private details of her sex life were relevant to the case.

As far as the “slut puppy” comment, the dissent wrote, “Andrew falsely accuses the prosecution of calling her a ‘slut puppy’ in closing argument. Whether the prosecution quoted something it believed Andrew once said to suggest to the jury that Andrew herself was a ‘slut puppy,’ or simply to recite an alleged abusive phone call is a question of fact for the Tenth Circuit to resolve.”

Regardless of what Thomas and Gorsuch have to say about the Andrew case, her conviction and sentencing are headed back to the court of appeals. “The question now is whether a fair-minded jurist reviewing this record could disagree with Andrew that the trial court’s mistaken admission of irrelevant evidence was so ‘unduly prejudicial’ as to render her trial ‘fundamentally unfair,'” the Supreme Court’s opinion said. “The court of appeals must ask that question separately for the guilt and sentencing phases,” the court added.