Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has revealed the challenges of balancing her personal moral views with her responsibility to uphold the U.S. Constitution in her upcoming book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution. An excerpt, published Wednesday in The Free Press, details one of the earliest tests of her judicial philosophy.
Barrett, appointed to the Court in 2020 by President Donald Trump following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, described her struggle during the case of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. After an appeals court overturned his death sentence, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reinstate it.
“For me, death penalty cases drive home the collision between the law and my personal beliefs,” Barrett wrote. She recalled authoring an academic article opposing capital punishment long before joining the Court, making the case deeply personal.
Despite her objections to the death penalty, Barrett voted to reinstate Tsarnaev’s sentence. She admitted she could have subtly shaped her interpretation of the law to favor defendants, but emphasized that doing so would have betrayed her duty.
“That would have been a dereliction of duty,” she noted. “The people who adopted the Constitution didn’t share my view of the death penalty, and neither do all my fellow citizens today.”
Barrett explained that her role as a justice is not to legislate morality but to ensure that the law is applied fairly. She acknowledged her vote was “distasteful” but insisted it was the right choice. If her conscience had made it impossible to rule impartially, she said recusal—not bending the law—would have been the ethical path.
Ultimately, she argued, the Court’s ruling in Tsarnaev’s case was not an endorsement of capital punishment but a decision that no legal barrier prevented the sentence. Judges, she wrote, are “referees, not kings,” bound to enforce rules rather than create them.
