The Supreme Court's ethics-tainted term ended last week. Plenty has been written on the court's momentous decisions involving election law, presidential power, gay rights, affirmative action and free speech. However, little attention has been paid to the number of deaths that will inevitably result from this term's majority opinions.

Two months ago, Chief Justice John Roberts said, "The hardest decision I had to make was whether to erect fences and barricades around the Supreme Court." Really? At the beginning of the term in October, Roberts and five other justices refused to hear the appeal of Andre Thomas. Thomas, a mentally ill Black man, was convicted of killing his white wife and biracial son by an all-white jury that contained three members who admitted their opposition to interracial marriage and procreation. Allowing the State of Texas to execute him by lethal injection would keep me awake many, many more nights than erecting temporary fencing that has already been removed.

Andre Thomas' capital case continues a recent trend. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote back in 2021, "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." The Supreme Court is this nation's court of last resort. Doesn't a decision to ignore justice and let a man die by lethal injection make the court majority in Thomas' case complicit in his death?

The May decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency will inevitably result in the death of not one person, but a multitude. A 5-4 majority of the court agreed to cut back on the protection of wetlands by the Clean Water Act. Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued against the majority's reasoning, stating it would have "significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States." Justice Elena Kagan agreed, noting that "wetlands play a crucial part in flood control (if anything, more needed now than when the statute was enacted)." Two former EPA commissioners, one appointed by President Bill Clinton, the other by President George H.W. Bush, wrote in a brief to the court that "wetlands have long been recognized as vital to protecting a range of important values essential to Congress's clean water directives, including ... water storage to mitigate effects of floods and droughts."

A single acre of wetlands can store 1 million to 1.5 million gallons of floodwater. By allowing more wetlands to be drained, the Sackett decision will lead to more floods like the 2017 one in Houston where 65 people died from freshwater flooding. As the two EPA commissioners noted, "in Houston, there have been five 500 year flood events in the past 6-7 years." In other words, more deaths by water are coming and coming soon.

In addition to preventing flooding, U.S. wetlands store 11.5 billion metric tons of soil carbon. As wetlands disappear, carbon is released into the atmosphere, dirties the air and accelerates climate change. The danger is clear. In the wake of last year's court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that restricted the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions by power plants, Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, population and data science at Harvard, said, "the dirtier air will make us sicker — and many Americans will die earlier as a result." A study published by GeoHealth found there were approximately 12,000 heat-related premature deaths annually in the U.S. from 2010 to 2020. By 2100, the number of deaths increase by 97,000 in a high-warming scenario that is made more likely by the court decisions in West Virginia v. EPA and Sackett v. EPA.

There were other cases in the past two decades that led to an increase in American deaths. Last year's Dobbs decision struck down a federal right to abortion. A University of Colorado study shows that abortion bans increase maternal mortality by 24%. Decided early in Chief Justice Roberts's term, the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case struck down most prohibitions in gun ownership. In its wake, the number of firearm deaths in the United States has increased from 31,593 in the year of the decision to 48,830 in 2021.

The infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin once said: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic." The majority of this Supreme Court showed no signs of finding a death sentence imposed by a biased jury on one man — Andre Thomas, who allegedly suffered acute psychosis from a lifelong mental illness — to be a tragedy. Are numerous deaths stemming from dirty air, climate change, abortion bans and gun proliferation indeed a mere statistic scarcely considered in majority decisions?

Attributing direct responsibility to the court majority for the coming deaths of so many Americans may be a legal stretch. Still, my verdict is guilty.

In Keith Raffel's checkered past, he has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started an award-winning internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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