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Law is, as legal scholars and commentators have long recognized, both a refuge for those seeking to escape abuses of power and a trap in which their claims of justice get lost in a maze of statutory intricacies. Nowhere has this been more clearly on display than in the world of capital punishment.

Over the span of half a century, the Supreme Court has gone from championing the rights of capital defendants and death row inmates to deflecting and denying their pursuit of justice. Where once the court carefully scrutinized procedures used in death cases, insisting that they had to conform to the dictates of so-called super due process, today it has made the due process accorded in those cases not super at all.

The Supreme Court’s refusal on Monday to take the appeal of Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed is just the latest example of the way legal complexities can be deployed to facilitate the state’s desire to get on with the business of executing people. Reed was, in 1998, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Stacey Lee Stites.

Right from the start, he has maintained his innocence. He contends that Stites was killed by her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, because he suspected that she was having an affair with Reed.

He wants a chance to prove that he was not the killer by testing Stites’ belt, which was used to strangle her, for DNA. The belt is in the state’s possession, and Reed has offered to pay for the cost of the test.

In the new world of capital jurisprudence, however, nothing is simple, even when it could help determine the guilt or innocence of someone who faces execution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor made that clear in her stinging and persuasive dissent from the court’s denial of certiorari.

This dissent is another reminder that Sotomayor has assumed the mantle of those justices who, over the past 50 years, have made lasting contributions to the effort by persuading their colleagues to end the death penalty altogether or to provide justice and equal treatment for those caught up in the death-penalty system.

The New York Times’ Adam Liptak described........

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