"It was just a pro se prisoner petition in a big stack of IFPs that normally would be short-formed with a quick 'Splitless, factbound, I recommend DENY.'"

Orin Kerr puzzles over Justice Sotomayor's "rather remarkable dissent from denial of certiorari in Pitre v. Cain, a pro se Eighth Amendment case brought by a prison inmate whose case was dismissed as “patently frivolous” by the trial court and affirmed by the Fifth Circuit in a short one-paragraph order.

The opinion begins:

Petitioner Anthony Pitre, a Louisiana state prisoner, stopped taking his HIV medication to protest his transfer to a prison facility. He alleges that respondents at the facility punished him for this decision by subjecting him to hard labor in 100-degree heat. According to Pitre, respondents repeatedly denied his requests for lighter duty more appropriate to his medical condition, even after prison officials twice thought his condition sufficiently serious to rush him to an emergency room.

This is the empathy we heard about, is it not?

The Magistrate Judge concluded that Pitre had been “‘hoist by his own petard’”...

And that's not empathy.