Richard Wolf

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Despite deep divisions over capital punishment, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that in the case of some particularly heinous Kansas murders, death was the appropriate penalty.

The court ruled 8-1 that death sentences handed down against three men in what became known as the "Wichita Massacre" in 2000 should not have been tossed out for procedural reasons by Kansas' highest court. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the decision, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor the lone dissenter.

Supreme Court says class action lawsuits can survive compensation offers

The case had exposed the same tensions and fault lines over the death penalty first revealed on the final day of the court's last term in June, when it ruled 5-4 to uphold a controversial form of lethal injection. Then, four justices spoke emotionally about the relative correctness or cruelty of capital punishment, and Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it might be unconstitutional.

Courts, states put death penalty on life support

In the Kansas case, the state Supreme Court had struck down death sentences against three convicted murderers because of instructions given to the juries and, in the case of two brothers, the use of a joint sentencing hearing rather than separate ones. The state asked to restore the death sentences, and a majority of justices agreed.

"These defendants tortured their victims, acts of almost inconceivable cruelty and depravity described firsthand for the jury by the lone survivor," Scalia said.

Noting during oral arguments that six of the state's nine death row inmates could win new hearings if the Kansas court's ruling remained, Scalia said, "Kansans, unlike our Justice Breyer, do not think the death penalty is unconstitutional and indeed very much favor it."

He later went out of his way to read the gory details of the Kansas murder case, in which five men and women were repeatedly raped and abused before four were murdered and the fifth shot execution-style.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the court's June opinion in Glossip v. Gross upholding lethal injections, called the Kansas killings "some of the most horrendous murders that I have seen in my 10 years here, and we see practically every death penalty case that comes up anywhere in the country. These have to rank as among the worst."

Nevertheless, the Kansas Supreme Court tossed out the death sentences for two reasons. It said the juries were not told that mitigating factors such as troubled childhoods did not need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it said brothers Jonathan and Reginald Carr should have had separate sentencing hearings.

Sotomayor took the lead in questioning the death sentences, as she did last year in criticizing Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol. She said the state court's criticism of the jury instructions was reasonable.

In her dissent, Sotomayor said the court never should have agreed to hear the case. "I worry that cases like these prevent states from serving as necessary laboratories for experimenting with how best to guarantee defendants a fair trial," she wrote.

USA TODAY's 2015 Supreme Court Decision Tracker