When the Supreme Court turned a blind eye to President Trump’s hostility toward Muslims last summer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned, in dissent, that the majority was undermining the Constitution’s “foundational principles of religious tolerance.”

In so doing, she said, the court was sending a message to “members of minority religions in our country that they are outsiders, not full members of the political commu­nity.”

Late on Thursday, the Supreme Court again sent that message, this time to a Muslim death-row prisoner, Domineque Hakim Marcelle Ray, who was awaiting execution in Alabama for the 1995 rape and killing of a 15-year-old girl from Selma.

A day earlier, an appeals court had put Mr. Ray’s execution on hold because judges wanted more time to assess whether a policy at Holman Correctional Facility, where Mr. Ray was set to be executed, violated the Constitution’s prohibition against religious favoritism by the government.