The Supreme Court seemed divided Tuesday on whether Texas must allow a pastor to pray aloud and lay hands on a death row inmate at his execution.

       Approximately 90 minutes of arguments in the case of John Henry Ramirez indicated it could be decided by the one justice who did not ask a question: Neil M. Gorsuch.

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       Gorsuch, nominated to the court by President Donald Trump in 2017, has been largely supportive of religious rights and the federal law that requires government to be accommodating of religious practice. That would be a good sign for Ramirez.

       But the Ramirez case seemed to flip the conventional lineup of the court. In general, the conservative justices who support religious groups in other settings are deeply suspicious of the sincerity of death row inmates and their lawyers.

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       Liberal justices, on the other hand, were the strongest supporters of Ramirez’s claims.

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       Ramirez, 37, was convicted of stabbing to death Pablo Castro in a robbery that netted pocket change in Corpus Christi, Tex., in 2004. His guilt is not at issue. On the night of his scheduled September execution, the Supreme Court issued a stay and ordered an expedited hearing on his request.

       Supreme Court considers a minister’s role at the time an inmate is put to death

       Ramirez says he has given his life to God since the killing. He wants the man who has been his spiritual adviser for several years, Pastor Dana Moore of Second Baptist Church, to be in the execution chamber with him, to touch him and pray aloud for his soul. Texas says Moore can attend the execution, but only if he stays quiet and away from Ramirez, citing safety and decorum.

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       Seth Kretzer, the Houston lawyer representing Ramirez, said the state is being unreasonable and obstinate, and that its arguments for restricting Moore fall flat when considering history and the law.

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       “Across Texas’s 572 executions spanning four decades, the state’s policy was to allow a spiritual adviser to be present in the execution chamber to lay hands on a condemned inmate and to audibly pray,” Kretzer said.

       It is only in recent years, he said, that the state banned spiritual advisers from the death chamber. After pushback from the Supreme Court, it relented, but said there could be no touching or audible prayer.

       Some of the court’s conservatives bombarded Kretzer with questions.

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       Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said Kretzer’s statistics “don’t move me at all,” because chaplains employed by the state would not be seen as a threat to disrupt an execution.

       Justice Clarence Thomas worried about inmates who file a series of complaints.

       “If we think Mr. Ramirez has changed his request a number of times and has filed last-minute complaints .？.？. and if we assume that that’s some indication of gaming the system, what should we do with that with respect to assessing the sincerity of his beliefs?” asked Thomas.

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       Under questioning from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Kretzer said Ramirez would be content with Moore simply touching his foot. Roberts wondered about another request from a different inmate — “if the religious conviction were somewhat different and the hand had to be on the forehead, on the heart, something like that?”

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       Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. predicted an “unending stream of variations,” adding, “We’re going to have to go through the whole human anatomy.”

       Kavanaugh said the state had a legitimate interest in wanting to minimize risk “in the most fraught situation anyone could imagine,” and that there was no way to predict how an outside spiritual adviser would react.

       Kavanaugh pivots as Supreme Court allows one execution, stops another

       Kretzer said the court had no reason to doubt Ramirez’s sincerity — lower courts did not. He said the federal government and the state of Alabama have conducted executions under the conditions Ramirez has requested, with no incidents.

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       And he said that Congress, in passing the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 intended for decisions to be made on individual claims when government restrictions impede religious practices. They must serve a compelling interest and be narrowly tailored to meet the goal.

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       Justice Department lawyer Eric J. Feigin said Texas and other states could “substantially” limit contact and prayer with the inmate, but that it did not appear the state was using the least restrictive means. He noted that in 13 recent federal executions, there was prayer by a spiritual adviser in 11 of them and physical contact in one.

       He suggested the case be returned to lower courts for more fact-finding.

       Texas Solicitor General Judd E. Stone II had two arguments: that Ramirez was shifting his demands to avoid execution, and that Texas had the right to reduce the risk of a problem during execution.

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       But Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the state has never shown there was a problem, and Justice Elena Kagan got more specific. “Are you aware in any other state of an execution going astray because of an outside spiritual adviser?” she asked.

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       Stone said he did not, but that did not matter. “This is the sort of thing we would anticipate to be a very low likelihood of occurring. It just has a catastrophic potential of potential damage if it did.”

       Supreme Court says Alabama cannot execute inmate without his pastor present

       Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who usually sides with conservatives, worried that the state’s concern about risk could extend so far as to keep inmates from gathering to conduct religious services.

       Last year, Barrett joined Kagan and the court’s liberals in saying states did not have the option of keeping spiritual advisers out of the death chamber. It was unclear at the time which justice provided a fifth vote to stop the execution of the Alabama man who brought the request to the court, but Tuesday’s argument suggested it might have been Gorsuch.

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       The case is Ramirez v. Collier.

       Debate over Puerto Rico

       The justices on Tuesday also considered whether it is unconstitutional for the federal government to deny benefits to older, disabled and blind Americans because they live in Puerto Rico.

       Jose Luis Vaello-Madero received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments in 1985 in New York. The payments continued to his bank account even when he moved to Puerto Rico in 2012. But the payments stopped when the government learned of his new address. Moreover, it attempted to recover more than $28,000 he received, since it says residents of the territory island are not eligible for the payments.

       SSI benefits are available to American citizens living in any of the 50 states, D.C. and the Northern Mariana Islands. Those who live in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam are excluded.

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       Justice Department lawyer Curtis E. Gannon told the justices during arguments that what might look unfair on the surface was simply part of the balance Congress has employed regarding Puerto Rico’s 3 million residents.

       Its residents contributed to federal unemployment insurance and to Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and receive benefits.

       But Puerto Ricans do not vote for president, and Congress has exempted them from certain taxes, such as federal income tax in some cases. It is part of making the island a self-governing commonwealth, he said.

       “Congress could reasonably take those considerations into account when deciding that Puerto Rico’s residents would receive some federal benefits but not others,” Gannon said.

       He noted that President Biden has asked Congress to change the policy regarding the disability payments, he said, but that is a decision for lawmakers rather than courts.

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       Hermann Ferre, representing Vaello-Madero, said lower courts were correct in finding it irrational to treat his client as if he had left the country.

       “For all relevant purposes, he is the same as similarly situated individuals in the states and the Northern Mariana Islands,” Ferre said. “Tax status is irrelevant. Those poor enough to qualify for SSI pay no federal tax, and they don’t have to qualify.”

       Several justices seemed reluctant to step in, although they questioned Gannon about whether the government might drop efforts to recover the money from Vaello-Madero.

       Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose parents are from Puerto Rico, seemed clearly on his side.

       “Needy is needy, whether in Puerto Rico or in the mainland,” she said.

       The case is United States v. Vaello-Madero.