Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has staked out her own positions so far during her relatively short Supreme Court tenure. She continued in that mode Thursday, dissenting alone from a death penalty ruling by the Republican-appointed majority.

Jackson’s criticism, which was stronger than her two fellow Democratic appointees’ separate dissent, provides some insight into the court, including within its three-justice minority, in a case that might otherwise escape widespread notice.

The decision in Thornell v. Jones, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, reversed a federal appeals court that sided with a criminal defendant on ineffective assistance of counsel grounds. The result was predictable from a high court that’s been hostile both to capital claims and rulings from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As the partial agreement from the two-justice dissent shows, this wasn’t the typical partisan split we see in these cases.

The 9th Circuit had ordered Danny Lee Jones’ resentencing on the grounds that his Sixth Amendment right was violated because his counsel failed to raise certain favorable evidence to try to mitigate his death sentence. Alito, who’s been making news for flag-related reasons lately, wrote: “Among other things, the Ninth Circuit all but ignored the strong aggravating circumstances in this case.”

In one of the two dissents, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, agreed with the majority on that point. But she said the majority went too far in unnecessarily weighing the aggravating and mitigating factors itself rather than sending the case back to the lower court to consider the full record in the first instance. Sotomayor quoted precedent that the high court is one of “review, not first view.”

Had those been the only two sets of writings from the court, it might be easier to dismiss the case as unremarkable. Indeed, there was near unanimous agreement that the circuit went astray. Had the majority been willing to abide by what the Sotomayor/Kagan dissent cited as proper procedure, then this could’ve been closer to a unanimous ruling overall.

But Jackson’s solo dissent reframes the matter. “In its search for legal error in this capital habeas case, the Court makes many mistakes of its own, including misreading the Ninth Circuit’s opinion,” the Joe Biden appointee began. She took issue with the notion that the circuit “all but ignored” the aggravating factors. The lower court’s discussion of those factors was “concise,” she acknowledged, but there’s “no benchmark length for any such discussion.”

So the claim that the circuit “all but ignored” the aggravators “rings hollow,” wrote Jackson, the court’s first former public defender, who separately wrote a solo concurring opinion Thursday in a case involving the National Rifle Association and the First Amendment.

The majority’s “real critique,” Jackson continued in her criminal case dissent, doesn’t appear to be with the circuit’s methodology but, rather, that the majority “merely takes issue with the weight that the Ninth Circuit assigned to each of the relevant facts.” She agreed with Sotomayor’s dissent that “we are not the right tribunal to parse the extensive factual record in this case in the first instance,” and she concluded that that’s “doubly true where the Ninth Circuit committed no legal error in reviewing that record to begin with.”

So the decision contains more agreement than it might seem on the surface of the 6-3 vote. But it’s also revealing that the majority might have been able to garner a more-unanimous ruling if it wanted one, and the split within the dissenters is an interesting phenomenon to watch as well, with Jackson being more of the real dissenter here.

As we head into the court’s June crush of crucial decisions, expect more 6-3 rulings to come — including ones that will likely contain clearer splits between the Republican and Democratic appointees.

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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com