Page:Russell Bucklew v. Anne L. Precythe, Director, Missouri Department of Corrections.pdf/33

30 issued sentences are resolved fairly and expeditiously. Courts should police carefully against attempts to use such challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay. Last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm, and “the last-minute nature of an application” that “could have been brought” earlier, or “an applicant’s attempt at manipulation,” “may be grounds for denial of a stay.” Hill, 547 U. S., at 584 (internal quotation marks omitted). So, for example, we have vacated a stay entered by a lower court as an abuse of discretion where the inmate waited to bring an available claim until just 10 days before his scheduled execution for a murder he had committed 24 years earlier. See Dunn v. Ray, 586 U. S. ___ (2019). If litigation is allowed to proceed, federal courts “can and should” protect settled state judgments from “undue interference” by invoking their “equitable powers” to dismiss or curtail suits that are pursued in a “dilatory”