Crime & Consequences

Category: U.S. Supreme Court

Sorry Joe, No Midnight Justice for You

by · Nov 10, 2024 10:55 am

In 1800, Jefferson’s Republicans routed Adams’s Federalists. During the transition period, the Federalists still controlled the government. They created many new judicial positions and filled them quite swiftly. The appointees were called the Midnight Judges, which has been a term of derision for this maneuver ever since.

Some people have been calling on Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire abruptly in mid-term so that President Biden could replace her with a younger justice during the transition period. Justices rarely step down in mid term, as it would be disruptive to the workings of the Court. Doing so now would be correctly perceived as blatantly political, something the Court surely does not need.

Jess Bravin reports for the WSJ:

Despite calls from some liberal activists for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down while Democrats can fill her seat before political power changes hands in January, she has no plans to retire from the Supreme Court, people close to the justice said. Continue reading . . .

SCOTUS’s Unclear Reversal of Capital Case It Deems “Unclear”

by · Nov 4, 2024 10:31 am

The U.S. Supreme Court has finally acted on Alabama’s petition in the case of murderer Joseph Clifton Smith. The high court’s repeated relisting of this case for consideration in an unprecedented number of conferences has drawn considerable speculation as to what was going on.

The high court did not take the case up for full briefing and argument but instead sent it back to the Eleventh Circuit for a do-over. That is most unfortunate, because they failed to clean up a mess of their own creation.

In the 1989 case of Penry v. Lynaugh, the Supreme Court ruled correctly that its precedent in Lockett v. Ohio requires capital sentencing juries to consider mental retardation (as it was then known) as a mitigating circumstance. (Whether Lockett itself was correctly decided is another question. See this article.) In 2002, the high court decided that wasn’t good enough, and it made mental retardation (as it was still known then) a categorical exclusion. Along with the constitutional problems, there is a huge practical problem. The Court tried to draw a bright-line rule with a paint roller.

Intelligence is a continuous spectrum, and the breakdown into categories is entirely a human construction. There are no natural dividing lines set by objective science. The lines are therefore subject to manipulation, as discussed in this post. Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Takes Up Drug Smuggler Deportation Case

by · Nov 4, 2024 9:11 am

The U. S. Supreme Court issued an orders list today, taking up one case, Riley v. Garland, No. 23-1270. Pierre Riley is a citizen of Jamaica, caught eight years ago smuggling over a metric ton of marijuana. Upon his release from prison, the immigration authorities began deportation on the ground that he had committed an aggravated felony.

An immigration judge granted Riley’s application for asylum, but the Government appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reversed and reinstated the deportation order.

The case involves technical questions regarding the jurisdiction and timing for a federal court of appeals to review immigration decisions. Continue reading . . .

Prosecutors Taking a Dive

by · Oct 28, 2024 9:51 am

The Anglo-American system of justice has always depended on having adversarial advocates to present both sides of any controversy. But what happens when a prosecutor “takes a dive” and joins a convicted defendant’s efforts to overturn his conviction? U. Utah Law Professor Paul Cassell has this op-ed in The Hill on that subject. He focuses particularly on the Glossip case from Oklahoma presently before the Supreme Court, in which he represents the victim’s family. See this post.

This is not to say that confessions of error are always inappropriate. Sometimes they are the right thing to do. The problem arises when political or ideological considerations enter into the picture. There is a strong basis for suspicion that is happening in the Glossip case, where the AG’s investigator never even asked the trial prosecutor about the meaning of cryptic notes that lie at the heart of the present case. In other cases, there is no doubt at all. Continue reading . . .

U.S. Supreme Court Takes Up Supervised Release Revocation Case

by · Oct 21, 2024 9:27 am

The United States Supreme Court issued an orders list this morning, taking up one criminal case. In Esteras v. United States, No. 23-7483, the high court will ponder what factors a federal district court may consider when deciding whether to revoke the supervised release of a federal convict. It is, once again, a question of interpretation of federal criminal statutes which will have little, if any, impact on the state courts that handle most criminal cases in this country. Continue reading . . .

Glossip Case in SCOTUS Tomorrow

by · Oct 8, 2024 11:11 am

The notorious case of Richard Glossip will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow. With the Oklahoma Attorney General supporting Glossip, the court appointed an amicus, Christopher Michel, to defend the decision of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. CJLF’s amicus brief in the case is here. Our press release is here. Utah law professor Paul Cassell has a three-part series of posts at the Volokh Conspiracy titled Glossip v. Oklahoma: The Story Behind How a Death Row Inmate and the Oklahoma A.G. Concocted a Phantom “Brady Violation” and Got Supreme Court Review here, here, and here. Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Takes Up Law Enforcement Related Cases

by · Oct 4, 2024 10:19 am

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a short orders list from Monday’s pre-term conference, adding 15 cases to the docket for the October 2024 Term. A much longer list of cases turned down will likely be issued next Monday at the formal opening of the term.

Continuing the high court’s frustrating lack of interest in criminal law, the list includes only one actual criminal case, Thompson v. United States, No. 23-1095. This case raises the question of whether the federal law against false statements to financial institutions and federal agencies extends to misleading half truths. An aspect of the case that increases its media profile is the fact that defendant Patrick Daley Thompson is the grandson of Chicago’s notoriously corrupt mayor Richard J. Daley and the nephew of later mayor Richard M. Daley.

There are also several law-enforcement-related civil cases, a category that gets more interest from SCOTUS:

Gutierrez v. Saenz, No. 23-7809, is a federal civil rights suit regarding a Texas capital case. It presents somewhat complex issues regarding DNA testing, standing, and distinctions between innocence claims and sentencing claims.

Barnes v. Felix, No. 23-1239, is a police use-of-force case involving the “moment of threat doctrine.” As described by the petitioner (i.e., the plaintiff suing the police officer), this approach “evaluates the reasonableness of an officer’s actions only in the narrow window when the officer’s safety was threatened, and not based on events that precede the moment of the threat.” In the Fifth Circuit, Judge Higginbotham wrote a concurrence to his own majority opinion asking the Supreme Court to resolve the circuit split on this issue. Continue reading . . .

Final Orders List

by · Jul 2, 2024 8:38 am

The U.S. Supreme Court issued the last regular orders list of the term today. The court took up two cases on resentencing under First Step Act (which should have been titled the False Step Act or perhaps the Misstep Act). If a federal criminal sentenced before the Act gets a resentencing for some reason, does he get the benefit of the Act’s softer sentencing?

There will be a few orders lists during the summer recess, but they will likely be procedural matters, not decisions on whether to take up a new case.

Continue reading . . .

Supreme Court Narrows an Obstruction Law

by · Jun 28, 2024 11:47 am

No one was surprised when the rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were charged with crimes. A lot of people were surprised when they were charged with violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a law mostly about financial matters enacted in the wake of the Enron fiasco. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court disapproved the creatively broad reading of the law behind these prosecutions in Fischer v. United States. Continue reading . . .