Category: U.S. Supreme Court
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 20, 2020 2:20 pm
Raymond Mata is very justly sentenced to death for the murder of 3-year-old Adam Gomez. (I have reserved the stomach-turning facts for the end of the post.) He has the right to government-paid counsel to make his defense, but shouldn’t the government insist on some kind of threshold of non-frivolousness before it forks over taxpayers dollars? Do we really need to pay for complete garbage? That is exactly what Nebraskans have paid for in Mata’s latest petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 16, 2020 9:36 am
The U.S. Supreme Court will postpone the argument session scheduled for next week. The press release says:
In keeping with public health precautions recommended in response to COVID-19, the Supreme Court is postponing the oral arguments currently scheduled for the March session (March 23-25 and March 30-April 1). The Court will examine the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 16, 2020 9:25 am
RJ Vogt has this story for Lexis’s Law 360 on Jones v. Mississippi, the juvenile life-without-parole case that the U.S. Supreme Court took to replace the mooted D.C. Sniper, Jr. case. See prior post.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 11, 2020 9:13 am
United States v. Briones, No. 19-720, is a federal case regarding what finding needs to be made before an under-18 murderer can be sentenced to life without parole. On Monday, the Supreme Court took up a Mississippi case raising the same question, as noted in this post. Yesterday the Solicitor General filed a letter with the Court asking for its case to be put on hold pending a decision in the Mississippi case.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 9, 2020 8:58 am
The U.S. Supreme Court today took up the case of Jones v. Mississippi, No. 18-1259, as its replacement for the moot Mathena v. Malvo on the findings required to sentence an under-18 murderer to life in prison without parole. See prior posts here and here.
by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 3, 2020 10:10 am
Immigration is a subject fully within the authority of the federal government. A federal statute requires new employees to complete a form to confirm they are not unauthorized aliens. The law makes it a federal crime to provide false information on this form. It also preempts state laws imposing sanctions on employers for hiring unauthorized aliens.
A general Kansas law forbids identity theft. Can this law apply to an employee who put someone else’s Social Security number on the work authorization form and also on the tax withholding forms? The Supreme Court today said yes in a surprisingly close decision.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 1:42 pm
In oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court today, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said,
So that’s a vastly different question of whether the Suspension Clause –which predated the Due Process Clause by 100 years –the Suspension Clause, at the time, it was viewed as permitting anyone who had a legal claim to stay to file a habeas petition.
100 years?
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by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 2, 2020 9:01 am
Today the U.S. Supreme Court released an orders list from last Friday’s conference. The Court took a new case on Armed Career Criminal Act sentencing to replace the deceased James Walker’s case. It relisted for this coming Friday cases to replace the withdrawn D.C. Sniper, Jr. case on juvenile life-without-parole sentencing. Finally, the Court passed, for now, on the question of whether bump stocks can be banned administratively without amending the relevant statute.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 27, 2020 3:36 pm
Yesterday, I noted the case of Newton v. Indiana, No. 17-1511 as a possible replacement for the recently-dropped Malvo case on sentencing juvenile murderers to life-without-parole. I have since been made aware of four other cases also listed for tomorrow’s U.S. Supreme Court conference. Update: See end of post.
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by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 27, 2020 1:54 pm
The Federalist Society has a podcast on McKinney v. Arizona by Arizona Solicitor General O.H. Skinner, who argued the case for the State.
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