Monthly Archive: March 2022

SCOTUS Reinstates Marathon Bomber’s Death Sentence

by · Mar 4, 2022 7:29 am

Opinion here. CJLF brief here. Prior post here. The prior post is an extended discussion of the evidence point in this case, while the brief is addressed primarily to the jury question. The issues are described in the prior post, so I will copy some of that material here.

In July of 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston reversed the death sentence and some of the convictions (though not on the capital offenses) of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the survivor of the pair of brothers who committed the horrible bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013.

The Court of Appeals’ primary reason for reversal was its finding that during jury selection the trial court violated its half-century old rule in Patriarca v. United States, a precedent never mentioned by either party in the trial court or in the Court of Appeals’ pre-trial reviews of jury selection.
The court also said it would “address other issues (even if just briefly) because we know they are likely to resurface on remand.” One of those was a claim that the judge erred in not allowing hearsay evidence of an earlier, unrelated murder that the older brother was alleged to have been involved in. The six-Justice majority today disposed of both holdings without much difficulty. Continue reading . . .

Defending a State’s Laws in Court When State Officials Disagree

by · Mar 3, 2022 4:26 pm

For some time now, I have been concerned about a threat to the separation of powers in state governments. A governor or other executive officer cannot, of course, repeal a statute. But executive officers can sometimes decline to appeal a court decision holding a statute unconstitutional, which in practice has the same effect. In that way, the executive branch could override the decision of the legislature or, in states with the initiative, the people themselves.

The U.S. Supreme Court made this subterfuge more difficult today in Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, No. 20-601. The statute at issue relates to abortion, a matter that CJLF takes no position on. What is important for our work is that Supreme Court allowed the Attorney General of the state to intervene to defend a statute after the state department head—no doubt on orders from the Governor—declined to seek further review of a decision holding a statute unconstitutional. Continue reading . . .

Los Angeles Police Can No Longer Make Traffic Stops

by · Mar 2, 2022 2:48 pm

The five member Los Angeles Police Commission has announced a new policy, effective immediately, which prohibits officers from making traffic stops for violations like failure to signal for a turn, a broken taillight or expired registration, unless the officer can present evidence that a more serious crime has occurred.  Kevin Rector of the Los Angeles Times reports that the new policy, which ignores state law, is meant to prevent “pretextual stops” where an officer pulls over a suspicious vehicle for a minor traffic violation in order to determine if the driver is currently wanted, or is carrying an illegal firearm or drugs.  It is legal under state law for police to pull over a vehicle for a traffic violation and look for evidence of a more serious crime.  According to Commission President William Briggs there “is no data that anyone can point to that establishes pretextual stops  curtail violent crime in our city.”  Briggs and others supporting the policy said it was needed to reduce racially biased policing.

Continue reading . . .