Supreme Court Orders Friday and Today

The U.S. Supreme Court held a conference Friday, resulting in a short orders list the same day and a longer one today. Some criminal cases were taken up, but no blockbuster ones.

Among cases we are following, the Marathon Bomber Case was relisted for this coming Friday, as expected. A grant on the second listing is a good possibility for this high-profile case.

In Poole v. Florida, the Court turned down a request to say that it didn’t really mean what it said in McKinney v. Arizona (see this post), i.e., that the Sixth Amendment has nothing to say about whether the weighing of the aggravating versus mitigating circumstances in capital cases, and hence the sentencing decision, must be done by a jury or a judge. Yes, it really did mean that.

The Court has taken up the following cases:

Greer v. United States, No. 19-8709, on the plain-error standard for reviewing claims that the defendant did not make in the trial court in the case of an intervening change in the law by the Supreme Court.

United States v. Palomar-Santiago, No. 20-437, a “crimmigration” case involving reentry following deportation and a challenge to the conviction on which the alien was originally deported.

United States v. Gary, No. 20-444, another case on the plain-error standard. Defendant pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon, but the judge did not advise him that knowing he was a felon at the time was an element of the offense.

Terry v. United States, No. 20-5904, involving sentence reductions under the First Step Act and defendants convicted of crack cocaine offenses before the 2010 reduction of the 100-to-1 crack-powder ratio.