Three reversals for the Ninth Circuit
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that individuals seeking to build a wireless telephone tower antenna do not have a right to sue for civil rights damages if they are denied a permit. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Court ruled, provides the only remedies available.
Clearing up a conflict among the Circuit Courts on whether an 1871 civil rights statute provides an alternative remedy to the Telecom Act, the Court overturned a Ninth Circuit ruling that allowed the civil rights case to go forward. The Court ruled in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia in City of Rancho Palos Verdes v. Abrams (docket 03-1601).
Reversing another Ninth Circuit ruling, the Court decided by a 5-3 vote that a jury considering a possible death sentence need not be told explicitly that it must consider favorable post-crime evidence as a mitigating factor. If a jury is instructed in sufficiently broad terms to consider all mitigating evidence, that will embrace post-crime as well as pre-crime mitigation, the Court declared in an opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in Brown v. Payton (03-1039).
In a third decision overturning the Ninth Circuit, the Court ruled unanimously that police did not violate the rights of an individual when they detained her in handcuffs while they searched a house where police believed a gang member lived. The Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, also ruled in the case of Muehler v. Mena (03-1423) that the officers did not violate that woman’s rights when they questioned her during the detention about her immigration status.
The Chief Justice, who returned to the bench on Monday for the first time since October, announced his opinion in the Mena case.
Classiness, All Around Us.
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Comment by WILLisms.com — March 22, 2005 @ 12:06 pm
0-3 for the Ninth:
The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit in three cases today: Muehler v. Mena (handcuffing during warrant execution didn’t viola…
Comment by The Volokh Conspiracy — March 22, 2005 @ 2:31 pm
The dreaded performance evaluation
If these cream-of-the-crop judges, consistently, can’t get the law right, shouldn’t some committee of Congress be thinking about an evaluation of some sort?
Comment by Vote for Judges — March 22, 2005 @ 4:20 pm
I hate to pick nits, but wouldn’t it be more accurate to say about Brown v. Payton that the Court ruled that it was not an unreasonable application of the law-at-the-time for the California state court to affirm the instruction? That’s the standard under the AEDPA and that’s what Kennedy’s opinion is about– and Breyer’s concurrance makes clear it’s the basis of his vote; he notes that he’d vote the other way on the question of whether the instruction was erroneous.
Comment by TomFreeland — March 22, 2005 @ 4:46 pm