Monday round-up

By Kali Borkoski
on Sep 12, 2011 at 8:46 am

In Court coverage from the weekend, Adam Liptak of the New York Times previews United States v. Jones, scheduled for argument in November.  The government is challenging a D.C. Circuit ruling that police must obtain a warrant before placing a GPS tracking device on the car of a criminal suspect.  Liptak notes that, in opinions on this question, several judges have invoked the total government surveillance depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

Meanwhile, Michael Kirkland of UPI reports on the government’s petition for certiorari in United States v. Alvarez.  The government is asking the Court to review the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to “falsely represent” that you “have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States,” after a panel of the Ninth Circuit struck down the law as invalid on its face under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.  At this blog, Lyle Denniston covers two pending petitions brought by Guantanamo detainees.  He writes that “[t]he continuing theme of the challenges is that the [D.C.] Circuit Court, left unreviewed, is hollowing out the Court’s historic 2008 decision in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, granting detainees a constitutional right to challenge their confinement.”

And, briefly:

• In the Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that Justice Souter’s retirement has been “different” from those of Justices O’Connor and Stevens: although the Justice sits on panels of the First Circuit, his primary focus has been reading.

• The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Justice Clarence Thomas will speak at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law on Thursday.

• At Sentencing Law and Policy, Douglas Berman links to coverage of an Arkansas case that is testing the implications of Graham v. Florida, in which the Court prohibited a sentence of life without parole for any juvenile offense short of homicide.  The case concerns a juvenile convicted of capital murder as an accomplice and sentenced to life without parole; his lawyer argues that Graham only allows such a sentence for juveniles who actually kill.