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Thursday round-up

Briefly:

  • At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger weighs in on yesterday’s execution of an Ohio death-row inmate, carried out after the Supreme Court denied the inmate’s petition for a stay, in which the inmate had challenged the state’s lethal-injection protocol; he argues that “[w]e spend far too much in time and resources litigating issues that have nothing to do with guilt,” and that “[w]here the underlying offense is one for which death is a just punishment, as this one surely is, then a trial, a direct appeal, and one collateral review in state court is all that is needed for the penalty phase of the case.”
  • At the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse blog, Mark Chenoweth lists “the top 10 cases the U.S. Supreme Court erroneously denied certiorari to last term” and maintains that “[t]hough a ready-made excuse was available this term, the Roberts Court is still not taking enough cases.”
  • At Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro looks at a new Supreme Court brief-writing style guide written by Dan Schweitzer of the National Association of Attorneys General, which “is full of tips that are not hard and fast rules but … help advocates show that they know what justices like or don’t like.”
  • In the New Zealand Herald, Audrey Young reports that in remarks at Victoria University in Wellington, Chief Justice John Roberts “volunteer[ed] some criticism about how confirmation of judicial nominations had become political” and that “when asked to reflect on the relative roles of the political branch and the judicial branch,” Roberts called it “’very important for the judiciary to appreciate they are not part of the political process and … for the public to understand that.’”

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Recommended Citation: Edith Roberts, Thursday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Jul. 27, 2017, 7:43 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/07/thursday-round-up-385/