Court to rule on insanity defense and Title VII
on Dec 5, 2005 at 10:02 am
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to clarify the constitutional duty of states to allow evidence of insanity to be used as a defense in criminal cases. The new case tests two aspects of an Arizona criminal law adopted in 1993 to limit the insanity defense.
At least implicit in the case is the basic question of whether the Constitution imposes any duty on states to permit an insanity defense. The two sides in this case take sharply differing views: the appeal by defense lawyers contends that the Supreme Court has recognized a due process right to put forth such a defense, and that this case is about the scope of that right. The state’s response contends that the Supreme Court had made clear several times that states need not permit such a defense, and if they do, may decide for themselves when and how it may be asserted. The Court may have to confront those differing perspectives as it ponders the Arizona case.
The first specific issue in the case of Clark v. Arizona (05-5966) is whether the Constitution requires states to allow an individual to claim that, because of mental defect, he could not know the nature and quality of the crime he is accused of committing. Arizona eliminated that aspect of the insanity defense, permitting individuals only to claim that a mental defect kept them from knowing right from wrong.
The appeal involves an Arizona youth who, at age 17, shot and killed a police officer who had stopped him for loudly playing the radio on his car. Eric Michael Clark contends he was mentally ill at the time of the incident. “This Court,” his appeal argues, “has never addressed this issue, and never held that a state may, consistent with due process, abolish the insanity defense as it existed at common law.”
A second issue in the case is whether a state may strictly limit or eliminate the right of a defendant to offer evidence of mental defect in order to rebut prosecution evidence of intent.
That was one of two cases the Court on Monday agreed to hear. In the other, it took on a major issue in employment law. It agreed to spell out the kind of proof a worker needs to show that he or she suffered an “adverse employment action” that would amount to retaliatory discrimination based on race, sex or religion. The issue, dividing the lower courts into at least three camps, arises in Burlington Northern v. White (05-259). The Court declined to hear another issue in that case: the proof needed to gain punitive damages in a Title VII case.
The 12 Circuit Courts have all addressed the retaliation issue, but the result, the appeal says, has been “multiple, well-acknowledged and interrelated conflicts.” The Supreme Court has never defined the phrase “adverse employment action” — one of the key parts of a worker retaliation claim under Title VII. A worker must have suffered such adverse action in order to be able to show retaliation for having complained of bias in the workplace. Some Circuit Courts have ruled that such an action exists only when the employer took an ultimate employment action, such as a firing. Others have ruled that an adverse action means a materially adverse change in terms of employment. And another view, held by the Ninth Circuit, is that any adverse retaliation treatment likely to deter worker protests about bias qualifies as an adverse action under the law.
The Burlington Northern case grows out of the claims of Sheila White, the only woman working in a track laborer position out of the railroad’s Memphis yard, that she was retaliated against for complaining of sex bias against her by her supervisors.
After looking for a fifth time at a group of seven cases challenging the redistricting of Texas’ congressional seats, the Court once again announced no action. The Justices have examined that case at each Conference since late October. There has been no explanation for its failure to act on those cases.
In another order, the Court asked for the views of the Solicitor General on a major case involving national banks and state regulation. The issue is whether states are barred from regulating the mortgage lending activities of national bank subsidiaries. The Second Circuit ruled in a Connecticut case that such state regulation is preempted by federal banking law. Forty other states supported Connecticut’s appeal. The case is Burke v. Wachovia Bank (05-431). Justice Clarence Thomas took no action on this order.
The Court also asked the Solicitor General for the government’s views on when an appeal may be filed to challenge a federal judge’s decision to send a state-law based case back to state court. The case — growing out of a disputed labor union election of national officers — tests what exceptions there are to the general rule that remand orders cannot be appealed. The case is Davis v. United Auto Workers (05-107).
Among the cases denied review, probably the most significant was a test of whether public school districts may use race as a factor in student assignments, in order to achieve racial diversity. That issue arose in Comfort v. Lynn School Committee (05-348). The case tested whether the Supreme Court’s 2003 decisions to allow some use of race in college admissions, in order to make classrooms more diverse, extended to student assignments at the elementary and secondary level. The First Circuit ruled that those rulings do apply in the public school context.
The Court also turned aside an appeal by Utah state officials seeking to revive state power to regulate the location of sites for storing spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. The Tenth Circuit ruled in Nielson v. Private Fuel Storage (04-575) that the federal Atomic Energy Act preempts the field of regulating issues of nuclear safety — thus setting aside an array of Utah laws that the state wanted to apply to plans for a nuclear waste storage site in Skull Valley in that state.
