Wednesday round-up
For the Associated Press, Kate Brumback reports that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court granted a temporary stay of execution Tuesday night for a Georgia inmate whose attorneys argue that the 59-year-old black man’s death sentence was tainted by a juror’s racial bias.” At Reuters, David Beasley reports that “Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch opposed the stay.” Additional coverage comes from Dakin Andone and Emmanuella Grinberg at CNN.
At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr notes that the Supreme Court’s high-profile partisan-gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford, “may turn on whether the challengers can convince [Justice Anthony] Kennedy that a manageable standard exists to outlaw extreme gerrymanders without calling into question more modest uses of political power.” Additional coverage of Gill comes from Mark Sherman and Scott Bauer at the Associated Press, who report that although “[c]ourts have struck down racially discriminatory maps for decades,” “[t]he Supreme Court has never struck down a districting plan because it was too political.”
At Law.com, Tony Mauro reports that “[w]ithout fanfare, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington has featured U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in a new display about the court alongside the late justice Thurgood Marshall.” At The Washington Times, Bradford Richardson reports that “Justice Thomas’ [previous] apparent omission [had] irked conservative observers, who suspected an ideological bias among Smithsonian officials and called for the influential jurist’s inclusion in the museum.”
Briefly:
- At USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “[a] reinvigorated Supreme Court will burst back on to the national stage next week facing a battery of contentious issues and a president determined to bend the judicial branch to his will,” and that “[a]fter a sleepy term in which a shorthanded court mostly avoided controversy, its new conservative majority will tackle major cases on voting rights, gay rights, workers’ rights and privacy rights — and, possibly, President Trump’s revised immigration travel ban.”
- At Vinson & Elkins’ Lincoln’s Law Blog, Ralph Mayrell provides an overview of the False Claims Act cert petitions currently pending at the Supreme Court.
- Subscript offers a graphic explainer for Class v. United States, which asks whether a guilty plea waives a defendant’s right to appeal the constitutionality of the law he was charged with violating.
- At Take Care, Samuel Bagenstos argues that in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether Ohio’s voter-roll-maintenance process violates the National Voter Registration Act, “the Sessions Justice Department has abandoned the interpretation of the NVRA that DOJ had previously endorsed in both Democratic and Republican administrations,” and urges the court to “reject the Trump Administration’s new position, which would eviscerate the statute’s prohibitions against removing people from the rolls for exercising their right not to vote.”
- At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s blog, Jonathan Wood urges the court to review the Foundation’s challenge to federal Endangered Species Act regulations, arguing that “Utah prairie dog regulation simply has nothing to do with interstate commerce.”
- For the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh explains that in November, [the Supreme Court] is taking a bold leap into the future,” catching up with many lower federal courts and state courts by “require[ing] electronic filing of briefs, initially only by parties represented by attorneys.”
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