Supreme Court agrees to hear case on digital privacy, reverses ruling ordering new murder trial

The Supreme Court on Monday morning agreed to weigh in on the interpretation of a federal law, enacted in the wake of Judge Robert Bork’s unsuccessful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, intended to protect videotape rental histories from public disclosure. The justices also reversed a ruling by a federal appeals court that had ordered a new trial for a Maryland man convicted of attempted murder.

The Supreme Court did not act on several high-profile petitions for review that it has now considered at several conferences in a row, including petitions challenging the constitutionality of a federal law banning the possession of guns by people convicted of felonies and a petition by oil and gas companies, which argue that federal laws preclude local governments in Colorado from bringing lawsuits in which they contend that the companies have knowingly played a role in exacerbating climate change.

In Salazar v. Paramount Global, the Supreme Court agreed to weigh in on the interpretation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that prohibits “video tape service providers” from disclosing “personally identifiable information” regarding their “consumer[s].” The law was enacted in the wake of the confirmation hearings for Bork, whose local video rental store provided a list of his rental history to a Washington reporter.

The question came to the court in the case of Michael Salazar, who had a digital subscription to the website 247Sports.com, which is owned and operated by Paramount Global and which focuses on college sports. Salazar says that after he watched videos on the site while he was also logged into Facebook, Paramount Global disclosed his Facebook ID and video-viewing history to Facebook; both companies then used that information to tailor their advertising to him.

Salazar filed a lawsuit against Paramount Global in federal court in Nashville, alleging that the disclosure of his information to Facebook violated the Video Privacy Protection Act. The lower courts threw out Salazar’s case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit agreed that Salazar was not a “consumer” for purposes of the VPPA because he did not subscribe to audiovisual goods or services from a video tape service provider.

Salazar came to the Supreme Court in October, asking the justices to take up his case. He contended that the federal courts of appeals were divided over the interpretation of the VPPA. Indeed, he noted, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in a case that Salazar himself filed against the National Basketball Association, had reached the opposite conclusion. (The Supreme Court turned down the NBA’s appeal of that ruling last month.) On Monday, the justices agreed to weigh in; the case will likely be scheduled for oral argument in the court’s 2026-27 term.

In an unsigned opinion in Klein v. Martin, the justices summarily reversed – that is, without additional briefing or oral arguments – a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that ordered a new trial for a Maryland man convicted of attempted murder based on prosecutors’ failure to turn over evidence that might have helped to clear him.

Charles Martin was charged for his role in the shooting of his girlfriend, who had recently told him that she was pregnant, would not have an abortion, and that “she intended to go to court to compel him to provide child support.” The evidence presented at his trial included a makeshift silencer made from a Gatorade bottle. Martin’s former girlfriend, Sheri Carter, testified at trial that he had researched gun silencers on a laptop issued to him by a former employer. Martin was convicted in a Maryland state court and sentenced to life in prison.

Martin asked the state courts to vacate his conviction, arguing that prosecutors had failed to turn over a report analyzing Martin’s laptop, which indicated that Martin had not used the laptop for more than three years before the shooting and that Martin had apparently not used it to research homemade silencers. That failure, Martin said, violated the state’s obligation under a landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision, Brady v. Maryland. A Maryland appeals court rejected that argument, concluding that even if prosecutors should have given Martin and his lawyers the report, there was enough evidence against Martin that the report ultimately wouldn’t have made a difference.

Martin found more success in federal court, where a federal district court ordered the state to give him a new trial. The 4th Circuit upheld that ruling. It explained that the state court had not “exhaustively examined the suppressed evidence” and had failed to provide a “nuanced analysis of the impact of the suppressed evidence on both sides of the case.”

Maryland came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to review the 4th Circuit’s ruling. It contended that the federal law governing post-conviction proceedings for state prisoners “establishes a ‘highly deferential standard for evaluating state-court rulings, which demands that state-court decisions be given the benefit of the doubt.’” The lower court’s ruling, the state argued, violates that deferential standard.

After considering the case at 11 consecutive conferences, the Supreme Court on Monday reversed the 4th Circuit’s decision. In a 12-page unsigned opinion, the court emphasized that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which governs requests for federal post-conviction relief, “sharply limits federal review of habeas claims raised by state prisoners.” And in particular, the court noted, “the standard relevant here … is whether a decision is contrary to, or involves an unreasonable application of, this Court’s holdings, not whether the state court’s opinion satisfies the federal court’s opinion-writing standards.”

The 4th Circuit’s decision, the Supreme Court continued, was wrong “in two ways.” “First,” the court wrote, “it grounded its holding that the state appellate court applied the wrong legal rule on its conclusion that the state court had not actually applied the materiality test that it clearly invoked. Second,” according to the court, “it erred in holding that no fairminded jurist could find the forensic report on the computer to be immaterial,” when, given the evidence against Martin, such a jurist “could easily conclude that disclosure of the forensic report on the laptop would not have made a difference.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated that she would have turned down Maryland’s petition for review, leaving the 4th Circuit’s decision in place, but she did not write separately to explain her vote.