Supreme Court refuses to hear case of Louisiana man sentenced to life imprisonment, “Tiger King” appeal

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to weigh in on a procedural question arising from a pregnancy discrimination case – specifically, whether a defendant can raise an affirmative defense (that is, a legal excuse or justification) later in the proceedings when it did not raise that defense in the answer to the plaintiff’s complaint.

Younge v. Fulton Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office was the lone case in which the court granted review on Monday. The announcement came on a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Friday, March 27.

The plaintiff in the case, Jasmine Younge, filed a federal civil rights suit, claiming pregnancy discrimination, against the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where she was a deputy chief of staff. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 carves out an exemption from protection under the law for elected officials and their “personal staff.” The DA’s office did not raise the exemption as a defense when it responded to Younge’s complaint; instead, it sought to rely on the exemption only when it filed a motion for summary judgment – a ruling by the judge that would resolve part or all of the lawsuit on legal grounds, because there are no real factual issues in dispute.

The district court allowed the DA’s office to assert the exemption, and it ruled in favor of the DA’s office on summary judgment. Younge appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which allowed the lower court’s ruling to stand.

Younge then came to the Supreme Court last year, asking the justices to take up her case, which they agreed on Monday to do.

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Over a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court denied review in the case of a Louisiana man who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a 1998 murder.

James Skinner had asked the justices to throw out his conviction and sentence just as they had for Michael Wearry, his co-defendant, in 2016, on the ground that prosecutors had withheld evidence – for example, statements suggesting that the key witnesses against him were not telling the truth – that could have helped to clear Wearry. “Mr. Skinner’s case,” his lawyers wrote, “presented the same courts with a claim involving the same characters, the same withheld evidence, the same crime, and a virtually identical trial.” And “the impact of the suppressed evidence on Mr. Skinner’s trial was at least as substantial as its impact on Mr. Wearry’s.”

In a one-sentence order, the court declined to do so. In a lengthy dissent, Sotomayor argued that “[e]qual justice under law, the phrase engraved on the front of this Court’s building, requires that two codefendants, convicted of the same crime, who raised essentially the same constitutional claims, receive the same answer from the courts.” But because the state courts had not properly applied the Supreme Court’s cases governing the suppression of evidence, Sotomayor continued, “including a decision by this Court involving the very same evidence, Skinner risks spending the rest of his life in prison while Wearry walks free.”

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Finally, the justices rejected a petition for review filed by Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as “Joe Exotic” from the TV series “Tiger King.” Maldonado-Passage was indicted in federal court on (among other things) two murder-for-hire counts. He was convicted, sentenced to 21 years in prison, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld his sentence last summer. He asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, but the justices turned down his request without even calling for a response from the federal government, which had waived its right to respond.

The justices will meet for another private conference on Thursday, April 2. They are expected to release orders from that conference on Monday, April 6, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.