The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it will not hear an appeal from longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after being found guilty of sex trafficking of a minor, among other charges.

Maxwell had asked the justices to review a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on a non-prosecution agreement from 2007 that she believes should have prevented the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York from pursuing some of its charges against her. The agreement, which was between Epstein and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, protected Epstein from certain future charges in that district, as well as “potential co-conspirators.” Specifically, it said, “if Epstein successfully fulfills all the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein.”

In Dissent is a recurring series by Anastasia Boden on Supreme Court dissents that have shaped (or reshaped) our country.

I. Stand down

In August 2002, federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Butte County Sheriff’s Department officers pulled up to a home in rural Northern California to argue over six marijuana plants in Diane Monson’s backyard. Monson had tried pharmaceuticals for her chronic back pain but found they either didn’t work or caused unwanted effects. So, pursuant to a licensed physician’s recommendation, she had turned to medical cannabis. The sheriff’s officers determined that her plants were fully legal under California’s Compassionate Use Act. Federal agents, however, determined that the plants were a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act – right alongside heroin – and had to be destroyed.

The Supreme Court on Friday afternoon once again cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals of their protected status under federal immigration law. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in San Franciso that barred Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, from terminating that status. Friday’s order came roughly four-and-a-half months after the court blocked a temporary order by the same judge requiring Noem to leave the protected status in place while a challenge to Noem’s efforts to end the Temporary Protected Status program designation for Venezuelans continued. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the court wrote.

The court’s three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – indicated that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request. Jackson wrote a short dissenting opinion in which she described Friday’s order as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”

The Supreme Court on Friday morning agreed to hear oral arguments this winter in a challenge to a Hawaii law that makes it a crime for someone who has a concealed carry permit to carry a handgun on private property without the property owner’s affirmative permission. The announcement that the justices will take up Wolford v. Lopez came as part of a short list of cases from the court’s “long conference” on Monday, at which they considered all of the petitions that became ripe for review during the justices’ summer recess.

In federal elections in Illinois, votes by mail are counted until 14 days after the polls close, so long as they are postmarked by election day. Democrats generally favor the rule because they believe that the majority of votes received after election day are for Democrats. Republicans generally oppose the rule for the same reason. In the case of Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, to be argued on Oct. 8, the question is whether  a candidate for Congress has standing – that is, a legal right to bring a lawsuit – to challenge the legality of that rule in federal court.