The petition of the day is:
Issue: Whether Colorado’s requirement that defendants must prove their innocence by clear and convincing evidence to get their money back, after reversal of conviction of a crime entailing various monetary penalties, is consistent with due process.
On April 29 at 6 p.m., the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding will host a discussion on the life of Justice Antonin Scalia. Speakers will include Hadley Arkes, John Baker, Paul Clement, Noel Francisco, Gene Schaerr, Michael Uhlmann, and Edward Whelan. More information about the event, which will be at the University Club in Washington, D.C., is available here.
Yesterday the Court heard oral arguments in the challenge by former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell to his fraud convictions. Molly Runkle rounded up early coverage for this blog, which included Lyle Denniston’s report for us. I covered the oral argument for my own blog, with other coverage coming from NPR’s Nina Totenberg.
On Tuesday, the Court issued its decision in Heffernan v. City of Paterson, holding that, when an employer demotes an employee out of a desire to prevent the employee from engaging in protected political activity, the employee can challenge that demotion even if the employer’s actions are based on a factual mistake about the employee’s behavior. Coverage comes from NorthJersey.com, with commentary from Lisa Soronen at Appellate Practice Blog. Continue reading »
In its Conference of April 29, 2016, the Court will consider petitions involving issues such as whether, for federal habeas purposes, California’s procedural rule generally barring review of claims that were available but not raised on direct appeal is an “adequate” state-law ground for rejection of a claim; the appropriate test to determine when a feature of a useful article is protectable under Section 101 of the Copyright Act; and whether execution of a condemned individual more than three-and-a-half decades after the imposition of a death sentence violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
This morning the Court heard oral argument in McDonnell v. United States, the challenge by former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell to his fraud convictions. Lyle Denniston covered the argument for this blog, while Mark Walsh has our “view” from the Court.
Other early coverage of the argument comes from Pete Williams of NBC News, Lydia Wheeler of The Hill, Ariane de Vogue of CNN, Adam Liptak of The New York Times, Lawrence Hurley of Reuters, Richard Wolf of USA Today, Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, Robert Barnes and Laura Vozzella of The Washington Post, David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times, Josh Gerstein of Politico, Greg Stohr of Bloomberg, Cristian Farias of The Huffington Post, and Sam Hananel of the Associated Press.
Early commentary comes from Amitai Etzioni for Huffington Post, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, and Rick Hasen at his Election Law Blog.
It’s the last day of oral argument for the Term, and the Court has one big case to deal with: McDonnell v. United States, about whether “official action” under the relevant federal fraud statutes is limited to exercising actual government power, or pressuring others to exercise such power, and related questions.
The petitioner, former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell, was convicted of various counts of “honest services” wire fraud, conspiracy to obtain property of official right, and obtaining property under color of official right. He was sentenced to twenty-four months in prison, but is free while this appeal is pending.
Analysis
When a government criminal case looks like it may collapse from more than one legal weakness, maybe the only challenge to the Supreme Court is to pick the one that limits the damage for prosecutors. That was the prospect on Wednesday as the Court — in the final hearing of the current Term — spent an hour pondering ways that it could scuttle the high-profile public corruption verdict against former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell — as he and his wife sat silently in the second row of spectators.
With Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy energetically taking apart the verdict — and, with it, the laws used by the prosecution — the prospect of imminent prison for McDonnell appeared to have visibly lifted. At a minimum, a new trial for him seemed in store, but there also was a more significant chance that the Court would make it considerably harder to build a new case against him and, in general, to prosecute other public officials for doing favors for benefactors.
The transcript in McDonnell v. United States is here.
Here’s a question for you, Supreme Court fans. What’s more intimidating than arguing before the United States Supreme Court? Answer: explaining to a Supreme Court Justice that she doesn’t understand one of her own majority opinions. Yet that was precisely the situation Assistant to the Solicitor General Nicole A. Saharsky found herself in during Tuesday morning’s oral argument in Mathis v. United States. And she did not blink.
The Justice was Elena Kagan, and the majority opinion she authored was in Descamps v. United States. In Descamps, the Court ruled, by a vote of eight to one, that a federal district court could not use something called the “modified categorical approach” (MCA) to unlock the facts underlying a California burglary conviction in order to determine whether it was a “violent felony” under a federal three-strikes statute. The MCA could not be used, Justice Kagan explained, because the California burglary statute was “indivisible” – that is, it contained a single unitary set of elements.
Today the Court will hear oral arguments in the challenge by former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell to his fraud convictions. Lyle Denniston previewed the case for this blog; other coverage comes from NPR’s Nina Totenberg, David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, and law student Ben Einhouse for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. Commentary comes from Garrett Epps, who in his column for The Atlantic argues that the “disgraced ex-governor is asking the Court to expand the First Amendment—already stretched beyond recognition by its application to the open use of money in politics—into a safeguard for any elected officeholder canny enough to disguise ever-so-slightly the exchange of money for favors.” Continue reading »
On April 14, Justice Stephen Breyer spoke at Columbia University with Lee Bollinger and Merit Janow about global interdependence and his new book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.
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