Thursday round-up

By Kiran Bhat
on Jul 21, 2011 at 12:13 pm

Having denied a stay of execution on Tuesday in the case of an Arizona inmate (as Conor noted in yesterday’s round-up), yesterday the Court denied stays in two additional cases:  those of Mark Stroman, who was convicted of killing two men of South Asian descent and wounding another in what he claimed was retaliation for the September 11 attacks, and Andrew Grant DeYoung, who was convicted of murdering his sister and parents. The Associated Press (via the Chicago Tribune) reports on Stroman’s case and execution, while ABC News and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution report on DeYoung’s case.

At his Sentencing Law and Policy Blog, Professor Douglas A. Berman notes that the First and Fifth Circuits have recently applied the Court’s recent decision in Tapia v. United States and reached different results in cases involving the revocation of a defendant’s supervised release.  The First Circuit applied Tapia to vacate a twenty-two-month sentence intended to allow the defendant to take part in a sex therapy program, while the Fifth Circuit affirmed a thirty-five-month sentence intended to allow a defendant to participate in a drug treatment program.

Briefly:

• Tun-Jen Chiang of PrawfsBlawg argues that Chief Justice Roberts’s criticism of legal academia is an “implicit attack” on the qualifications of his colleagues – Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan – who are former law professors.
• Dahlia Lithwick of Slate compares the “public hand-wringing” among the Justices  about  when and whether to retire with the “almost complete lack of concern about an equally pressing judicial issue:  recusal.”  She observes that although “the justices are quite open about discussing their fears of overstaying their welcome on the job, they are loath even to consider questions about whether they have been compromised by financial or personal dealings with parties to the cases pending before the court.”
• Russell Hubbard of the Birmingham News reports on jailed former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, who last week filed a cert. petition seeking review of the $2.9 billion fraud judgment against him.