Monday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jun 13, 2016 at 5:57 am

Jeremy Roebuck of Philly.com reports on last week’s decision in the case of Terrance Williams, in which the Court ruled that “former Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille was wrong to participate in an appeal from a death-row inmate whose prosecution he oversaw nearly three decades before.”  In commentary at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick observes that “[n]obody with a wireless signal can possibly miss the fact that the court waded into the murky discussion over judicial bias only days after Donald Trump accused the federal judge overseeing a class-action suit against Trump University of bias.”

Commentary on Monday’s grants in Moore v. Texas, in which the Court will consider whether the state used the correct standard to determine whether death-row inmate Bobby James Moore is too intellectually disabled to be executed, and Buck v. Stephens, a death penalty case that has its roots in testimony – offered by the defendant’s own expert – that the defendant was likely to be dangerous in the future because of his race, comes from Kenneth Jost, who at Jost on Justice suggests that, “[e]ven with a conservative orientation, however, the court gives death penalty cases some extra scrutiny — an unfavorable omen for the so-called great state of Texas in the coming term.”  And at Vox, Tara Golshan observes that “[t]he capital punishment sentencing is the common thread, raising the stakes in the both cases, while the Court addresses the practices and processes the criminal court and prison system tolerates and those it shouldn’t.”

Briefly:

• In The New York Times, Adam Liptak interviews soon-to-be-former Solicitor General Don Verrilli.
• In an op-ed for the Louis Post-Dispatch, Gabe Roth notes the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Court’s decision holding “that Missouri’s mandatory retirement age for state court judges did not violate federal law or the U.S. Constitution,” as well as its “implications for the Supreme Court’s current makeup.”
• In its second podcast, More Perfect looks at “the dramatic long-term results of the little-known Baker v. Carr case as well as the personal toll these high-stakes cases can have on individual justices.”
• Writing for Greenwire, Robin Bravender reports that a “Supreme Court term that started off as lackluster for environmental law enthusiasts has turned out to be one for the history books.”
• At his eponymous blog, Michael Dorf suggests that last week’s decision in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, in which the Court held that the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits Puerto Rico and the United States from successively prosecuting a single person for the same conduct under equivalent criminal laws, “doesn’t necessarily decide other questions about the legal status of Puerto Rico.”
• At Law.com (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that Chief Justice John Roberts “could not resist mingling golf with law in a recent decision that did not get much attention.”
• At Notice and Comment, David Rubinstein and Pratheepan Gulasekaram discuss United States v. Texas, the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred action policy, and argue that “the choice between judicial review and no judicial review of executive action in Texas is a false dichotomy.”
• In The Washington Post, Richard Willing reports that “Chief Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion” in Miranda v. Arizona, which was issued fifty years ago today, “leaned . . . heavily on a submission from the FBI, then as now not the most likely of ACLU allies.”
• At Balkinization, Marty Lederman continues his post on Muhammad Ali’s “legal travails . . . after he refused induction into military service in 1967–culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling in his favor on the appeal of his criminal conviction.”
• Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services (via YourWestValley.com) reports on the original lawsuit filed last week by (among others) Arizona, which alleges that “Delaware is illegally telling MoneyGram Payment Systems to give it any funds not claimed by customers.”

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