Court will not speed Hamdan case
on Mar 5, 2007 at 10:03 am
UPDATE 11:15 a.m. The first of the new detainees’ appeals mentioned in the second paragraph here has now been filed. A post on it appears above. The other petition is due at the Court this afternoon.
The Supreme Court refused on Monday to grant expedited review of Salim Ahmed Hamdan’s new appeal seeking to regain the right to make a new court challenge to his impendiing war crimes trial. Two Justices, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter, noted that they would have granted the motion to expedite in 06-1169. It apparently would have taken five votes to grant the motion. The case will now unfold on a regular schedule, with the government replying to the petition by March 29, unless it seeks and obtains more time to file.
The Court”s brief order silently provided an answer to one lingering question: whether Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., would take part in the consideration of the new Hamdan case (which also involves another detainee, Omar Khadr, who, like Hamdan, is facing a war crimes trial before a military commission). Roberts had taken himself out of the Court’s review of Hamdan’s case last Term, because he had sat on the D.C. Circuit Court panel that decided an earlier appeal in that case. There was no indication on Monday that he had not participated in the denial of the motion to expedite the new case.
Meanwhile, other detainee cases are due to be filed at the Court later Monday, and those will be oin an expedited schedule, by agreement of both sides. It is unclear at this point, however, whether the Court will actually hold a hearing and rule this Term on the claim of detainees to a right to bring habeas challenges despite the new Military Commission Act’s court-stripping provisions.
The Court, in another detainee case (In re Ali, 06M73), allowed a Chinese citizen being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to file his petition under seal. The appeal papers may contain some classified material, and attorneys for the detainee — whose real name is Anwar Hassan — plan to file an edited version of the appeal. The appeal in this case is an original petition for habeas corpus.
The Court granted no new cases for review on Monday.
It did, however, issue a summary ruling on what at one time had been a significant test case on congressional redistricting, concluding that four Colorado voters did not have “standing” to pursue one of their claims that seeks to undo a court-ordered redistricting plan and substitute for it one approved by the state’s legislature. They had no right to bring a case, the Court’s unsigned opinion said, based on the Constitution’s Elections Clause claiming that the legislature, not the courts, had the final say on when to redisrict. The Court did summarily uphold a federal District Court ruling dismissing a separate Petition Clause challenge by those same voters claiming that their right to petition the government had been impaired by leaving the court-ordered plan in place. The case was Lance v. Coffman (06-641).
In the only decision announced on the merits, the Court ruled unanimously that a federal court may take up immediately the question of whether it is the proper court to hear a case when one side complains that it is an inconvenient forum. A trial court, the Justices said in an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, need not take up any other question — including whether it has jurisdicition over the case, or jurisdiction over the party sued. The ruling came in the case of Sinochem International Co. Ltd. v. Malaysia International Shipping Corp. (06-102). That case, the Court added, was “a textbook case” for immediate dismissal on the inconvenient forum issue.
Sinochem International is a Chinese company that had a contract with an American company, Triorient Trading Inc., for the sale of steel coils. The contract called for any disputes to be settled under Chinese law. The coils were loaded in Philadelphia onto a vessel owned by Malaysia International, to be shipped to China. Sinochem sued in a Chinese court, claiming illegal backdating by Malaysia International of the bill of lading. The cargo was loaded after an agreed date. Malaysis International filed a suit of its own in a U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, complaining of mishandling of the deal by Sinochem. The judge dismissed the case on grounds of an inconvenient forum, but the Third Circuit Court reinstated the case. Monday’s ruling reversed that result, concluding that “judicial economy is disserved by continuing litigation in the District Court given the proceedings long launched in China.”
The Court ordered the dismissal, as moot, of a test case on the authority of public school officials to discipline students for wearing clothing bearing a message that the officials consider to be offensive. The Justices sent the case of Harper v. Poway School District (06-595) back to the Ninth Circuit Court for dismissal. After the disciplined student had appealed to the Supreme Court, a federal judge found the case to be moot; the student has now graduated. The student had been suspended for wearing an anti-gay T-shirt. A District Court has ruled that the challenge raised by the youth, Tyler Chase Harper, may go forward with Tyler’s sister, Kelsie, as the plaintiff.
Justice Breyer dissented without opinion on Monday from the Court’s summary dismissal order.
Among cases that were denied review on Monday was an appeal by former technology business tycoon Bernard Ebbers, challenging his trial and conviction on securities fraud and other charges. He was prosecuted in one of the high-profile corporate scandal cases that arose in the 1990s and in the first years of the new century. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence. His appeal sought to challenge the prosecution’s failure to agree to legal immunity for defense witnesses, and to challenge the trial judge’s instruction to the jury on a “conscious avoidance” charge. The appeal was Ebbers v. U.S. (06-590).
The Court also declined to hear an appeal by the state of New Mexico, seeking new clarification of the power of states to prosecute Indians who commit crimes on land that was one part of Indian lands but is now privately owned by non-Indians. The state Supreme Court found the state had no jurisdiction to prosecute two such crimes. The case was New Mexico v. Romero (06-765).
