Thursday round-up
Briefly:
- At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger weighs in on this week’s summary reversal of the Sixth Circuit in the habeas case White v. Wheeler, arguing that “[t]he fact that it is necessary for the high court to so admonish the federal appellate courts is a sad commentary on the state of our judiciary. Judges who cannot or will not decide capital cases fairly should not sit on them.”
- In the wake of last week’s arguments in the challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, Steven Mazie has an “explainer” for The Economist on the Court and its affirmative action jurisprudence.
- At ACSblog, Scott Nelson contends that, although Monday’s opinion in DIRECTV v. Imburgia “itself will have little or no impact beyond the parties to the case,” it “is a reminder that the Supreme Court’s FAA jurisprudence—a relatively recent body of case law that has turned what had been an obscure piece of legislation into a broad license for companies to opt out of the justice system—is not likely to change soon.”
- Bloomberg Law and Oyez recently hosted a Twitter chat to discuss the oral arguments in the December sitting.
- At PrawfsBlawg, Steve Vladeck discusses the original cases involving the retroactivity of the Court’s decision in Johnson v. United States and concludes that the government’s “actions (and the arguments in the briefs) give rise at least to the appearance that, even though the Solicitor General agrees that Johnson is retroactive on the merits and should therefore be enforceable by federal prisoners through both original and second-or-successive applications for post-conviction relief, the government is perfectly content to run out the clock–and to not support efforts to have the Supreme Court so hold before next June’s deadline.”
- On remand from the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit yesterday affirmed a federal district court’s ruling that Louisiana death row inmate Kevan Brumfield, who was sentenced to death for the fatal shooting of an off-duty police officer, is indeed intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed. I covered the decision for my own blog.
[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondents in DIRECTV. However, I am not affiliated with the law firm.]
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