Monday round-up

Subscript Law offers a graphic explainer for the decision last week in Bucklew v. Precythe, in which the court rejected a death-row inmate’s argument that, because he suffers from a rare medical condition, executing him by lethal injection would be so painful that it would violate the constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Opening Arguments (podcast) “takes an in-depth look at [the] decision,” which “lays bare the ‘originalist’ view of the Eighth Amendment.” At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost argues that “Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion turned the medical oddity of Bucklew’s case into an invitation for gruesome deaths for condemned inmates in the future.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in this case.]

Briefly:

• Richard Wolf reports at USA Today that “[t]he conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that was anticipated following President Donald Trump’s two selections has been stalled by a budding bromance between the senior and junior justices,” which “stands in stark contrast to the differences evident to date between Trump’s two nominees”; he notes that “[i]t’s still relatively early in the court’s term, with more than half the cases to be decided, so trend lines among the justices may not hold through June.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Jonathan Blanks urges the court to review or summarily reverse the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision in a Fourth Amendment traffic-stop case, Sievers v. Nebraska, arguing that “SCOTUS has already ceded too much leeway to police to stop motorists as pretext, but police officers should at least meet the minimum standard for a legal stop.”
• At The Faculty Lounge, Brian Gallini explains why the court should grant the cert petition of Charles Rhines, “a gay man on death row in South Dakota,” “and hold that jury deliberations must be free of anti-gay bias, just as they must be free of race and gender discrimination.”
• At Bloomberg Law, Robert Iafolla reports that “[t]wo major public sector unions lost nearly 210,000 agency fee payers combined in 2018, according to recently filed reports showing the impact of a U.S. Supreme Court decision [last term in Janus v. AFSCME] that prohibits forcing nonmembers to pay for collective bargaining and other nonpolitical expenses.”

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