The court released three more opinions yesterday, all of them unanimous. In Holguin-Hernandez v. United States, the court held that a criminal defendant is not required to object formally to his sentence to preserve a challenge to the length of the sentence on appeal. Rory Little analyzes the opinion for this blog. The justices decided in Shular v. United States that a state drug offense is not required to match the elements of a generic analogue offense in order to qualify as a “serious drug offense” under the Armed Career Criminal Act, which enhances the sentences of repeat offenders who commit crimes involving guns. This blog’s opinion analysis comes from Leah Litman.
And in Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee v. Sulyma, the court ruled that a plaintiff suing retirement-plan fiduciaries is not presumed to have “actual knowledge” of fraud, triggering a shorter window for suing, when relevant information is revealed in mandatory disclosures that the plaintiff did not read. Natalya Schnitser analyzes the opinion for this blog. At his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel observes that “[t]he US Supreme Court can get behind being unanimous when faced with a statutory phrase that is written in ‘plain and unambiguous statutory language.’”
At NPR, Nina Totenberg covers Tuesday’s decision in Hernandez v. Mesa, noting that “[t]he vote was 5-to-4 with the court’s conservative justices refusing to allow damage suits for cross-border shootings, and the court’s liberal justices castigating the court’s majority for giving a free pass to the ‘rogue actions’ of law enforcement officers.” For The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Brent Kendall and Jess Bravin report that “Tuesday’s separate 5-4 decision in [an] Arizona murder case,” McKinney v. Arizona, “highlighted the Supreme Court’s growing split in death-penalty litigation.” At Subscript Law, Abdel-Rahman Hamed provides a graphic explainer for the decision in McKinney.
Gabriel Chin analyzes Tuesday’s oral argument in United States v. Sineneng-Smith, a First Amendment challenge to a federal law making it a crime to encourage or cause illegal immigration for financial gain, for this blog. Daniel Hemel has this blog’s analysis of Tuesday’s opinion in Rodriguez v. FDIC, in which the court held that a judicially created rule how courts should determine ownership of a tax refund paid to an affiliated corporate group is not a legitimate exercise of federal common law rulemaking.
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