Wednesday round-up

Briefly:

• Jordan Rubin reports at Bloomberg Law that “[t]he U.S. Justice Department’s determination to resume federal executions after a decade-plus hiatus is back in Supreme Court justices’ hands, with the filing of a petition from death row prisoners challenging the way the government wants to execute them.”
• For The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall report that the “raft of long-pending appeals asking [the justices] to review a legal doctrine that makes it difficult for many victims of abusive policing to sue the perpetrators … underscores the power of qualified immunity, a rule the Supreme Court recognized in 1967, and later strengthened, to protect officials from the threat of litigation for most law-enforcement actions.”
• Tony Mauro reports at The National Law Journal that the “Supreme Court will soon consider a petition that pits police against a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in a dispute over the First Amendment rights of assembly, petition and speech”; “the case, Mckesson v. Doe, does not arise from the nationwide protests of recent weeks[:] Instead, it dates back to a 2016 protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, triggered by the death of Alton Sterling, an African-American man shot and killed at close range by police responding to an anonymous 911 call.”

• For The New York Times, Neil Vigdor reports that Bobby Moore, “[a] Texas inmate who spent nearly 40 years on death row and was at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that exempts people with intellectual disabilities from being executed[,] was granted parole on Monday.”
• At The Originalism Blog, Michael Ramsey highlights an amicus brief in Fulton v. Philadelphia, a challenge to Philadelphia’s exclusion of Catholic Social Services from the city’s foster care system because the group will not place children with same-sex couples; the brief urges the court to overrule a key free exercise precedent, Employment Division v. Smith, because “the Free Exercise Clause was originally understood to protect the unqualified right to exercise religion, free from government interference.”

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