Notable & Ignoble Supreme Court Rulings

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - SCOTUS is swingin' back to the right...

Illegal immigrants have no automatic right to freedom, Supreme Court rules
Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - Immigrants being held for deportation don’t have an automatic right under the law to post bond and be set free, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a decision that could give the Trump administration more freedom to pursue stiff detention policies for illegal immigrants who show up at the border claiming asylum.

In the 5-3 ruling, the justices also took a dim view of the kinds of class-action lawsuits on behalf of immigrants that have become a key tool for anti-Trump immigrant rights activists, leaving the activists worried about the fates of other cases winding their way through the lower courts challenging President Trump on issues such as illegal immigrant Dreamers and Iraqi deportees. The ruling was also a rebuke by the high court to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which had its decision overturned. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. chided the 9th Circuit for ignoring the text of immigration laws and creating a legal standard for bail hearings “out of thin air” by requiring that immigrants be given periodic bail hearings. “Spotting a constitutional issue does not give a court the authority to rewrite a statute as it pleases,” Justice Alito wrote for the majority.
The complex case has been percolating through the courts for years, based on a challenge first brought by Alejandro Rodriguez, a Mexican national who has been in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident since 1987. The government tried to deport him in 2004 after several criminal convictions. Mr. Rodriguez fought deportation, but the government detained him during that time. He sued, arguing that under the detention law he was entitled to a bond hearing that could result in his release. The lower courts established a class action for Mr. Rodriguez and other immigrants being similarly detained, and ruled that they were entitled to bond hearings after six months and periodically after that. The lower courts said the law could be unconstitutional otherwise, based on a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that mandated release of immigrants whose home countries refused to take them back.
Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Neil Gorsuch — and to an extent, Clarence Thomas — said that amounted to a wholesale “rewrite” of the law. They sent the case back to the 9th Circuit for another review consistent with their ruling that the law doesn’t require bond hearings for all immigrants in detention. Immigrant rights groups said they will continue to fight as the case goes back to the lower courts and will argue that the law is unconstitutional if it doesn’t allow for bond hearings. They got backing Tuesday from the dissenters, led by Justice Stephen G. Breyer. He wrote that the country’s core liberty rights have always included the chance to challenge detention by seeking bail. “The bail questions before us are technical but at heart they are simple. We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have ‘certain unalienable Rights,’ and that among them is the right to ‘Liberty,’” he wrote.
Justice Breyer said the majority decision appeared to eat into a key 2001 Supreme Court precedent, the Zadvydas ruling, which established a six-month maximum on detentions in cases in which the government is trying to deport immigrants but their home country won’t take them back. Detention applies to illegal immigrants caught at the border and inside the U.S., and to legal immigrants whose criminal activity has made them eligible for deportation. The biggest effect of Tuesday’s ruling could be on the surge of migrants who have shown up on the border in the past few years demanding asylum. Their numbers have swelled as smugglers have taught illegal immigrants to use “magic words” claiming fear of being sent back home to get on the asylum track. The Trump administration has argued that it should be allowed to hold them while their cases proceed — hoping that it will tamp down on bogus claims. Analysts said the Tuesday ruling appears to give the administration broad detention powers in those cases.
Supreme Court backs Donald Trump on illegal immigrant detention

 

[Marion Morrison]

Uncle Ferd sez: "Hey, waltky! Good to see ya, boy!"

 

[waltky]

SCOTUS rules police officer cannot be sued for shooting Arizona woman in her front yard...

Supreme Court rules police officer cannot be sued for shooting Arizona woman in her front yard
04/02/18 - The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a lawsuit an Arizona woman tried to bring against a Tucson officer who shot her four times in her front yard in May 2010.

In an unsigned opinion, the court said the officer, Andrew Kisela, was entitled to qualified immunity in the shooting of Amy Hughes. Kisela and three other officers were called to Hughes’s house after a neighbor called 911 to report that Hughes was in the yard hacking a tree with a kitchen knife and acting erratically.

When officers arrived, Hughes emerged from the house carrying a large knife at her side and approached her roommate, who was standing in the front yard, stopping six feet away from her. Officers, believing Hughes was a threat to her roommate, drew their guns and told her twice to drop the knife. Kisela ultimately shot her four times through a chain-link fence. The court’s decision Monday reverses a 9th Circuit Court ruling in favor of Hughes. The lower court said Kisela had used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court, however, said Kisela was entitled to qualified immunity because there is no prior case setting a precedent that his use of force in this situation would be excessive. “Use of excessive force is an area of the law ‘in which the result depends very much on the facts of each case,’ and thus police officers are entitled to qualified immunity unless existing precedent ‘squarely governs’ the specific facts at issue,” the court wrote. “Precedent involving similar facts can help move a case beyond the otherwise ‘hazy border between excessive and acceptable force’ and thereby provide an officer notice that a specific use of force is unlawful.”

In a scathing dissent, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court has never required a factually identical case to satisfy the “clearly established” precedent standard. “It's decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public,” she wrote. “It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

Supreme Court rules police officer cannot be sued for shooting Arizona woman in her front yard

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Justices grant one new case, summarily reverse in excessive-force case
Mon, April 2nd, 2018 - The Supreme Court added one new case to its merits docket for next term, bringing the total number of cases slated for oral argument in the fall to eight.

The grant came in Stokeling v. United States, in which the justices will once again interpret a provision of the Armed Career Criminal Act, which imposes longer sentences for repeat offenders who commit crimes with guns and have been convicted of either violent felonies or serious drug crimes. The defendant in the case, Denard Stokeling, pleaded guilty in 2016 to charges that he was a felon in possession of a gun and ammunition. Stokeling had been convicted twice for robbery in Florida, where state law includes overcoming “victim resistance” as an element of robbery, but state courts have interpreted the offense as requiring only slight force to overcome such resistance. Stokeling argues that these two Florida robbery convictions do not count as “violent felonies” for purposes of an enhanced sentence under the ACCA because the convictions did not require the use of violent force. The justices will now consider whether he is correct.

In Kisela v. Hughes, the justices overturned – without briefing or oral argument – the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in favor of Amy Hughes, whom police corporal Andrew Kisela shot and wounded in 2010. Kisela had responded to reports that Hughes was in the street with a large knife “screaming and crying very loud”; when he arrived, he saw Hughes approaching another woman. After Hughes ignored orders to drop the knife and continued to move toward the woman, Kisela fired at Hughes. The shots struck Hughes several times, although her injuries were not life-threatening. Hughes filed a lawsuit against Kisela, alleging that the shooting violated her federal civil rights. A federal district judge ruled for Kisela, but the 9th Circuit reversed. Today, in an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court reversed the 9th Circuit’s ruling. The opinion explained that, even if Kisela had violated the Fourth Amendment by using deadly force against Hughes (which the ruling described as “a proposition that is not at all evident”), Kisela still could not be sued because any rights that he might have violated were not clearly established – a key factor in whether government officials enjoy immunity from lawsuits.

The court rebuked the 9th Circuit, stressing that it had “repeatedly told courts—and the Ninth Circuit in particular—not to define clearly established law at a high level of generality.” This is especially important in excessive-force cases, the court continued, because otherwise police officers in the field will have trouble figuring out what they can or cannot do. Therefore, the court observed, police officers “cannot be said to have violated a clearly established right unless the right’s contours were sufficiently definite that any reasonable official in the defendant’s shoes would have understood that he was violating it.” But, the court added, the 9th Circuit “failed to implement” that standard “in a correct way.” Indeed, the court suggested, although the 9th Circuit’s opinion in this case indicated that a case arising out of the FBI stand-off at Ruby Ridge in 1992 “clearly established that the shooting here was unconstitutional,” the panel’s reliance on the Ruby Ridge case “does not pass the straight-face test” because “a reasonable police officer could miss the connection between the situation confronting the sniper at Ruby Ridge” – who “shot a man in the back while the man was retreating to a cabin” – and “the situation confronting Kisela in Hughes’ front yard.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from today’s summary reversal, in a 15-page opinion joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sotomayor recounted the facts of the case, positing that if the story “sounds unreasonable, that is because it was. And yet,” she complained, “the Court today insulates that conduct from liability,” “effectively treating qualified immunity as an absolute shield.” In particular, she lamented, the court’s ruling “ultimately rests on a faulty premise”: that the cases on which the 9th Circuit relied “are not identical to this one.” But the Supreme Court, she argued, has never ruled that the “clearly established law” standard is met only when the plaintiff can point to a case with identical facts. “It is enough,” Sotomayor contended, “that governing law places the constitutionality of the officer’s conduct beyond debate” – as Kisela’s was here. But at a minimum, Sotomayor added, there is enough dispute about the facts and the law in Kisela’s case that the court should not have reversed without the benefit of briefing or oral argument on the merits.

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[waltky]

The Supreme Court decided two key criminal-justices cases Monday that upheld individual rights...

Supreme Court Upholds Individual Rights In 2 Key Criminal Justice Cases
May 14, 2018 - The Supreme Court handed down five decisions Monday, and one that could pave a path for legalizing sports gambling throughout the country got most of the attention Monday morning. But the court also decided two important criminal-justice and personal rights cases.

In one, McCoy v. Louisiana, the court ruled by a 6-3 margin in favor of a defendant whose lawyer told a jury that his client was guilty, disregarding the explicit instructions of his client. His lawyer wanted him to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. "Guaranteeing a defendant the right 'to have the assistance of counsel for his defense' is the defendant's prerogative, not the counsel's," the court said in its ruling. In other words, it's up to the person accused of a crime how they want to plea, not a lawyer. In the other, Byrd v. U.S., the court unanimously decided that a driver of a rental car, whose name wasn't on the rental agreement, still has a reasonable expectation of privacy during a traffic stop. Police found 49 bricks of heroin and body armor in the man's trunk.

McCoy v. Louisiana

Robert McCoy's defense attorney told the jury his client was guilty of a triple murder despite the fact that McCoy expressly maintained his innocence. The Supreme Court decided that violated the client's constitutional right to counsel. "Guaranteeing a defendant the right 'to have the ASSISTANCE of Counsel for HIS defence,' the Sixth Amendment so demands," the court wrote. "With individual liberty—and, in capital cases, life— at stake, it is the defendant's prerogative, not counsel's, to decide on the objective of his defense: to admit guilt in the hope of gaining mercy at the sentencing stage, or to maintain his innocence, leaving it to the State to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." McCoy, was charged with killing three family members in a vain attempt to find his estranged wife, Yolanda. With the help of police, she had fled her Louisiana home after McCoy, at knife point, threatened to kill her. She brought her infant daughter along but left her 17-year-old son with her parents so that he could finish high school and graduate.

The Supreme Court decided two key criminal-justices cases Monday that upheld individual rights​

A month later, McCoy was arrested and charged with killing his wife's parents and her son. A 911 tape recorded Yolanda's mother screaming: "She ain't here Robert. ... I don't know where she is. ... The detectives have her." After the sound of a gunshot, the line goes dead. Despite overwhelming evidence against him, McCoy steadfastly maintained his innocence, alleging that the killings were the product of a drug deal gone bad and that police conspired to frame him, because he supposedly revealed their involvement in drug trafficking. Five months later, state psychiatric experts found McCoy mentally competent to stand trial. His first lawyers were public defenders, but he fired them for refusing to subpoena his alleged alibi witnesses. His parents then hired Larry English for $5,000. He advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison instead of the death penalty, but McCoy repeatedly refused, insisting that he was innocent. He also refused to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt, in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. Indeed, in his opening argument, he told the jury, "There is no way reasonably possible that you can listen to the evidence and not come" to that conclusion. And in his closing, he told the jurors that he had taken the burden of finding and proving guilt off of them and the prosecutor. The defense lawyer was hoping that the jury would not sentence McCoy to death if he could convince them that McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity and should therefore only be convicted of second-degree murder. But, as the prosecutor would soon explain to the jury, that defense was legally unavailable to McCoy, because Louisiana allows a diminished capacity argument only if the defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In any event, the strategy didn't work. The jury ultimately sentenced McCoy to death. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the decision and an infuriated McCoy, aided by a new lawyer, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that the state had deprived him of his right to counsel.

Byrd v. U.S.