The Supreme Court agreed to hear only one case today. It involves parental notification rights in abortion cases. Scotus blog reports:

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide a long-unsettled issue of abortion law: the standard to be used in judging the constitutionality of a restriction on a women's right to end a pregnancy. The question is whether such a restriction is to be upheld if there is any circumstance in which it could be applied constitutionally. The Court for some time has not followed that approach in abortion cases, but has never explicitly repudiated it. The working standard the Court has applied is whether a restriction, as written, would put a burden on the abortion rights of a significant number of women.

The Supreme Court has refused to hear the cases of Mexican citizens on death row in the U.S. For the time being. The case is Medellin v. Dretke, 04-5928.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned aside an appeal by a Mexican citizen on death row in Texas who contended he and 50 other Mexicans should have their death sentences overturned because they were improperly denied legal help from their consulates in violation of international law.

Over the dissents of Justices Scalia and Thomas, the Supreme Court today ruled that defendants cannot be placed in front of the jury in shackles.

The Supreme Court, brushing aside warnings by two justices that it was jeopardizing courthouse safety, ruled Monday it is unconstitutional to force capital murder defendants to appear before juries in chains and shackles.

Justices threw out the sentence of Carman Deck, who was shackled in leg irons and handcuffed to a chain around his belly when he faced a Missouri jury that put him on death row.

The opinion is here.

Bystanders, protesters and neighbors sued the federal government for being tear-gassed during immigration agents' Miami raid five years ago on the home of Elian Gonzales' relatives. The case proceeded to a non-jury trial. The court has ruled for the Government.

In a 19-page decision U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore said the demonstrators and bystanders failed to show enough credible evidence that federal officers' use of force was "unreasonable under the circumstances."

The 13 people sued the government for $3.25 million , claiming they had lingering injuries after being sprayed at close range on their own property or behind barricades. Three neighbors testified that an agent gassed them without warning from 2 to 4 feet (about 1 meter) away as they stood alone in their fenced front yards.

by TChris

This is an activist judge.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked a county school system from instituting a health curriculum that includes discussions of homosexuality.

U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams in Maryland evidently believes that teaching tolerance of homosexuality advances governmental support of religions that accept (or at least tolerate) homosexuality over religions that condemn it. But sexuality is not an intrinsically religious issue. Religious organizations take competing positions concerning sexual practices and education about sexuality in general, but religious organizations take any number of competing positions about all sorts of things. By Judge Williams' logic -- and maybe this is where it's leading -- a school could not teach evolution because it would be advancing a particular viewpoint to the detriment of a competing religious (albeit unscientific) viewpoint. Nor could it teach any fact of history (like the probable age of the planet) that is contradicted by a religious belief.

Tolerance (like intolerance) might be held as a religious value, but teaching tolerance neither advances religion nor intertwines government with a particular faith. Teaching tolerance of others, like teaching respect for the law, has social value independent of and apart from any corresponding religious value. Telling a school that it can't teach the societal benefit of mutual respect is a stunning display of judicial activism.

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that where racial profiling resulted in criminal charges, the charges can be dismissed.

This would seem like a no-brainer, but the law has been that so long as police could establish that a traffic violation occurred, their reason for making the stop was irrelevant.

Justice Andrew Hurwitz wrote in the unanimous decision that a state can neither write laws that apply only to people of certain races, nor selectively enforce the law according to race, a practice commonly referred to as racial profiling. A state can no more make 'driving while Black' a crime by means of its enforcement than it could by express law," he wrote.

by TChris

An ugly death in Iraq isn't the kind of future that induces young men and women to enlist in the military. The Army missed its recuiting goals for the third consecutive month in April. Perhaps hoping to bolster the Army's recruiting efforts, the administration persuaded the Supreme Court to decide whether it is entitled to withhold federal funds from schools that ban military recruiters.

A coalition of 31 law schools says forcing them to accommodate military recruiters also forces them to endorse the Pentagon's discrimination against gays and lesbians, which is at odds with the colleges' anti-discrimination policies. They say a 1994 law that threatens federal funding for colleges that ban military recruiters ["the Solomon Amendment"] violates their rights to choose what ideas they embrace or support.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia agreed with the colleges and declared the law unconstitutional.

The Bush administration argues that the schools surrender their free speech rights by accepting federal money. The law schools contend that they cannot be forced to endorse employers who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation by providing them with career placement services.

by TChris

Manhattan Judge Jeffrey Atlas thought there was barely enough evidence to justify jury deliberations in a bribery prosecution of two union officials. But when he learned that the jurors weren't following the rules, he set aside their guilty verdict.

Jurors are instructed not to discuss the evidence until it's time to deliberate. They're also told not to read media accounts of the case. Judge Atlas wasn't happy when an alternate juror revealed that jurors disregarded both of those admonitions.

Atlas said he was troubled by numerous episodes of misconduct in the jury room while the trial was under way, including instances of jurors voicing opinions about the credibility of witnesses and sarcastic comments about the defendants. He also was troubled by the presence in the jury room of a Village Voice article about the trial.

The sarcastic comments included comparisons between the defendants and "The Sopranos." Defense attorney Dino Lombardi thinks some of the jurors had an anti-union bias that they failed to disclose during jury selection.

"You have these one-dimensional cartoonish impressions of trade union guys," Lombardi said of the juror bias.

The Supreme Court issued a decision this week limiting the reach of the felon in possession law which prohibits those convicted of a felony from possessing a firearm. The Court ruled that for the law to apply, the prior conviction cannot be one from another country.

The majority arrived at that conclusion by interpreting the statute's reference to a conviction in "any court" to mean "any court in the United States." Justice Stephen G. Breyer's majority opinion said that in the absence of any indication that Congress even considered the issue when it enacted the law in 1968, the court should apply a legal presumption that "Congress ordinarily intends its statutes to have domestic, not extraterritorial, application."

In March, the Supreme Court decided Roper v. Simmons, which held that executing persons who were under 18 at the time they commited their offense violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion (pdf), in which he referenced practices and laws of other countries. Here is that section of the opinion:

by TChris

The Bush administration has taken a position that is hostile to the free exercise of religion in a case accepted for review today by the Supreme Court. The case asks whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act -- a federal statute enacted to protect religious practices that might otherwise transgress the law -- protects members of the New Mexico branch of a Brazilian church who want to ingest hoasca during religious ceremonies. Hoasca contains DMT, a mildly hallucinogenic substance regulated by federal law.

After the Supreme Court ruled that state drug laws trumped the free exercise of Native American religious practices that include the consumption of peyote, Congress enacted the RFRA. The law requires the government to show a compelling interest in criminalizing religious practices. The Court later struck down the Act as it applied to state laws. In the case now before the Court, the Tenth Circuit prohibited the federal government from enforcing its drug laws against individuals who use hoasca in religious ceremonies.

The case poses an interesting conflict for the Bush administration, which refuses to cede ground in its war against drugs even at the risk of alienating its religious supporters.

Religious groups say the Bush administration would trample spiritual freedom in its zeal to enforce federal drug laws. The Christian Legal Society, the National Association of Evangelicals and a top U.S. Presbyterian Church official opposed the government at the lower court level.

Update: More about the case here.

by TChris

Almost two decades after Philadelphia police decided it would be a good law enforcement tactic to drop a bomb on the headquarters of MOVE -- a plan that failed to consider the risk to neighboring homes that were set ablaze by the bombing -- a federal jury awarded $530,000 to each of 24 residents to compensate them for the economic and emotional harm caused by the City's failure to keep its repeated promises to repair their homes.

The award amounts to more than three times the $150,000 that Mayor Street wanted to pay the homeowners to move them permanently out of their homes in 2000.